A book in which the main character is a boy who wears velvet suits, long blond curls, and call his mother "Dearest"? Right! That's going to be on my list of things to read. Yet Little Lord Fauntleroy, sausage curls and all, was the Harry Potter of his time and Frances Hodgson Burnett was as celebrated for creating him as J.K. Rowlng 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. And, like Harry Potter, there was merchandising ..."
~ Polly Horvath's foreward to Little Lord Fauntleroy
(Aladdin Classics), 2004.
Frances Hodgson Burnett (Frances Eliza Hodgson), was born in Manchester,
England, on November 24, 1849. Upon the death of her father when she was four,
her family fell into deep poverty and eventually migrated to
Knoxville, Tennessee in 1865 when Frances was 16. To help
contribute to the family's finances, she began writing short pieces for publication.
Frances lived to see several of her novels made into silent
films. She died in 1924, the same year that actor Freddie
Bartholomew was born. Freddie starred in the first 'talkie'
version of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936).
"Louisa May Alcott, although an unmarried woman without children, also had much in common with Frances. The
daughter of the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, she had grown up in the rarified intellectual community of Concord, among
such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Like Frances, her first stories were written
for money, and she churned out potboilers rather than romantic tales to help her family.... Also like Frances she tried her
hand briefly at teaching before turning to her pen for her income. ..." From Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden (2006) by
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
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