by Ann Thwaite
It was this peace which passeth all understanding she needed so badly. Christian Science, of course, claimed to be able to give it to her. If only, Christian Science taught, she became convinced of the power of controlling mind, she would be lifted above the chances and changes of this mortal life, and taste of the peace which the world can neither give nor take away. It was an attractive thought. But Frances could not accept that Matter is simply a false impression, that evil and sin, sorrow and illness are unreal in an absolute sense. She had seen too much evidence of their reality. Her illness, she would like to believe, could be overcome by the power of the mind. Thinking only on things that were good and lovely might perhaps just possibly free her from this “nervous prostration” or whatever it was. But Christian Science told her that its theology was essential to its healing. It must be accepted in its entirety or not at all. She never became a Christian Scientist, though, much later, Vivian did.
In 1884 she “took several courses of treatments with a local mind-healer” in Boston. These seemed to be nothing much more complex than an encouragement to her to think that, if she wanted to be well, she would be well. She did not feel able to return to Washington. There are no existing letters from or to Swan at this period, and it is difficult to know just what was going on. But it seems certain that their marriage had already ended in every real sense. Our only clues are from Through One Administration. There Bertha decides to stay with Richard for the sake of the children. For the same reason—and of course because divorce was rare and controversial at that time—Frances made no open break for another fourteen years. Frances met the Halls that year and it was largely the attraction of their company which kept her in Boston—this and the more admissible reason of her mind-healing “treatments”. Madam Edna Hall, as she was known, was a singing teacher, who had had some success as a concert performer in her younger days. There were three daughters: Marguerite (Daisy), a singer like her mother, Grace (Gigi), who painted and Gertrude (known as Kitty) who was a poet. Kitty was at this time working on her Verses which were later to be favourably reviewed in the Atlantic by the respected William Dean Howells. Frances was at once attracted to her and the friendship was to last throughout their lives.
When Frances finally returned to Washington in the autumn of 1884—just in time for the festivities to mark the beginning of the Cleveland administration—Kitty Hall came too. Kitty remembered Frances telling Vivian at her knee—in that short interval between breakfast and the time to start for school—the beginning of the story of the little American boy who became an English Lord. “The effect of testing her plot on the imagination of a child indubitably satisfied her. He had heard her tell many stories and so had I; Die Lust zufabulieren was in her inborn and life long; we could have no idea that on this day a classic had been born.”
Frances remembered the origins of Little Lord Fauntleroy like this:
[Vivian] was such a patriotic young American; he was so engaged in an impending presidential election at the time; his remarks were so well worth hearing! I began, among other fancies about him, to imagine his making them with that frankly glowing face to conservative English people.
“. . . When a person is a duke,” he had said to me once, “what makes him one? What has he done?” His opinion evidently was, that dukedoms were a species of reward for superhuman sweetness of character and brilliant intellectual capacity. I began to imagine the interest that would be awakened in his mind by the contemplation of ducal personages. It amused me to analyze the subject of what his point of view would be likely to be. I knew it would be productive of immense entertainment to his acquaintances . . . Would he seem “a cheeky little beggar” to less republican minds than his own? I asked myself this curiously. But no, I was sure he would not. He would be so simple. He would expect such splendour of mind and of noble friendliness that the hypothetical duke would like him as Dan and Carrie did, and he would end by saying, “My friend, the Duke of Blankshire,” as affectionately as he had said, “My friend, the milkman.”
It was only a thread of fancy for a while, but one day I had an idea. “I will write a story about him,” I said. “I will put him in a world quite new to him and see what he will do. How shall I bring a small American boy into close relationship with an English nobleman—irascible, conservative, disagreeable? He must live with him, talk to him, show him his small, unconscious, republican mind. He will be more effective if I make him a child who has lived in the simplest possible way. Eureka! Son of younger son, separated from ill-tempered noble father because he has married a poor young American beauty. Young father dead, elder brothers dead, boy comes into tide! How it would amaze him and bewilder him! Yes, there it is, and Vivian shall be he—just Vivian with his curls and his eyes, and his friendly, kind, little soul. Little Lord Something-or-other. What a pretty tide—Little Lord—Little Lord—, what?” And a day later it was Little Lord Fauntleroy. A story like that is easily written. In part it was being lived before my eyes.
