One of the real agonies of my childhood concerned clothes. The boy of fashion was dressed in kilts of a plaid that had some real or imaginary relationship to one's family. Mine reflected the fact that my grandfather (first wife) and uncles had married girls of the Anglo-Celtic pioneer families of that area. At any rate, kilts it was for me, with long black stockings. In this outfit I circulated until I was about six years old.

I recall, in my kilted period, making a stick-horse from a long broom handle topped by a horse's head. You put the stick-horse between your legs and galloped around the Square. A great friend of mine, Frank McQuown, and I did this at least once a day.

After I graduated to short pants I was obliged to wear what was called the Little Lord Fauntleroy costume, the most hateful and poisonous habiliment ever forced on a child. My mother outfitted me like the rest of the boys my age, with Fauntleroy's tight velvet pants, his velvet coat with a huge lace Eton collar, strong, sturdy black shoes, and a frilled shirt. After emerging from the kilt era, I retained only the thick long black stockings.

I hated this costume, and, hoping to win a concession, I insisted that my curls, which I still wore at the age of six (they were red-gold, mirabile dictu!), be sheared as the price for appearing in public as an ersatz Little Lord Fauntleroy. My mother refused the concession, but an uncle took pity on me. One day, without notifying my mother, he took me to the barbershop and ordered my curls cut off. But I was still obliged to wear the ghastly plumage for another couple of years.

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.

HBC treats Little Lord Fauntleroy suits in much more detail in its new expanded site. If you would like to pursue this topic in more detail, be sure to access the expanded site.