Essays on literary works - 2024

Essay on F. Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy

There’s something deeply irritating about Little Lord Fauntleroy, and that’s precisely why we need to talk about it.

Yes, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s sweet-as-honey tale of transatlantic innocence and aristocratic redemption has long been dismissed by many as a piece of sentimental children’s literature—syrupy, predictable, dressed in frills (literally and figuratively). But scratch the surface of those golden curls and wide eyes, and you’ll find a text tangled in contradictions, ideology, soft violence, and the residue of imperial guilt.

Let’s begin with Cedric Errol, that miniature diplomat, moral prodigy, and sartorial icon (I mean—velvet suits, ringlets, a belt like a pageboy from a forgotten utopia). He’s not just a child. He’s a performance. A spectacle of innocence projected into a decaying British aristocracy. A boy whose sweetness is weaponized. Cedric does not act—he redeems. And in this, he becomes a problem.

Because who benefits from his existence?

(Let’s pause. I once had a classmate who insisted Cedric was the proto-influencer, and I laughed. But now I think she wasn’t entirely wrong.)

The entire novel is a kind of fantasy—one not for children, but for adults disillusioned by class warfare and the fading glow of Empire. In Cedric, Burnett crafts an impossible ideal: a child untainted by cynicism, whose goodness is so contagious it reforms a misanthropic old earl. But this “goodness” is so spotless it feels like it was pressed by PR managers, not born from anything human. Cedric, that glowing token of “innocent America,” is offered as a balm for the crusty English aristocracy. Isn’t that ideological? Isn’t that dangerous?

The novel pretends to be apolitical while being a Trojan horse of colonial nostalgia and patriarchal inheritance logic. The message? If you import enough American innocence into the British system, the class divisions will melt away like butter on a crumpet. That’s not reform—it’s sedation.

And don’t get me started on the Earl. An emotional taxidermy project. He goes from “old curmudgeon with gout” to “soft-eyed grandpa in tweed” under the influence of a child who does... what, exactly? Smiles? Loves dogs? Talks like a moral fortune cookie?

But here’s where it gets complicated.

Because Burnett knows. She knows. There’s a mischievous awareness underneath the sentimentality. The prose winks, here and there. When Cedric forgives the Earl for being a classist tyrant, it’s not just sweetness—it’s performance. A kind of social theatre. Cedric, the American messiah of manners, chooses to forgive, to love. But it’s also coercion. What child doesn’t want approval from a grandparent, especially one who controls an estate the size of a minor country?

So is Cedric a pawn? A prince? A prisoner?

—Probably all three.

And what about the mother, “Dearest”—a character so pure she nearly evaporates. She doesn’t even get a real name. She’s a gendered archetype, a maternal cipher who exists only to embody the ideal Victorian woman: self-effacing, devoted, allergic to conflict. But let’s not mistake absence of voice for absence of force. Dearest is iron in velvet. Her quiet dignity is a refusal. A resistance. She does not bend to the Earl’s condescension. She sets boundaries. And yet Burnett never allows her to shout. She’s a feminist icon gagged in lace.

(And here’s the part that always gets me: why does Dearest forgive the Earl so easily? Why does the novel? Does maternal patience have to be masochistic?)

The novel tells us that kindness wins. But kindness, in Little Lord Fauntleroy, is political currency. Cedric’s goodness buys access. Dearest’s virtue earns tolerance. The Earl’s conversion earns redemption. Everyone is paid in sentiment, but the transaction is economic. Don’t let the tea and scones fool you—this is capitalism in costume.

(Quick aside: I once read an article comparing Cedric to neoliberal diplomacy. I rolled my eyes. Now I find myself nodding in the dark.)

But beyond economics, there’s something messier at play. Let’s talk about trauma. Not in the Freudian “tell me about your mother” sense, but as a ghostly presence. The death of Cedric’s father is the original wound—softly mentioned, never dissected. Cedric performs brightness not in spite of the trauma, but through it. As if cheerfulness is a shield. The very mechanism of survival. What looks like innocence may in fact be the most sophisticated form of denial.

Burnett doesn’t pathologize him. She doesn’t have to. Cedric’s relentless optimism is the narrative’s own repression.

And gender? Oh yes. Let’s not pretend those curls aren’t doing something. Cedric’s androgyny was so influential it sparked a fashion movement. Boys in dresses. Boys in lace. The cultural backlash was violent—in the press, in the schools, in the streets. Cedric’s softness was threatening. Because he blurred lines. Because he was beautiful.

And herein lies the queerness of Fauntleroy—not in explicit content, but in the way the body is stylized, read, consumed. Cedric is feminized. Desired. Not sexually (though the reader’s gaze is not innocent), but ideologically. He becomes an emblem of something lost and longed for. A prelapsarian dream of morality, manners, and monarchical redemption.

And yet, what is more political than nostalgia?

(It just occurred to me: what if Cedric is the child the Empire wishes it could be? Apologetic, pure, endlessly charming. The anti-colonial colonizer.)

The novel also offers a strange kind of inverted paternalism. The Earl, supposedly the symbol of patriarchal dominance, is re-educated by the child. Power flows backward. But that reversal is never truly allowed to last. The end of the novel is a restoration. The Earl keeps the title. Cedric inherits. The class structure is varnished with love, but remains intact. Nothing has changed, except the tone.

But tone is everything. It’s how ideology hides in plain sight.

Burnett’s genius lies in this sleight of hand. She lets you think you’re reading a moral tale for children, when in fact she’s feeding you a treatise on transatlantic identity, class performativity, and the architecture of virtue. Little Lord Fauntleroy is not a bedtime story. It’s a Rorschach test for how we metabolize power.

(And it’s also—fine, yes—a little annoying. But that’s the point.)

What endures in Fauntleroy isn’t Cedric’s manners. It’s the question: what do we want from children? Do we want them to be agents of change—or symbols of our guilt? Is innocence a moral state or a projection? When Cedric smiles and says “I’m so glad I’m your little boy,” is that love? Or is it social choreography?

I don’t have an answer.

But maybe the novel doesn’t either.

Maybe that’s why it haunts. Because even in all its lace and bows and pageantry, it’s whispering something darker:

That goodness is never just goodness. It’s a strategy. A spectacle. A negotiation.

And that’s not cynical.

It’s human.