The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus by Jr. Horatio Alger

The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s late nineteenth century novels for boys, working in his rags to respectability formula but with the unusual setting of the traveling circus that gave the book its title. The Great North American Circus and similar nineteenth century traveling shows were a major form of entertainment across the country during Alger’s career, with the circus visiting most American cities at least annually and providing the kind of spectacle that adult and child audiences alike turned out to see.

The young acrobat protagonist is the standard Alger young man, with the additional twist that his particular path to respectability runs through the circus performance world rather than through the more typical commercial or clerical positions that most Alger heroes work their way up through. The novel follows him through the standard plot beats. The temptation of the wrong sort of company among the circus performers and the various people the show encounters on tour. The discovery of a sympathetic older patron, possibly the circus manager or one of the more established performers, who recognizes the protagonist’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.

The circus setting gives the novel its distinctive flavor within the wider Alger catalogue. The traveling circus world had its own internal hierarchy, its own customs, its own dangers, and its own particular kinds of moral testing that the more conventional urban settings of Alger’s New York fiction did not offer. The novel renders the circus environment with the kind of detail that makes the world feel real, with attention to the specific performances, the rigging and equipment, the wagons and horses, the sleeping arrangements, and the various other practical realities of nineteenth century circus life.

Alger’s prose is brisk and his action sequences move at the pace his young readers expected. The moral lessons are delivered through the narrative rather than imposed in lectures. Modern readers should be aware that the period assumptions about race, class, and the moral character of various peoples encountered in the traveling show world are very much present in the fiction in ways that have not aged well.

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 Young Acrobat is one of the more distinctive entries because of its circus setting. Many of his books are now in the public domain.