Perfect Little Protagonists: from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy”

 Little Lord Fauntleroy is a quintessential rags-to-riches story of an American boy named Cedric becoming the heir to an English Earl. His father was the disowned son of the current Earl, a crotchety, proud, and selfish man. Through Cedric’s pure-hearted love and generosity, the Earl turns over a new leaf.

Basically, it’s Annie with a British Daddy Warbucks.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is the sort of author who thrives on the melodramatic. In A Little Princess she wrote a sort of inverse Fauntleroy, with the rich Sara Crewe being forced into a live of servitude and poverty…before getting the obligatory fairy tale ending. In A Secret Garden the character of Mary Lennox is not the same as Sara or Cedric, starting out peevish and contrary before developing into a decent heroine, but there is still the same sort of feeling of wish fulfillment as she goes from being an orphan in a foreign country (having grown up in India, she is very much alone when she’s taken to live in Britain with her relatives) to having a family and friends.

In Little Lord Fauntleroy, however, the main character is not nearly as relatable as Mary (or even Sara). Cedric is annoyingly perfect. He’s super “beautiful” (not “handsome,” or even “cute”), clean, well-behaved, generous, affectionate, and both more intelligent and more mature than his seven or so years of age. Everyone in the book loves him with a level of devotion that’s at best unrealistic, and at worst sort of creepy. In fact, the climax of the book actually hinges on something completely out of Cedric’s control (or even awareness), as his position as the rightful heir to his grandfather’s fortune hangs in the balance and the only person able to help is a shoeshine boy he treated kindly back in America. In fact, although Cedric is sort of funny in a “precocious innocent” sort of way, he really doesn’t have much to do with the plot. Everything happens to him rather than requiring him to make any important choices.

Something else that bothers me about this book actually came upon a second reading of it, this time with a little more knowledge of Burnett’s own life. Apparently she based Cedric upon her son Vivian (who, like Cedric, called her “Dearest” instead of Mother). In fact, she had two sons, for whom she made clothes with lots of frills. She also made sure their hair grew long so she could curl it into ringlets. Perhaps she wished she was living in the times of Louis XIV. No matter the reason for this rather eccentric way of dressing her children, the publication of Fauntleroy created an epidemic of mothers dressing their sons in velvet and making their hair grow out—which did not endear Burnett to a young male readership.

While I honestly did enjoy the book both times I read it, probably the thing I disliked the most about this book was something that was more apparent to me reading as an adult than when I read it as an adult: its essentially classist perspective. Cedric is good and wise and educated not because of anything he has chosen (or, at his age, not because of the way his parents raised him), but because he’s got “good breeding.” Even his American mother is a “lady,” not to be compared with other American women who are trash because they are not on her social level. Never is this so ridiculous, however, than in Cedric’s relationship with the grocer, Mr. Hobbs. The story would have us believe that Cedric is qualified to teach a grown man mathematics—event though Cedric can barely spell, we’re supposed to believe he understands the complexities of arithmetic better than a small business owner!