What Makes a Morally Bad Behavior Permissable or Not in Ragged Dick?

As was brought up in class, it seems like the intended audience of Ragged Dick is for young, middle-class boys that will never experience the poverty which Dick faces in the novel, and so my interpretation of the intent of this novel is to use the impoverished position of Dick to inspire the readers to rise through the ranks of society and hold on to their moral foundations. Like all novels aimed at an audience of young adults or children it seems like there is a strong moral message that pervades this reading, although an interesting distinction is made in the course of the novel between actions which are intrinsically bad and behaviors which are abandoned by Dick in his climb up the socioeconomic ladder. In the readers introduction to Dick there is a clear list of unfavorable behaviors which the narrator indicates are faults in his character but are separated from the innate immoral behaviors which Dick never engages.

On Dick’s road to respectability, Dick abandons his previous behaviors of smoking, gambling, and generally being careless with his earnings, but at the moral baseline of not stealing, cheating, or imposing himself on younger boys the narrator still describes his nature as “a noble one” (Alger 7). Throughout the novel we see instances of Dick overcoming these bad habits, for example, Dick opens a bank account which demonstrates a commitment to be responsible with his money. While Dick shakes off his old bad behaviors, he also pursues an education and a stable job, and so it begs the question of why it was necessary for Dick to begin his journey with such bad behaviors and what makes them more acceptable for Dick to have than lying or cheating. Would it have not sufficed to simply show Dick progressing from a boot black to a counting room clerk.

              It is evident in characteristics like Dicks innate generosity, which is at first painted as the vice of extravagance, that some qualities moral value is dependent on the control which is exercised over them. In the readers introduction to Dick, his extravagance is painted as a vice when he “invite[s] some of his friends in somewhere to have an oyster stew” (Alger 6), but later in the book when he buys Fosdick breakfast (Alger 73) it is an example of Dick’s moral generosity. Likewise, Dick’s smoking with other children can be seen rather as a case of poorly placed generosity as “he was generally ready to treat his companions” (Alger 6) to cigars. Perhaps the seemingly bad behaviors of Dick at the beginning of the book were a demonstration of Dick’s innate kindness and generosity.

Conversely, it seems that the defined moral evils of stealing, cheating, and leveraging one’s own position over others are unredeemable because, rather than displaying a deeper, admirable quality, they demonstrate an utter disregard for other people. It might also be interesting to interpret the moral nature of each of these behaviors in regards to their potential for improving or harming Dick’s socioeconomic status, and in this case the morally untouchable behaviors are those which have the potential for raising Dick’s socioeconomic status at the detriment of others.