Little Lord Fauntleroy

New-York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886. First Edition, First Isue of Little Lord Fauntleroy
With a Signed Quotation from the Book

BURNETT, Frances Hodgson. Little Lord Fauntleroy. New-York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886.

First edition, first issue, with the imprint of the De Vinne Press on the verso of the final leaf of text.

With a signed ink quotation from the book loosely inserted "He was always/lovable because/he was simple and/loving"/Frances Hodgson Burnett". (p. 205, line 16).

Small quarto (8 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches; 209 x 165 mm.). xi, [xii], 209, [1], [14, ads] pp. With twenty-six illustrations from drawings by Reginald B. Birch, many of them full-page.

Publisher's green cloth, front cover and spine pictorially stamped in red, black and gilt, brown coated endpapers. Minimal rubbing to extremities, inner hinges sound. An excellent copy with an original quotation from the book. Chemised in a quarter dark blue morocco slipcase (chemise joints neatly strengthened).

Little Lord Fauntleroy is a sentimental novel by the English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, 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 (the publisher of St. Nicholas) in 1886. The novel's protagonist, Cedric, and his mother, Dearest, live in America until Cedric learns that he is to inherit the title and estate of his paternal grandfather. The mother and son then move to England, where Cedric, as Lord Fauntleroy, charms his embittered grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, and everyone else he meets with his open, egalitarian ways.
In the illustrations for the novel and in the popular stage play that followed, Cedric's hair was worn in shoulder-length curls. He is clad in velvet knee pants and a white lace collar (which would later be referred to as a Lord Fauntleroy collar).

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was a British-born American novelist and playwright who was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911). After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 they emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. There, Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died, and in 1872 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowrie's), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Beginning in the 1880s, Burnett began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, New York, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery. In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honor in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.

BAL 2064.