by Ann Thwaite
The case showed the law to be an ass. “It being granted that it was not illegal to dramatize the story of another person, could it be contended that for this purpose the dramatizer could not write a single copy of his play without infringing copyright in the story—but must commit the whole to memory and impart it to the actors by word of mouth?” Defendant’s counsel could not believe this was reasonable.
Mr Justice Stirling, in giving judgment, said a lot of the play had been extracted almost verbatim from the book—more than one quarter of the lines in the first act alone. “I think that what has been done and is intended to be done by the defendant constitutes an infringement of the plaintiffs’ legal rights no less than if the defendant had published his play. I grant a perpetual injunction to restrain the defendant from multiplying copies of his play. The plaintiffs further insist on an order directing the delivery up of the existing copies of the play . . . the costs of the action must be paid by the defendant.”
Victory was total. It was not possible for a play to be licensed unless a copy was lodged with the Lord Chamberlain, and unauthorized dramatists would no longer be able to lodge copies with the Lord Chamberlain. Judgment was delivered on 10th May and Frances’ own play was ready to open on 14th May at Terry’s Theatre.
Wilson Barrett “is doing everything for me”, Frances had written to Kitty in Florence, “and reads the play as I write it . . . Yesterday he brought me a mechanical tin cart to play with.” Madge Kendal agreed to produce it and an excellent cast was assembled, many of whom were later to become well known. Dearest, for instance, was played by Winifred Emery, the Earl of Dorincourt by Alfred Bishop and Mr Havisham by Brandon Thomas, the author of Charley’s Aunt. Vera Beringer, who played Cedric, was then nine years old. Years later (she died only in 1971) she recalled:
I played the part between six and seven hundred times—and with what a wonderful cast . . .
Little Lord Fauntleroy was a real person to me. I loved him dearly, and it was a daily joy to go down to the theatre for each performance and “be Cedric”, as I used to say.
It was an amazing time for any child—a time of success, of spoiling, of triumph; but somehow it was more connected in my childish mind with Fauntleroy than with myself. I remember so vividly the first performance of all, at Terry’s Theatre, when Mrs Burnett sat in a stage box, and in her enthusiasm flung me her immense bouquet of pink roses. Such an exciting thing had of course never happened to me before, and I remember saying, “thank you” in a burst of gratitude, whereupon she replied, “Bless the child, and she did not forget a single word!”
Frances had the pleasure of taking Vera up to the box to meet the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, when they came to see the play. Vera was worried whether she should curtsey or bow to royalty. It would seem odd to curtsey in black velvet knickerbockers. Fortunately the royal pair solved the problem by kissing her. “Mrs Burnett,” said Vera, “occupied a rather odd position in my small mind. I looked on her as a kind of relation of Lord Fauntleroy’s and consequently I had for her the same sort of affection I had for Cedric himself”.
The Times of 15th May was enthusiastic. “The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy proved to be in all respects superior to the pirated version, which Mr Seebohm has been restrained from performing. It reflects in a great measure the fresh, delicate, exquisitely pretty sentiment of the book . . . the piece is exceptionally well-acted.” William Archer in the London World of 23rd May agreed that the new Fauntleroy was in every way better than the pseudo-Fauntleroy. “Mrs Burnett shows herself a true poet though her Pegasus may be a rocking-horse.” He praised Frances for taking her case to the courts. “Novelists need no longer fear to see their brain-children kidnapped, distorted and sent forth to pick up pence for the kidnapper in the theatrical highways and byways.” In celebration of her achievement, Frances appeared as one of the few women in an impressive volume of portrait-photographs called Men and Women of the Day. But it was another photograph, taken by Barrauds of Oxford Street on the same occasion, which pleased Frances more. For once she thought the likeness “really excellent”, so it gives us a good idea of how she liked to think she looked: intelligent, thoughtful, a little quizzical and severe, not “fluffy” at all.
