After several months working hard, saving money, and learning to read and write from Fosdick, Dick is well on his way to becoming a respectable young man. Everything seems to be going well for him until Alger uses foreshadowing to hint at Jim Travis's theft of Dick's bank book. Describing Dick's walk home one night, he writes:
But Dick was destined to be surprised, and that in a disagreeable manner, when he reached home.
Here, Alger reveals explicitly that something bad is about to happen, even though he doesn't specify what, exactly, that something is. To those reading Ragged Dick in novel form, the time between Alger's hint and the Travis's theft is so short that this instance of foreshadowing almost feels somewhat redundant: the passage above comes at the end of the chapter, and Alger begins the next one with Dick's discovery of the missing bank book. However, for Alger's original audience, who read the book in serial form, this passage would have raised suspense at the end of one installment and maintained interest in the next. In this sense, the foreshadowing speaks to the form in which Alger originally wrote and the young readership he was addressing.
