They found themselves in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1865, still poor, but with more opportunity than they had had in Britain. Fanny, as she was known, had been writing stories since her poverty-stricken childhood in Manchester, and to help the family's finances she began writing short pieces for publication. Her first major success appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1872. A year later she married Dr L.M. Burnett.
She wrote both adult and children's novels, but it is for her children's stories that she is best remembered, particularly The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. The Secret Garden and A Little Princess are still widely read today, and both have been made into superbly mounted, high-budget films in the past eight years. Certainly my favourite amongst Frances Burnett's works is The Secret Garden. It is an exciting and slighly spooky mystery, with a sense of the gothik and the horror story about it, and strikes me as like The Turn of the Screw for children. It would not give children nightmares, but it would certainly leave them with a sense of wonder, what the French call fantastique.
Little Lord Fauntleroy, on the other hand, is scarcely read at all these days. And yet it is this book, first published in 1886, when Frances was 37, that has penetrated most deeply into the culture and memory of English-speaking countries. And this has not happened because of its story, which is a rather prosaic reworking of the Cinderella theme. It is because of the clothes that little Cedric is described in one passage as wearing, so well shown in Reginald Birch's illustrations for the novel: a velvet suit with a broad lace collar, and very much in the picturesque style that mothers preferred for their sons last century. Subsequently the Little Lord Fauntleroy fashion became enormously popular, and was still being made in the 1920s, forty years after the book's first publication.
Two years after Little Lord Fauntleroy's release, which made her famous around the world, Frances separated from her husband and returned to England. It was not until ten years later, in 1898, that they were divorced, and she then married Steven Townsend, and returned to the United States in 1901. She lived to be 75, dying in 1924, when the Little Lord Fauntleroy style of dress was still in use. In her later life she turned to spiritualism and took to wearing lots of frilly clothing, which caused friends to call her 'Fluffy'.
The Little Lord Fauntleroy style of velvet suit had been, in fact, what aristocratic children in England in the 1850s and 1860s had worn, when Fanny Hodgson was a child and a young lady. Partly it is based on the style of dress of William Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. She had always loved the style, and she hand made Little Lord Fauntleroy suits for her sons Lionel, and the younger Vivian, who was himself the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Frances wrote in the 1880s:
That the little fellows have worn velvet and lace, and being kindly endowed by Nature, have so adorned it as to fill a weak parent with unbridled vanity, is true…[but] my taste for the picturesque has not led me to transform two strong, manly, robust boys into affected, abnormally self-conscious, little mountebanks.
When Cedric first appears in the book, the passage reads: What the Earl saw was a graceful, childish figure in a black velvet suit, with a collar and lovelocks waving about his handsome manly little face, whose eyes met his with a look of innocent good fellowship.
Part of the popularity of the Little Lord Fauntleroy style in America was the desire to emulate the English aristocracy, although the lace collared suits had long gone out of fashion amongst the nobility, except for party dress for very small boys. Doting mothers adored the clothes, and the long flowing curls, but their sons did not like them at all, and found them uncomfortable and sissyish. Even so, the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit was often a first step towards more masculine styles of dress. It was often the first 'male' clothing that a boy wore, when he was taken out of the frilly and heavily belaced frocks and petticoats which were normal for young boys in those days. Certainly, 'breeching' one's son (as it was called) was often a sad and tearful moment for many an adoring mother.
The style was open to variation. Many of the nineteenth century suits had a lacy blouse with a big collar, and lace at the hem of the knee length pants, which buttoned on to the elaborately frilled blouse. The suits were nearly always worn with hats, generally broad-brimmed sailor hats. There was often a silk sash about the waist. Below the velvet pants were black stockings, or, in the twentieth century, more commonly white. Black patent single strap shoes looked particularly smart, and especially devoted and cherishing mothers made sure their son's hair was styled in long sausage curls to frame his face. The illustration of the rather sulky little darling on this month's cover gives an excellent idea of the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit at its most eleborate.
Little Lord Fauntleroy suits were amongst the most disliked of Victorian and Edwardian clothes from the point of view of the wearers, although boys also hated wearing kilts with frilly blouses and long stockings, which were also popular then. There is even a case from a newspaper of the time of a boy in the countryside burning down the family's barn on hearing that his mother had bought him a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. And this brings me to another point: part of the popularity of the suits despite the wearer's disgust and embarrassment, was that it was the mother who decided what clothes the children were to wear. When the father began to take a greater role in choosing the clothes of the children (a lamentable development in my private opinion), Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, kilts, and pinafores and petticoats for younger boys, fell into disuse.
Of course the boys saw Little Lord Fauntleroy suits as sissyish and effeminate, which was no doubt reinforced by the practice of casting pretty, curly-headed girls in the role of Cedric in early films. This is ironic, because Cedric was meant, in the story, to be a sweet, but high spirited and manly, boy. He is growing up in America when, upon the deaths of his uncles, he finds that he will become the Earl of Dorincourt in England when he attains his majority. He travels to England where his claim is called into question, but it is the contrast between his life in the United States and his new status as a member of the English aristocracy that interests Frances Burnett. He is certainly not a milksop, and that is not what Frances intended - as can be gathered from reading the passage above, about the attire of her two sons.
Nevertheless, the name Little Lord Fauntleroy became indissolubly linked with all that was namby-pamby and sissy. To this day, when the clothing style has not been employed on any scale for over seventy years, it is a name familiar to all, and which unfailingly evokes the image of a prettified, curly-headed boy in a velvet suit and big frilly collar. How many boys over the last century and more, whether being made to wear their Sunday best, or suffering actual petticoat punishment, must have cursed that fatal day of November the 24th, 1849! Of course the effeminate connotations of the Little Lord Fauntleroy style made it perfect for petticoating, and it has been employed for that purpose to great effect over many decades. Certainly no boy is likely to be ill-mannered, or to misbehave, in a tight-fitting velvet suit, with silk stockings, a big silk sash, and long Mary Pickford curls around his face.
Little Lord Fauntleroy has had other reverberations throughout the years, apart from the clothing style. When, in the 1960s, the Japanese company Nissan released their first car for mass Western markets, it was called the Nissan Cedric. To most people the name just seemed ridiculously and comically quaint, and typical of the Japanese custom of Western imitation: in the 1950s they even had a town called 'Sheffield', where cutlery was manufactured. But the full story is a good deal more curious.
Little Lord Fauntleroy has always been an immensely popular novel in Japan. Lord Cedric, with his noble courage, and his obedience and respect towards his elders, has long been seen by the Japanese as embodying the very best elements of young manliness (the reader can see how far apart Western and Japanese cultures actually are). When they named their car (which looked rather like a Nash Rambler), the Cedric, they fully expected that English-speaking countries would recognise the name at once, and immediately associate it with that novel which the Japanese really believed was known, read, and loved by nearly all English speaking people. After all, how many films had Hollywood made of Little Lord Fauntleroy throughout the years?
This was in the mid 1960s. I am sure they would know better now. It certainly would have surprised them to learn that nobody would associate the name 'Cedric' with Little Lord Fauntleroy, and that since the 1920s the novel had hardly been read at all. They would have been even more surprised to learn that the character was seen by modern culture as embodying everything sissy and girlish.
Still, for all his unpopularity, and despite the fact that the novel is never read nowadays, Little Lord Fauntleroy is still one of our most potent and enduring cultural ikons. We will probably never see the style in widespread use again, which I think is a great pity. I think that today's generation, of both sexes, would greatly benefit from an understanding that there is nothing wrong with being sweet, docile, and prettily dressed.
Susan MacDonald