On 11th July, Lewis Carroll (seeing himself as the Aged, Aged Man) was at Paddington Station to meet Isa Bowman, who was to appear later in the year in the operetta version of Alice in Wonderland. That afternoon they saw Little Lord Fauntleroy and Carroll commemorated the occasion in a frivolous journal:
Little Vera Beringer was the Little Lord Fauntleroy. Isa would have liked to play the part but the Manager at the theatre did not allow her, as she did not know the words, which would have made it go off badly. Isa liked the whole play very much: the passionate old Earl and the gentle mother of the little boy and the droll Mr Hobbs and all of them.
The boys, with Kitty Hall, rejoined their Dearest in the house she had taken at Regent’s Park West. Frances was working on a short novel, The Pretty Sister of José, which she had begun in Florence. It is a mystery why she chose to set a book in Spain, where she had never been, rather than in Italy, where she was writing. It is a conventionally romantic story about a self-willed girl who scorns love, even that of everyone’s hero, the dashing bull-fighter, Sebastiano, until the moment when he leaves Madrid and she realizes she has loved him without knowing it. There is a passing nod to progressive thought: “She was a Spanish girl and not so far in advance of her age that the terrible features of the pastime going on before her could obscure its brilliancy and excitement.” For the most part, the story is rich in the stage properties of Spain—the fans and guitars, the jasmine, the roses and the grapevines—and poor in any feeling of reality.
It was difficult for Frances to work on something new when everyone was talking about Fauntleroy—not just the success of the play but also the significance of the judgment of the courts. All questions of copyright were in the air. Two years before, Frances had been one of forty-five writers who had contributed open letters to the Century, demanding international copyright. All classes of literary workmen, they said “still endure the disadvantages of a market drugged with stolen goods”. “A right to the control and the protection of the products of one’s brain”, it seemed to Frances, could not be questioned. In this summer of 1888, the Society of Authors decided to give a dinner “in honour of American men and women of letters now in England”, partly to thank them for their efforts on behalf of international copyright. Henry James, who was invited to be one of the guests of honour, took strong exception to the whole affair. He had an aversion to public dinners anyway (“I can’t come to a thing of speeches,” he once wrote to Vernon Lee) but this one seemed to him a particularly ill-judged occasion. He wrote to Edmund Gosse, one of the committee: “To give American authors a dinner when the Copyright Bill is not passed—mon cher ami, y-pensez-vous?” It would be torture for him to attend it. “The dearest wish of my heart—it is really what, as a literary man, I live for—is the coming to pass of such relations between the two countries as that the copyright matter shall be but a drop in the deep bucket of their harmony.” James Russell Lowell was still in London at this point: James said that Lowell was shy about attending, “not at all wishing to be publicly thanked for having, as yet, achieved nothing at all”. However, Lowell turned up and so, of course, did Frances. After all, she had achieved something and she was very happy to be thanked for it.
The Times records that the dinner was held at the Criterion Restaurant on 25th July. Mr Bryce, M.P., presided and there were present among others, Mr J. Russell Lowell, Mrs F. Hodgson Burnett, Mr Wilkie Collins, Mr Jerome K. Jerome, Lord Brabourne, Mr E. Gosse, the Master of the Temple, Mr Rider Haggard and Mr Walter Besant. Lord Tennyson telegraphed warmest greetings to “our American guests”. Lowell made a splendid speech in reply to the toast “Literature”. It was interspersed with cheers and laughter and Hear Hears. On the subject of International Copyright he said, “I am not so sure that our
American publishers were so much more wicked than their English brethren would have been if they had had the chance.” He remembered that his old friend and neighbour, Longfellow, had once invited him to eat a game pie with him, “the only honorarium he had ever received from this country for reprinting his works”.
Frances was presented with a magnificent diamond bracelet inscribed “To Frances Hodgson Burnett, with the gratitude of British Authors”. There was a diamond ring to match and a parchment scroll, illuminated with the names of those who had helped to make the gift. “The undermentioned Men and Women of Letters desire to express to Mrs Frances Hodgson Burnett their appreciation of the great service they believe she has rendered to British Authors by so strongly attracting public attention to the unsatisfactory condition of Copyright Law in England . . .” Eighty-four writers associated themselves with the address and the “accompanying Souvenir”, including Ralph Abercrombie, Rider Haggard, F. Anstey, George Meredith, Arthur W. Pinero and Oscar Wilde.
