Sam's Chance and How He Improved It

Tattered Tom #7

by Horatio Alger Jr.

Sam isn't too much of a goody-two-shoes, like some Horatio Alger heroes. He even tries to rob his roommate. Then he moves to Boston for a new start and decides to try to become respectable. He walks up Tremont street stopping in all the stores looking for work. Sam stumbles into a great job in the usual Alger way and becomes quite successful.

Excerpt from Sam's Chance: And How He Improved It

Sam's Chance is a sequel to the "Young Outlaw," and is designed to illustrate the gradual steps by which that young man was induced to give up his bad habits, and deserve that prosperity which he finally attains.
The writer confesses to have experienced some embarrassment in writing this story. The story writer always has at command expedients by which the frowns of fortune may be turned into sunshine, and this without violating probability, or, at any rate, possibility; for the careers of many of our most eminent and successful men attest that truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction. But to cure a boy of radical faults is almost as difficult in fiction as in real life.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1876

About the author

Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, most famous for his novels following the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels about boys who succeed under the tutelage of older mentors were hugely popular in their day.

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Alger entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen. Following graduation, he briefly worked in education before touring Europe for almost a year. He then entered the Harvard Divinity School, and, in 1864, took a position at a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts. Two years later, he resigned following allegations he had sexual relations with two teenage boys.[1] He retired from the ministry and moved to New York City where he formed an association with the Newsboys Lodging House and other agencies offering aid to impoverished children. His sympathy for the working boys of the city, coupled with the moral values learned at home, were the basis of his many juvenile rags to riches novels illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. This widely held view involves Alger's characters achieving extreme wealth and the subsequent remediation of their "old ghosts." Alger is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals. He died in 1899.

The first full-length Alger biography was commissioned in 1927 and published in 1928, and along with many others that borrowed from it later proved to be heavily fictionalized parodies perpetuating hoaxes and made up anecdotes that "would resemble the tell-all scandal biographies of the time."[2] Other biographies followed, sometimes citing the 1928 hoax as fact. In the last decades of the twentieth century a few more reliable biographies were published that attempt to correct the errors and fictionalizations of the past.

Reviews

[Hal Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alger’s previous book, The Young Outlaw; or, Adrift in the Streets, is unique in his canon because the hero, Sam Barker, ends the book as much a screw-up and a failure as he was when he started. It was too good to last, though, because now Sam is back, and heading for bourgeois respectability.

It will take him a while, though, and for a refreshingly long time, Sam is pretty bad. He’s got the smart-mouthed insouciance of Dick Hunter, but with none of that hero’s moral fiber.

Sam’s eventual but inevitable “big break,” brought about after a mock Masonic ritual with skulls and candles, is one of Alger’s stranger plot devices. It’s unearned, of course, but Sam had begun straightening up ahead of time. Unlike a fellow like Ragged Dick, though, driven by some Franklinesque need for self-improvement, Sam’s betterment almost entirely manifests itself as self-denial. Temperamentally unsuited to studying (unlike his goody-two-shoes roommate), Sam can only abandon his bad habits of cigar-smoking, larceny, theatergoing, and, especially, general profligacy. Soon he’ll bleed all the color out of his character and be just another dull Bostonian, too bland even to get the girl. But he had a good time of it for a while.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the Horatio Alger books were all alike–stories of hard working, honest young men who went from rags to riches by their industry. This one is different. It concerns a lazy, dishonest young man who makes one bad decision after another. That isn’t the whole story, however. Sam, the young man, meets a Boston girl who inspires him to try to be a gentleman, and he becomes honest, hard-working, and gentlemanly. Since I’ve now read twenty-five Horatio Alger books that all seemed alike, the change was refreshing.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sam isn't too much of a goody-two-shoes, like some Horatio Alger heroes. He even tries to rob his roommate. Then he moves to Boston for a new start and decides to try to become respectable. He walks up Tremont street in perhaps the 1850s stopping in all the stores looking for work, visits the Parker House and rooms on Harrison Ave. Alger, being from Revere originally, and having gone to Harvard, knows Boston. Sam stumbles into a great job in the usual Alger way and becomes quite successful.

[Barry]

There's a 99-year-old inscription in beautiful script:
To Phillip
from
Lawrence
Dec 20, 1909