The Cash Boy

The Cash Boy, originally published as Frank Fowler, the Cash Boy, is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s many novels for boys, fitting squarely into the rags to respectability formula that earned him his lasting place in American popular literature. The cash boy of the title was a particular kind of nineteenth century retail worker, a young boy employed by department stores and dry goods establishments to carry money from the various sales counters to the cashier and back, before pneumatic tubes and other later technology made the position obsolete. The cash boy job was the entry level position for many young men in the urban retail world, and Alger uses it as the starting point for his protagonist Frank Fowler.

Frank is the standard Alger protagonist. Young, poor, honest, hardworking, and willing to face down both bullies and bad luck without losing his moral compass. He has come to New York City after his mother’s death and is supporting himself and his younger sister through the small wages of the cash boy position. The novel follows him through the standard Alger plot beats. The temptation of the wrong sort of company. The discovery of a sympathetic older patron who recognizes Frank’s worth. The appearance of villains who would prefer to keep him in his original lowly station. The slow accumulation of small successes that build toward the moral resolution Alger’s readers expected.

What makes the novel interesting beyond the standard Alger formula is the specific occupational detail. The cash boy job and the wider world of nineteenth century urban retail are rendered with the kind of street level accuracy that gives Alger’s New York fiction its particular historical value. Modern readers interested in the actual social and economic conditions of late nineteenth century American urban work can find in Alger’s novels a kind of sentimentalized but genuinely observed portrait of the life that his young readers were actually growing up in.

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. The Cash Boy is one of the better known entries and a fair sample of his style at its most polished. Many of his books are now in the public domain.