“There is no danger of my becoming vain,” Frances had written to Gilder in 1877. Eleven years later there was a danger—but not from any recognition at this stage from her admired Henry James. “The incorporated society of authors”—he wrote to R. L. Stevenson, “I belong to it and so do you, I think, but I don’t know what it is—gave a dinner the other night to American literati to thank them for praying for international copyright I carefully forebore to go, thinking the gratulation premature, and I see by this morning’s Times that the banquetted boon is further off than ever.”
After the banquet, Frances took the boys off for a holiday at Joss Farm, St Peter’s, on the Isle of Thanet. It was an attractive place—a rambling, ivy-clad cottage and a tousled garden full of lavender and phlox, amid cornfields sloping down to white chalk cliffs above the English Channel. Frances bought blue and white cretonne in the village shop at sixpence a yard and made the sitting-room resplendent. She hung white muslin curtains in “the queer low-roofed dining-room” and put turkey-red cotton on the chairs. She walked in the fields with her arms full of poppies and listened to the skylarks. But not for long. Plans were going ahead for the American production of Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was to open in Boston and then move to New York for the winter season. It was time she returned.
Before leaving from Liverpool, Frances visited Manchester as guest of honour at a reception given by the Manchester Arts Club. Both That Lass o’ Lowries and Little Lord Fauntleroy, they told her, were “distinguished by a broad humanity”. Mrs Burnett “had conferred, by her genius and her various works, honour upon Manchester”. Little Lord Fauntleroy “had done an immense amount of good in raising the character of human nature throughout the English speaking race”. (“Hear, hear.”) Frances told them how delighted she was to be in her native city after so many years. Then there followed an impromptu concert. Fortunately, Miss Dawson, of Rhodes, near Middleton, “a vocalist of considerable ability”, was present.
Frances reached the United States—after sixteen months away—on board the steamer City of New York, with Lionel, Vivian and her secretary, “Signorina Chiellini, a beautiful Florentine”, as the papers put it. She found the newspapers full not only of the success of her play, which had opened at the Boston Museum Theater on 10th September, but also of the death of E. V. Seebohm, which seemed to be subsequent to that success. The journal Spirit of the Times reported the story like this:
Last week, when the news of the immense success of the author’s version of Little Lord Fauntleroy at the Boston Museum reached New York, a young Englishman committed suicide, at the Hoffman House. He had been known as Lawrence Herbert, had talked much about the chances of English dramatists in this country, and had expended all his money. On the London tailor’s tab in the pocket of his overcoat was written the name of E. V. Seebohm. It will be remembered that Mr Seebohm dramatized Little Lord Fauntleroy in London, and was stopped by an injunction. He then left England for a tour round the world. The identity of the suicide was much discussed by the daily papers. Cablegrams were received describing Mr Seebohm’s appearance. Now it is claimed by the Herald that a great detective feat has been accomplished in the discovery that Mr Seebohm was the suicide. A greater detective feat would have been the discovery that the suicide was not Mr Seebohm, but that somebody else had killed himself in Mr Seebohm’s coat.
Frances was mobbed by reporters on the docks. “You want me to talk about Mr Seebohm,” she said, “and I do not want to talk of him, now that he is supposed to be dead . . . From my brief acquaintance, I should not imagine that he was a man to commit suicide. It is much easier for me to believe that he was murdered even than that he should have destroyed himself.” It was an unpleasant business; she did not let herself dwell on it.
She despatched the boys to their father in Washington. Lionel was now fourteen and Vivian twelve and they were well able to travel alone. She went herself immediately to the Halls’ home in Boston. She found waiting for her a letter from Elsie Leslie, the child who was playing Fauntleroy, and replied at once, telling her to look out the following night for a little lady in a yellow brocade dress in one of the boxes. She told her about the boys and how they had always called their mother “Dearest”. “That was why I made Fauntleroy call his mother so.” Elsie Leslie was an extraordinary child; everyone was agreed on that. She had had her seventh birthday only the month before Fauntleroy opened. She was already a veteran actress but was unspoiled and natural to a remarkable degree. Mark Twain wrote The Prince and the Pauper for her and embroidered her a slipper (William Gillette made the other one). He used to work on it on trains during his lecture tours “and was in danger of being put off as a raving lunatic”.
