Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religious Motivation

While Ragged Dick and Little Women are both moral tales marketed to the young adults of their generation, they differ markedly in their portrayal of religion and prosperity. In social psychology, there are different religious orientations; Ragged Dick would be considered extrinsically oriented while the March sisters are intrinsically oriented. Ragged Dick while repeatedly described as an “honest” person, a label with which he self identifies, is not a particularly religious person (34). Ragged Dick has never read the bible and in the beginning does not attend church. This changes later in the novel. Ragged Dick becomes interested in organized religion once he realizes it can make him “’spectable” (63). He realizes that he can get ahead with more education and Mr. Greyson offers to provide that with his Sunday school classes. Mr. Greyson invites not only Dick to dinner at his “so fine a mansion” but also his friend Henry (83). Attending church also has the benefit of putting Dick in contact with wealthy patrons who see Dick’s potential and are willing to nurture it.

This is not to imply that Ragged Dick does not have a moral code; he is “not naturally irreligious” (79). He obviously has his own set of ethics at the beginning of the book when he discusses stealing with a passerby and shuns such behavior because “it’s mean” (3). However, Dick only becomes interested in organized religion when it comes with social benefits. The lectors are not supposed to believe this as Alger states that Dick is only nonreligious at the beginning of the novel “because he had lived without a knowledge of God and religious things, it was scarcely to be wondered at in a lad who, from an early age, had been thrown upon his own exertions for the means of living, with no one to care for him or give him good advice” but that does not negate the evidence to the contrary (79).

Dick’s extrinsic orientation is contrasted with the March sisters, who are also moral, but are religious because they believe it’s the right thing to do. They help others like the Hummels because they want to out of the goodness of their hearts and in turn the universe rewards them for their kindness. Likewise, in Ragged Dick, Dick is rewarded by the universe, but less for his kindness than for his ambition: “as of to encourage him with his new-born resolution [to be respectable] our hero obtained no less than six jobs in the course of an hour and a half” (63).