Edwin P. Hoyt writes that ""Ragged Dick" ... caught the American fancy ... represented something virtually unknown to boys in the American countryside and totally unsung until [its publication: the street waif who made his living in the jungles of brick and stone". Hoyt points out the Alger refined the many "stylistic tricks" he had been polishing for several years. The action displayed an authorial confidence, and the language captured the "coarse and ungrammatical" style of the metropolitan street boys. The book was a virtual guide to Manhattan in 1866, and "for that reason if for no other it approached the realm of literature". Hoyt points out that "here had never been such a book ... one swindle after another is exposed to readers who had never heard of such things."