. . . Almost every day I recorded something he had said or suggested. And how delightful it was to read the manuscript to him and his brother. He used to sit in a large arm-chair holding his knee or with his hands in his pockets. “Do you know,” he said to me once, “I like that boy? There’s one thing about him, he never forgets about Dearest.”
“It is not a portrait; but, certainly, if there had not been Vivian there would not have been Fauntleroy,” Kitty Hall heard Frances tell people. Vivian was to suffer from this identification for the rest of his life. It was an albatross round his neck as well as Frances’. It would have destroyed lesser men, but he never lost the characteristics of the charming, helpful boy, who expected the best from everyone. In 1937 the newspaper report of his death had the heading ORIGINAL “FAUNTLEROY” DIES IN BOAT AFTER HELPING RESCUE 4 IN SOUND. “Vivian Burnett, Author’s Son who Devoted Life to Escaping ‘Sissified’ Role, is Stricken at Helm—Manoeuvres Yawl to get 2 Men and 2 Women from Overturned Craft, Then Collapses.”
It was an appropriate way for Vivian to die. It was also typically Fauntleroy behaviour, for Cedric Errol, Lord Fauntleroy was, in fact, no sissy. His true character was overlaid by the trappings of the part, by the clothes which he wore, by the hair that curled to his shoulders and by the sweet girl actresses who played the role on the stage. Frances did rhapsodize to excess about Cedric’s beauty (“such a handsome, blooming, curly-headed little fellow”) and the relationship between mother and son is certainly over-idealized; but this is only a very small part of the book. “Dearest” is in fact a rather minor character. The whole interest lies in the impact of Cedric on his disagreeable grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt
Cedric is certainly loving, considerate, tender, but he never deserves the label “odious little prig”. He is brave, enterprising, adaptable and unaffected. He is, in fact, a likeable boy. When he hears the news that he is heir to an earldom, having discovered what an earldom is, the young American is appalled. His friend, Mr Hobbs, the grocer on the corner, has always said very severe things about the aristocracy and has confidently expected an English Revolution. “Those they’ve trod on will rise and blow them sky high. They’re a bad lot,” he tells Cedric. Naturally Cedric would rather not be an earl. “None of the boys are earls,” he tells Dearest “Can’t I not be one?”
But there is apparently no getting out of it. Fortunately Cedric expects the best of his own grandfather. And when he arrives in England, he is so pleased to find there is no one actually languishing in the dungeons and that the people take off their hats to his grandfather, that he gets the impression the Earl is, like Mr Hobbs, “a universal favorite”. There is nothing unconvincing about the Earl of Dorincourt’s reformation under the influence of his small republican grandson. People tend to act in the way that is expected of them, and pride has always been one of the Earl’s strongest characteristics. He is proud of Cedric; the rest follows. It is Cedric, of course, who becomes the universal favourite.
The attraction of the book i
s obvious. Indeed, it fits almost exactly the formula for a bestseller which Claud Cockburn defines rather crudely in his exploration of twentieth-century best sellers: “. . . to take the reader on a trip to the wide blue yonder, to get one more flight out of an imaginary but ever so noble aristocracy, while indicating one’s modern awareness that the old bus might be conking out, these are notable achievements, notably achieved by a whole sales force of authors.” The wide blue yonder was in this case not a desert island or a desert kingdom, but the noble acres of the Earl of Dorincourt’s estate. The appeal was marvellously double-edged. The reader could have it both ways. He could both enjoy the aristocratic way of life and share Cedric’s belief that Mr Hobbs and Dick, the bootblack, were every bit as important as an earl.
