Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little Lord Fauntleroy is a novel by the English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), her first children's novel. It was published as a serial in St. Nicholas Magazine from November 1885 to October 1886, then as a book by Scribner's in 1886. The novel set a precedent in copyright law when Burnett won a lawsuit in 1888 against E. V. Seebohm over the rights to theatrical adaptations of the work. In a shabby New York side street in the mid-1880s, young Cedric Errol lives with his mother (known only as Mrs. Errol or "Dearest") in genteel poverty after the death of his father, Captain Cedric Errol. One day, they are visited by an English lawyer named Havisham with a message from Cedric's grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, an unruly millionaire who despises America and was very disappointed when his youngest son married an American woman. With the deaths of his father's elder brothers, Cedric has now inherited the title Lord Fauntleroy and is the heir to the earldom and a vast estate. Many ups and downs follow. The Fauntleroy suit, so well-described by Burnett and realized in Reginald Birch's detailed pen-and-ink drawings, created a fad for formal dress for American middle-class children. The Junior Deluxe Editions were a mail-order based program from Doubleday in which customers signed on to receive new volumes on a monthly basis. There were about 90 titles in all, issued from the mid ’40s up to 1962. They are all beautifully illustrated. This book is illustrated by Peter Spier (b. 1927), a Dutch-born American illustrator and writer who has created more than thirty children's books.