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THE TOM SLADE SERIES |
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Notes |
Titles |
| "Let your boy grow up with Tom Slade," is a
suggestion which thousands of parents have followed during the past, with
the result that the TOM SLADE BOOKS are the most popular boys' books
published today. They take Tom Slade through a series of typical boy
adventures through his tenderfoot days as a scout, through his gallant days
as an American doughboy in France, back to his old patrol and the old camp
ground at Black lake, and so on." ---Grosset & Dunlap advertisement.
A major theme of the Horatio Alger books is that honest, hard-working, ambitious young men can be found in slums and poorhouses, sleeping under bridges and blacking boots on street corners; despite the squalor and poverty of their lives, their native good character will be undefiled. Similarly, dishonesty, cowardliness, sneakiness, and laziness can flourish anywhere; education and a fortunate environment will not eradicate inborn weaknesses of character. The Tom Slade series, written a few decades later, takes the opposite view: dishonesty, violence, and other moral failings are not inborn flaws, but are product of a bad environment -- remove the boy from the bad environment, and you can change his character. When we meet Tom, he is a hoodlum. Uneducated, half-starved, abused by his father, Tom roams the streets committing acts of robbery, vandalism, and intimidation. Thrown out on the streets after his father and he are evicted, Tom is taken under the wing of Roy Blakeley and Scout leader Mr. Ellsworth, and swiftly develops into a sturdy, ambitious, and honorable boy. Similar reformations happen with several other of Tom's slum friends, as well as to the spoiled young Connie, victim of an overprotective mother. As the series progresses, Tom grows up, participates in various capacities in the World War, and returns to Temple Camp to resume his connection with Scouting and with the camps as a young adult. In a typical plot, Tom Slade performs some self-sacrificing action which is misunderstood by those around him. He stolidly weathers universal disapproval until the true facts are somehow discovered by accident and his noble motivations become known.
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Source: Advertisement in Roy Blakeley's Tangled Trail, by Percy Keese Fitzhugh. Illustrated by H.S. Barbour. Grosset & Dunlap. New York. 1924. Advertisement in Roy Blakeley's Silver Fox Patrol, by Percy Keese Fitzhugh. Illustrated by Howard L. Hastings. Grosset & Dunlap. New York. 1920. WorldCat Holdings |