It is typical of the best seller, according to Cockburn, that the Sheikh and the Bohemian turn out to be well-born respectable people after all. E. M. Hull’s Sheikh (immortalized by Rudolph Valentino) was actually “the son of a tip-top English peer”; Beau Geste, the Foreign Legionary, is Lady Brandon’s nephew. “W. J. Locke’s Beloved Vagabond is, in fact, an old Rugbeian. So too Cedric, the young egalitarian, has the ancient lineage. “Here’s to him,” Mr Hobbs said, proposing Cedric’s health in the small back room at the grocery, “an’ may he teach ’em a lesson—earls an’ markises an’ dooks an’ all.” Cedric does teach the Earl a lesson, and when the rival claimant turns up, Cedric shows that his own character is undeviating and he will be exactly the same person whether he is an earl himself or a partner in Hobbs’ grocery business. The irony, of course, is that whatever happens, he is the Earl’s grandson, for all his splendidly American attitudes. The coincidence of Dick, the bootblack, recognizing the rival claimant’s mother as his own sister-in-law, is a preposterous one but by then the reader’s unbelief has been happily suspended. As Cockburn says, a “rattling good yarn” has incalculable powers of survival. “It can even survive a plot of breath-taking, shamelessly audacious absurdity.”
And Little Lord Fauntleroy is a splendid yarn. The sentiment we find nauseating (“such a beautiful, innocent little fellow he was, too, with his brave, trustful face”) is not really very much in evidence. It would not need cuts of more than a couple of pages of odd sentences here and there to make it perfectly acceptable to today’s taste. It is not read now because people who haven’t read it think that Cedric is nothing but an over-dressed mother’s darling. The Dictionary of American Biography said most unfairly, “Chiefly he is made up of a wardrobe and manners.” The illustrations, which did the book and Frances so much disservice in the end, were by Reginald Birch. At the end of his life, Birch himself said they had ruined his career; no one ever let him forget them. They were based on a photograph of Vivian taken in Lynn in 1884. It is one thing to wear black velvet in a photographic studio or on Tuesday afternoons, as Vivian did; it is quite another to wear it when riding a pony or watching a bricklayer. The image was wide open to both admiration and ridicule.
At the time the vast majority admired. Frances knew instinctively—and it helped to make the book a best seller—that the Mr Hobbses of this world are as fascinated by the aristocracy as is everyone else. Mr Hobbs, indeed, that believer in the rights of an English revolution, shut up his New York grocery, opened a shop on the Earl’s estate and pored over the Court News every morning in The Times. Many people read mainly to substantiate their day-dreams and the Fauntleroy story is the perfect daydream. Mark Twain’s distant cousin, Jesse Madison Leathers of Louisville, was firmly convinced he was the rightful Earl of Durham. Twain said to prove the claim would be as difficult as taking Gibraltar with blank cartridges, but there were plenty of people who had similar dreams. It could happen to my boy, people thought; there was a case in the paper just the other day—an American carpenter found himself suddenly a Scottish nobleman. It could happen. All over America, men, women and children followed Cedric’s adventures. The reaction was described like this: “It does not do to say merely that Little Lord Fauntleroy was a great success; it caused a public delirium of joy. It had the Cinderella charm and something else. Young and old laughed and thrilled and wept over it together.”
It began in the children’s magazine, St Nicholas, in November 1885—but was it really a children’s book? It was certainly written partly for Lionel and Vivian; it has a perfect plot for children and is entirely accessible to them. One of the things that made Frances such a good writer for children was that she was always an extremely natural writer. “It is doubtful,” as one critic put it, “that Mrs Burnett ever consciously made a phrase.” She wrote “always in the most simple and straight-forward words that she could find”, with her eye on the thing she was writing about and not on the way she wrote. But Little Lord Fauntleroy appealed even more to adults. Cedric, unlike Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox of her later books, is always seen from the outside, from the adult point of view. And it is adults, of course, who buy children’s books. Mothers bought it perhaps for their children but they read it themselves and they loved Cedric. They longed for their own children to be like him.
Louisa M. Alcott, in a glowing review in the Bookbuyer, drew attention to the fact that “Grown people, who still love children’s books, will enjoy much which escapes the younger reader in the working out of the fierce old earl’s regeneration”. Miss Alcott considered writing for children “a peculiarly fitting and gracious task for women” and she rejoiced to see “our best and brightest consecrating their talents to this useful and beautiful work”. “Nothing could have been more happily conceived,” wrote George Parsons Lathrop in the New York Star. “The way in which the happy thought has been embodied is nothing less than perfect.” The reviews were actually far more sickly than the book.