Frances was delighted with Elsie’s performance and with the production: the settings were more lavish than in London. Indeed, everyone was delighted with it. Oliver Wendell Holmes, nearly eighty and much honoured, wrote from his house on Beacon Street: “We had a most delightfully memorable evening, though we were all crying like babies half the time. The tears that will not flow for real grief will sometimes come unbidden at the call of the writer of fiction who knows the human heart, and has access to its hidden fountains. You should be very happy, for what mother ever had such a darling child as your dear little Lord Fauntleroy? And to think that he was not born to die, or to grow out of his beauty and infinite charm, like the poor little creatures of flesh and blood all around us.”
A long review in the Boston Transcript of 11th September agreed with Holmes. “It is a play for moist eyes, even in its comic parts . . . A susceptible person will hardly get the tears down out of his throat through the whole piece.” The great majority of the first-night audience were watching to see how closely the play followed the book. They had all read it; half of them had read it twice. And they were not disappointed: Elsie Leslie is a “remarkable child . . . Her acting is thoroughly natural . . . and her full-faced rosy beauty helps to make her Fauntleroy the more real—a distinct advantage when it is considered that the slightest touch of pallor and fragility would turn this impossible little lord into a pure idealization . . . We should say that, unless the development of the fishery troubles should bring the public too much into sympathy with the views of Mr Hobbs and diminish the taste for representations of the British aristocracy, this play will have a long and successful run.” In Boston the theatre was always full; Frances received nearly eight hundred dollars a week from it.
The only critical voices were those of some “prominent people” in Boston who complained to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that Elsie was “much overworked”. T. H. French of Samuel French and Co, who were to put the play on at the Broadway Theatre, wrote to Elsie’s mother saying the child must have a week’s rest between the Boston run and the New York rehearsals and that, on arrival in New York, she should be “examined by the said society”. It was also arranged that Tommy Russell (nephew of Annie Russell, who had played Esmeralda) was to share the part with Elsie. She was to play six times a w
eek and Tommy on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday nights. French was enormously conciliatory to Frances. She wrote to Kitty Hall from the Grand Hotel in New York: “It appears that I am to have all I want—do all I want—rule the earth—for this matter everything is to be subservient to my royal will. ‘This’ I say ‘appears’. ‘Just as you please, Mrs Burnett—all that you wish . . .’ Every actor is to do exactly as I wish. Let us hope it will turn out so.”
The first night in New York was on 3rd December 1888 and the success in London and Boston was repeated. It was now that the fashion for Little Lord Fauntleroy suits boomed. All over America, reluctant small boys were forced by their mothers into black velvet suits with lace collars and other outfits based on Cedric’s clothes. In Davenport, Iowa, an eight-year-old burned down his father’s barn in protest at being dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy. In Worcester, Massachusetts, a boy traded his suit for some old patched clothes belonging to a gypsy. In New York it was reported that Stephen Crane gave money to two small boys and sent them to have their curls cut off; one mother went into hysterics, the other fainted. When I was in Washington in 1970, an old woman, at the mention of the name Frances Hodgson Burnett, recalled a family story. Her mother had ordered two of the suits for her brother. He hated them so much he stuffed them in the coal cellar. The mother was furious: “Just you wait till your father comes home . . .” But when the father returned, he took the boy’s part. Irving Cobb, in his fictionalized memories of his childhood, published in 1924, gives an exaggeratedly graphic account in a chapter called “Little Short Pantsleroy”: “A mania was laying hold on the mothers of the nation. It was a mania for making over their growing sons after the likeness of a beatific image. Little Lord Fauntleroy infected thousands of the worthy matrons of America with a catching lunacy, which raged like a sedge fire and left enduring scars upon the seared memories of its chief sufferers—their sons, notably between the ages of seven and eleven.” Mrs Custer, the mother in Cobb’s book, had imagined that clothes could convert her unsatisfactory son into a Fauntleroy, charming, courteous, thoughtful. “It was the mistake of many another baffled mother.”