January 23, 2007

January 23, 2007 is the documented release date of The Son of a Soldier, the novel credited to Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield. As the book’s publication date, it belongs to the bibliographic frame rather than to the chronology of Jack Ruthven’s story, whose decisive revelations concern adoption, shipwreck, memory, and biological parentage.

Bibliographic Identity

January 23, 2007 is identified as the release date for eBook #20432. The record names the work The Son of a Soldier, credits Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield as its authors, specifies English as the language, and gives ISO-8859-1 as the character-set encoding. The date therefore marks the digital publication event recorded for this edition, not a date within the American Civil War-era action narrated by the novel.

The Publication Frame and the Novel’s Identity Mystery

The date places a modern electronic edition around a much older fictional world in which Jack Ruthven’s identity is repeatedly rewritten by testimony and evidence. Darcy Gilbert first reports that Jack is supposedly “a nobody” who does not belong to the Ruthven family and may one day have to leave. Marion Ruthven then corrects that version by explaining that her parents adopted Jack when he was three or four and that he is now John Ruthven, her brother.

The story’s uncertainty is materially anchored in the past. Jack remembers only dimly “some storm and of the awful waves,” while Marion recounts how Old Ben found him on the beach beside his injured mother after wreckage had struck her. The boy was carried to Old Ben's Boathouse and then brought with his mother to the Ruthven Plantation. A ring later becomes another possible clue: Mrs. Ruthven retrieves it from a small jewel casket, and Jack sees a gold circlet that looks like a wedding ring, although its worn marking cannot be read even after inspection by two jewelers.

Competing Claims Preserved in the Narrative

The novel makes identity a sequence of competing claims rather than a single fact disclosed at once. Dr. Mackey presents himself to Jack as his father, invoking Jack’s resemblance to Walter and insisting that the astonishing assertion is true. Later, however, Marion tells Jack that he is not Dr. Mackey’s son but Colonel Stanton’s son, adding that Colonel Stanton has proved the claim beyond doubt. The release date belongs to the edition that preserves this gradual movement from foster-child status, through a false or disputed paternal claim, to biological recognition.

Memory remains unstable even when it appears to promise certainty. Colonel Stanton, wounded and feverish, mutters about a doomed ship and breaking against rocks, prompting Mrs. Ruthven to connect his words with a possible shipwreck. He later explains that exposure affected both body and mind: after rescue, a voyage lasting several weeks, and two months in a strange hospital, he was transferred to an insane asylum. He remembers these experiences only dimly and uncertainly, while Dr. Mackey’s manipulation of his account gives private memory a direct connection to property and power.

Why the Date Matters

As a publication date, January 23, 2007 separates the text’s modern archival life from its nineteenth-century narrative materials. It identifies when this electronic edition entered circulation while the novel itself remains organized around older conflicts: the difference between social belonging and blood descent, the vulnerability of damaged memory, and the power of documents or objects to settle claims. The date consequently serves as an external temporal marker for a work whose internal drama depends on reconstructing an earlier past.