A book in which the main character is a boy who wears velvet suits, long blond curls, and calls his mother "Dearest"? Right! That’s going to be on my list of things to read. Yet Little Lord Faunderoy, sausage curls and all, was the Harry Potter of his time and Frances Hodgson Burnett was as celebrated for creating him as J. K. Rowling is for Potter. Go figure.

  Little Lord Fauntleroy first appeared as stories in St. Nicholas magazine and readers waited eagerly for each installment. When the book was published, it was an instant best-seller, making Burnett more than $100,000. It later became a play that made even more money than the book...

At the age of sixteen Frances Hodgson Burnett moved to Tennessee with her bankrupt family and began writing for American magazines as means to support herself. Over two decades later Burnett published Little Lord Fauntleroy, modeling the character after her son Vivian. Burnett’s text and Reginald Birch’s original illustrations helped popularize a very romantic style of dress for boys a velvet suit with a broad lace collar-in the late nineteenth and earlv twentieth centuries.

Foreword

1: A GREAT SURPRISE

2: CEDRIC’S FRIENDS

3: LEAVING HOME

4: IN ENGLAND

5: AT THE CASTLE

6: THE EARL AND HIS GRANDSON

7: AT CHURCH

8: LEARNING TO RIDE

9: THE POOR COTTAGES

10: THE EARL ALARMED

11: ANXIETY IN AMERICA

12: THE RIVAL CLAIMANTS

13: DICK TO THE RESCUE

14: THE EXPOSURE

15: HIS EIGHTH BIRTHDAY