High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ragged Dick is a children's novel by Horatio Alger, Jr. about a poor bootblack and his rise to middle-class comfort and respectability through good moral behavior, clean living, and determination. Ragged Dick was serialized in 1867 and published as a novel in 1868. Horatio Alger, Jr. formed an association with the Newsboys' Lodging House, a home for impoverished children in New York City, after resigning from the ministry in 1864. Alger's sympathy for the children he met, and the moral values of his youth, produced not only Ragged Dick but a collection of similar rags to riches juvenile novels in the last decades of the 19th century.