One author describes the desire of Americans in the late 19th
Century
to emulate English aristocrats, or how they envisiined European
aristocrats.
The effects were often striking. In the early 1890's a
well-meaning group of Anglophiles called the American Acclimatization
Society thought it would be charming if the American fauna included
all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. Their imported thrushes,
chaffinches, nightingales and skylarks died out. Their starlings did
not--hence the losing battle of many of today's cities against the
noise and corrosive feces of flocks of millions of starlings and the
near wiping out of several species of native birds whose nesting
places starlings take over. A few years earlier the Reverend Endicott
Peabody, whose strongly Yankee name belied his education in England,
had founded in a Massachusetts township (once wiped out by King
Philip's Indians) the famous Groton School patterned as closely as
his zeal could manage on the aristocratic public schools of England,
cold baths and all. He had recently been ministering to the heathen
of Tombstone, Arizona, in its most carefree phase. Even so the
reaction seems excessive and had anomalous consequences on his manly
young pupils' habits of speech and, because of Groton's instills high
prestige, on the atmosphere of the most fashionable Northeastern
private preparatory schools for boys. That sort of tutelage was
limited of course, to the few whose parents could afford-and whose
social status justified admission to-such privileges. Almost
immediately however, the scope of Anglicization was immensely widened
by the publication in St. Nicholas Magazine (already solidly
acknowledged the proper reading for the Quality's children) and then
in book form of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
This was the most widely sold work of a popular English woman
writer resident in America since girlhood, Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Bennett. It tells of the sturdy small son of a charming, hard-up
American widow, whose late husband, son and heir of a real English
earl, had been disowned by his crusty father for marrying her.
Increasing age moves his Lordship, now gouty and crustier than ever,
to fetch sturdy, golden-haired Ceddie (for Cedric) back to be
educated in England as befits the progenitive heir, courtesy title
Lord Fauntleroy. The boy's sturdily sweet disposition wins his
lordship around to the point of reconciliation with mama, and
everything is awfully hands-across-the-sea. The nub of the story is
the success of the boy in making the English feel, in spite of his
early Yankee rearing, his innate patrician qualities. The point is
probably all the more lovingly made because Mrs. Burnett's rearing
had been that of a petty shopkeeper's daughter in the English
Midlands.
The worst of it was that little Lord Fauntleroy wore his
golden hair in long curls, and the illustrations by Reginald Birch, a
mainstay of St. Nicholas, showed him sturdily facing
grandfather in a knee-breeched, black velvet suit with a broad white
collar. Reynold Birch's drawings of Little Lord Fauntleroy had as
much to do as Frances Hodgson Burnett's text with inflicting his
image on the American mother--and too often her son. Many American
mothers above a certain income level not only took him to their
hearts but socially crucified their boy children by putting them into
black velvet and never allowing their hair to be cut. For good or ill
other immigrant Britons left traces on America between the Civil and
the Spanish-American wars: James Redpath, first efficiently to
organize the lecture branch of American show business; Alexander
Graham Bell; Edward Weston second only to Edison as father of the
electric industry . . . But only Mrs. Burnett could claim so deeply
to have affected the emotional health of so many American boys.
Navigate the Boys' Historical Clothing Web Site related pages: Navigate the Boys' Historical Clothing Web Site:
Christopher Wagner
[Return to the Main Fauntleroy page]
[Ringlet curls]
[Vivian Burnett]
[Kilts]
[Long stockings]
[Lace collar]
[Sailor hats]
[Introduction]
[Chronology]
[Clothing styles]
[Biographies]
[Bibliographies]
[Countries]
[Activities]
[FAQs]
[Contributions]
[Boys' Clothing Home]
Created: May 30, 1998
Last updated: May 30, 1998