Slow And Sure

Slow And Sure, or From the Sidewalk to the Shop is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s late nineteenth century novels for boys, fitting squarely into the rags to respectability formula that earned him his lasting place in American popular literature. The slow and sure of the title points to one of Alger’s recurring themes. The protagonist’s progress from poverty to respectability is not a sudden transformation but the cumulative result of patient hard work, honesty, and the willingness to take small opportunities seriously even when they do not look immediately impressive.

The protagonist is a young street vendor or shop boy who is given a chance to work his way into a more stable position. The standard Alger elements are all present. Honest labor, the temptation of the wrong sort of company, the discovery of a sympathetic older patron who recognizes the young man’s worth, the appearance of villains who would prefer to keep him in his original lowly station, and the slow accumulation of small successes that build toward the moral resolution Alger’s readers expected. The from the sidewalk to the shop subtitle indicates the trajectory the novel is going to follow, with the young protagonist moving from street vending to a stable position inside an established business.

Alger’s prose is formal by modern standards and his moral lessons are delivered with an unsubtle hand. The period assumptions about race, class, and gender are very much present in his work and modern readers will need to navigate them. What Alger did well was pacing. His books are short, his plots move, and the stakes for the young protagonist feel real even when the resolution is never seriously in doubt. The New York City settings of his urban novels remain one of the more interesting aspects of his work, with the post Civil War American metropolis rendered with street level detail.

For scholars of nineteenth century American children’s literature, of the cultural construction of the self made man, or of the wider print culture that shaped American boyhood in the post Civil War decades, Alger’s catalogue remains essential. Slow And Sure is a representative entry and a fair sample of his style. Many of his books are now in the public domain.