Post Ragged Dick Readings

As cliche as the phrase is, a picture sometimes really is worth a thousand words. A photograph provides the audience with a more tangible source than letters arranged in disarray on a sheet of paper. While Ragged Dick and other primary sources from the Gilded Age are telling stories, they fail to capture the essence of the destitute poverty infecting New York City and account for its growing population of street arabs. Throw as many statistics at someone as you may please, however the mind is incapable of fathoming the extent of numbers and the importance they embody in contrast to the emotions which pictures can flood an individual with. Certain events in history, such as the stories of the poor in the late 19th century are best told not in words, but in film.

Although Ragged Dick is a tale of the rise from rags to riches, the life of Dick while he is in rags is almost glorified; the times appear rough, as indeed they are, but his consistent, merry attitude and perseverance can shadow the truth behind his situation. Words just can't do the time period justice. While describing the sleeping situations of the young vagabonds, "to sleep in boxes, or under stairways, or in hay-barges on the coldest winter nights," definitely appears horrible to the audience, a reader will most likely be more indifferent to the passage, forgetting about it ten minutes later as they saunter off to participate in social aspects of their lives ("Homeless Boys," 143). However, seeing a photograph such as those which are in the edited version of Ragged Dick from Jacob Riis' How the Other Half lives, hits closer to home to the audience.

The above photograph speaks to me tenfold compared to reading about the corners and alleyways that the street children slept in (photograph from How the Other Half Lives). Actually seeing photographs of real children sleeping in a doorway on a metal grate will stick in my mind far longer than words describing the same situation will. Seeing living human beings suffering evokes empathy in the audience because witnessing the horrible situation makes it more real, more tangible and the reader is forced to believe that young children were necessitated to live in such desolate manners.

The supplemental reading to accompany Ragged Dick, "Street-Rats and Gutter Snipes," tries to provide readers with statistics on the age, gender, and nationality of a specific group of pick pocketers in New York City. Charts, like that one on page 28 illustrating the age of the thieves, do provide solid information on the statistics of the past, but charts and graphs and words alone don't do history justice. The mind can't fathom and process the number of kids actually left to fend for themselves and each other on the streets, just as humans can't comprehend the number of casualties from a war. We can read the number 20,000 or 3,000,000 and know that both are big numbers, but when we see hundreds of pictures of different kids roaming the streets of New York alone or we see a picture of hundreds of bodies piled in a mass grave, suddenly that large number becomes alive and we are humbled by it's truth and enormity. The incorporation of photographs in historical events makes the events which are occurring all over the world so much more intimate and tangible to the audience, and can speak many more silent messages to the onlooker than any essay or novel can.