When it was published in England, the Pall Mall Gazette defined its appeal like this: “The grace and tenderness of the sentiment, the childlike natural ways of the small hero, the happy alternation of the quaint, laughable incidents, with touches of real, though unobtrusive pathos, above all the pervading atmosphere of unaffected goodness, combine to form a whole of which the fascination is felt by children of an older growth as much as, if not more than, by juveniles.” And the Manchester Guardian agreed: “Cedric’s simple, truthful, earnest and loving nature is what one would like all children to have, for it was just the same with or without wealth, in the little house in New York or in the great castle.”
Among the “grown people”, the “children of an older growth” who happily admitted to an admiration for the book, there were some impressive names. Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, was one. We shall hear more about this later. The poet James Russell Lowell, who had recently been recalled by President Cleveland from his post as American Ambassador in London, was another. The Anglo-American theme was of particular interest to both of them. Lowell wrote to Scribner: “I have just been reading Little Lord Fauntleroy. I was very tired and my niece gave it to me, saying, ‘Here is something easy to read which I am sure you will enjoy.’ I should be glad to have the author know how much pleasure the book gave me. I feel so grateful to her.”
Frances had returned to Scribner’s fold with this book, in spite of a letter from Swan to Scribner as late as April 1885 which says, “As regards Mrs Burnett’s future books, I should hardly feel justified in binding ourselves to a house which allows one of our [crossed out and “her” written above] books to remain out of print for a year. That argues a lack of interest, which is not encouraging for future works.” So Swan was still acting as amanuensis and feeling possessive about the books, even though their writer was drifting further and further away from him.
Fortunately for Scribner’s, the differences were resolved. They were able to acquire the plates of the two Osgood books and brought them out in their uniform edition that summer. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published as a book in October 1886. A year later 43,000 copies were in print Two years later, influenced by the play, sales soared higher and higher. It became one of the biggest sellers of all time, selling over a milli
on copies in English alone, and being translated into more than a dozen languages. It made Frances at least a hundred thousand dollars in her lifetime. The term “best seller” is, of course, often used pejoratively—the idea being that more people read bad books than good books. But the sales success of a book often tells us more about the time than about the book itself. Frances had produced a book which fitted perfectly the taste of the time.
Frances had started off as an extreme realist by the standards of the day; now she became identified as a romantic. Marcus Cunliffe sets the book in opposition to Dean Howell’s Indian Summer. It was “the exotic versus the demotic; the day-dream versus broad daylight; sentimentality versus commonsense”. Romanticism was in the ascendant and, with this one book, Frances had stepped into line. It was the age of escapism. In England it was the heyday of Andrew Lang. His influence as a critic was enormous. For him, there were no problems about relative values. As John Gross has put it, “Milton was literature and so was Stanley J. Weyman”. There was a craving for escape from life and no aesthetic encouragement to face it. Lang preferred Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope to Hardy and Henry James, Stevenson to Dostoievsky. And thousands, hundreds of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, agreed with him.
It was in 1886 that Lemuel Bangs, Scribner’s agent in England, attempting to introduce a little realism into the list, was told by Charles Scribner to “let up on the nasty books”. A list of the best-selling novels in these years is very revealing:
1884 Heidi; Treasure Island
1885 A Child’s Garden of Verses; Huckleberry Finn
1886 Little Lord Fauntleroy; King Solomons Mines; War and Peace
Of these titles, all except War and Peace would now be considered children’s books. At this time there was no rigid demarcation line between adult and children’s literature. Publishers did not have special children’s departments. There were no children’s libraries. Reviews of children’s books were not confined to separate supplements; they frequently contained phrases such as, “It will delight all children between the ages of six and sixty” or “Grown-up readers will be as much delighted as the younger ones”. Swinburne, writing on Mrs Molesworth in the Nineteenth Century in 1893, was to say: “Our own age is more fortunate . . . Any chapter of The Cuckoo Clock or the enchanting Adventures of Herr Baby is worth a shoal of the very best novels dealing with the characters and fortunes of mere adults.” Lewis Carroll had had a good deal to do with this. Everyone read Alice. Henry James, though depressed by the “beastly bloodiness” of Rider Haggard, admired Treasure Island enormously. His copy of Kidnapped is heavily annotated. The taste of the general public accorded neatly on the whole with what was considered suitable for children; when Huckleberry Finn was serialized in the Century (not St Nicholas), Gilder deleted, with the author’s agreement, all references to nakedness, blasphemy, smells and dead cats.