The Young Explorer

The Young Explorer is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s many late nineteenth century novels for boys, working in his rags to respectability formula with the additional adventure plot of an exploration expedition that takes the young protagonist into territory beyond the standard urban or small town settings of much of Alger’s wider fiction. The exploration premise gave Alger room to deliver the kind of escalating geographical adventure that his readers responded to alongside the standard moral and economic uplift plots that the wider Alger catalogue is built around.

The protagonist is the standard Alger young man. Honest, hardworking, willing to face down both bullies and bad luck without losing his moral compass. The exploration setting gives Alger room to deliver dangers and opportunities that the urban fiction did not have access to. Encounters with various peoples in remote regions. Difficult terrain, weather, and the practical hardships of long distance travel. Encounters with various other travelers and locals, including some who turn out to be allies and others who turn out to be the kind of villains the genre required.

Alger’s prose is brisk and his action sequences move at the pace his young readers expected. The moral lessons about courage, perseverance, and honesty are delivered through the narrative rather than imposed in lectures. Modern readers should be aware that the period assumptions about race, particularly the depiction of the various indigenous peoples encountered during exploration plots, are very much present in his 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, of the wider print culture that shaped American boyhood in the post Civil War decades, or of the exploration adventure subgenre that the period produced in significant volume, Alger’s catalogue remains essential. The Young Explorer is a representative entry in his wider exploration adventure fiction. Many of his books are now in the public domain and available through reprint editions and online libraries.