American Quarterly

Early in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, the title character takes his wealthy new friend, Frank Whitney, to see Central Park. When, six chapters later, the boys finally arrive at their destination, Frank is disappointed to find that it is still under construction. “It had not been long since work had been commenced upon it,” Alger writes, “and it was still very rough and unfinished.” What had been the goal of the tour, however, turns out to be only a detour; the boys decide not to enter the park. After gazing briefly at the unattractive, broken landscape, they return downtown to see the financial district. ¹

In this scene, two boys from opposite ends of the economic spectrum glimpse the construction of a new kind of public place. Designed to be simultaneously didactic and pleasurable, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park was an attempt to construct a cultural public sphere for the masses, instilling in “the dangerous classes” norms of gentility and civility and allowing the “middling classes” to display their own adherence to such norms. ² Contemporary celebrations of Central Park often compared its functions to those of other relatively new institutions like public libraries and public schools, calling it “a great free school for the people . . . a magnetic charm of decent behavior, giving salutary lessons in order, discipline, comeliness, culminating in mutual [End Page 415] good will.” ³ Such public spaces were to be neither domestic nor commercial; rather, they were differentiated from the parlor and especially the marketplace. Olmsted declared that Central Park should display “the greatest possible contrast with the streets and the shops.” ⁴ The official regulations prohibited the “display [of] any sign, placard, flag, banner, target transparency, advertisement or device of business . . . nor shall any hawking or peddling be allowed on the Central Park.” ⁵ Olmsted’s intransigent opposition to the park’s commercialization was one of the factors that in 1878 led to his dismissal from his position as Central Park’s landscape architect. ⁶ Conceiving of a public sphere distinguishable from the market was apparently not a simple or uncontroversial project. ⁷

In this article, I read Horatio Alger’s novels and the responses they provoked, like the controversies over Olmsted’s plans for Central Park, as moments in the struggle to shape the American public sphere, in particular to define the roles men and boys were to play in the economic market and the mass-cultural public. ⁸ Alger’s narrative formula is designed to enlist his readers in the construction of a literary counterpart to the ideal realm of leisure, discipline, and genteel performance Olmsted envisioned. Alger’s stories were reformulations of the traditional association of masculinity with the public sphere, ways of interpellating boys as virtuous, “manly” individuals destined to play a role in an especially homosocial version of that sphere. ⁹ Like Olmsted, Alger tried to imagine a public realm distinct from overtly commercial values and linked to an older model of republican virtue. Despite his best efforts, though, his novels also provoked controversies about the possibility of distinguishing between the public sphere and the realm of economic exchange, controversies that were articulated as anxieties about masculinity and the market. What males bought, what they read, and what they were, all were intimately intertwined with contemporary notions of the public sphere. To some of his adult readers, Alger’s form of address to a reading public comprising boys and young men was a morally dubious form of “pandering” to his audience’s basest desires and pleasures, a further step in the regrettable and ongoing commodification of the reading public. Because, to use Linda Kerber’s words, masculinity and the public sphere were “reciprocal social constructions,” ¹⁰ anything that seemed to debase the contemporary public sphere put the meaning and stability of masculinity into question, and vice versa. [End Page 416]

This article is also meant to intervene in an ongoing redefinition of the public sphere in the study of gender in nineteenth-century American culture. For differentiating the public sphere from the market is also something that has not been easy to do...