Episode 22: Little Lord Fauntleroy

Like many ladies of her time, my grandmother Ruth is enamored of the story of Little Lord Fauntleroy. While I doubt she ever read the book, published in 1886, a silent movie starring Mary Pickford is released in 1921, just a year after Guy is born. The story features an American boy who inherits a British title and goes to England to live with his wealthy, grouchy grandfather.

Mary Pickford starred in the 1921 silent film Little

Lord Fauntleroy.

The boy arrives wearing a black velvet suit with a lace collar, his curly hair worn long. This image becomes the bane of many a young boys’ existence whose mothers are intent on recreating this look. Ruth is one of them. She wants Guy to have very long curly, girly hair, and puts him in dresses. Finally, young Guy goes to his father and begs for haircut and regular boys’ clothes. D.G. takes him to the barber and gets him back in boys clothing.

Ruth cries for a week.

The author of Little Lord Fauntleroy is Britisher Frances Hodgson Burnett. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband, a doctor, and two sons. She has also written The Secret Garden, another very popular children’s novel. It turns out she is dressing her own boys just like Lord Fauntleroy even before the book is published, for which she draws a lot of negative criticism in town. Even the Washington press publishes derogatory commentary. They claim she’s using her sons, artfully posing them around her salon in fancy dress, to impress strangers. She writes a scathing rebuke defending her choice in boy’s clothing.[1]

D.G. sees the future. His bride and everyone around her will not be happy if she doesn’t have something to do. She quit her bank job when they married. So he buys her a little restaurant to manage out on the highway. This appears to do the trick for the time being.

D.G. dies of a heart attack when Guy is only seven after losing his fortune in the early days of the Great Depression. Now Ruth has Guy all to herself. By the time she is done with him, he despises her.

My grandfather D.G. holding my father/

Once sitting on his screened porch in Arlington, Dad is in his cups when he tells me he’s spent a lifetime putting the world between himself and his mother. I don’t point out that at the same time he put the world between himself and his children.

[1] American Heritage, February 1970, Volume 21, Issue 2