Jacob August Riis was born in the conservative old town of Ribe, Denmark, the third of fourteen children of Niels Edward and Caroline Lundholm Riis. His father was a teacher in a Latin school, but the elder Riis often wrote for a local newspaper for extra income to help feed his large family. He wanted Jacob to pursue some kind of literary career, but to his disappointment the boy apprenticed himself to a carpenter. Riis did well in school, however, and proved particularly adept at reading English, probably because he was so attracted to the works of Charles Dickens; he also read James Fenimore Cooper.
Perhaps influenced by Dickens's tales of London squalor, Riis became concerned at an early age about conditions in his own town. As he later recalled in his autobiography, The Making of An American (1901), his playmates called him "Jacob the delver" because of his constant warfare with the rats nesting in the open-gutter sewer which ran underneath his house. Then, when he "could hardly have been over twelve or thirteen," he turned his attention to Rag Hall, the town's only tenement. Given one mark as a Christmas Eve present, he took it immediately to Rag Hall to share it with the poorest family there, on the condition that they should clean things up--especially the children.
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