Little Lord Fauntleroy

5/10

Charming, heart-warming, and sugar sweet. While this text is not high-brow literature, its delightful and touching little tale goes down easily.

Cedric’s care, compassion, and charity for those around him is genuinely moving. When told by Mr. Havisham, he has the finances to do whatever he wants, he directs them to helping a family, a bootblack, and ‘the apple-woman’. If she were the Apple-woman she’d be sorted financially thanks to rip-off electronics and devices. Throughout the book he just goes around winning people over, including non-human animals, like Dougal the dawg. Further, he shows himself to be a true-blue playa by making moves on Miss Vivian Herbert, “’Come here, Lord Fauntleroy,’ she said, smiling; ‘and tell me why you look at me so.’ ‘I was thinking how beautiful you are,’ his young lordship replied. Then all the gentlemen laughed outright, and the young lady laughed a little too, and the rose color in her cheeks brightened.” No wonder it is said of Cedric, that “a foiner little felly niver sthipped in shoe-leather”. Though, allegedly, a book for children, there were some serious adult moments (“Perhaps it was this the old man remembered as he glanced through the divided folds of the red curtain of his pew. Many times he looked over the people’s heads to where his son’s wife sat alone, and he saw the fair face the unforgiven dead had loved, and the eyes which were so like those of the child at his side”) and even a couple of tearful moments. Most notably, when Dearest is invited to come and live at the castle and when she is first visited by the Earl, “’Yes, he is fond of me,’ he said, ‘and I am fond of him. I can’t say I ever was fond of anything before. I am fond of him. He pleased me from the first. I am an old man, and was tired of my life. He has given me something to live for. I am proud of him. I was satisfied to think of his taking his place some day as the head of the family.’” Thankfully, there was plenty of comedy, too. Examples are Mr. Hobbs mistaking ‘ancestors’ and ‘aunt’s sisters’ and when Cedric and the Earl are at the church. Cedric reads, “’Here lyeth ye bodye of Gregorye Arthure Fyrst Earle of Dorincourt Allsoe of Alisone Hildegarde hys wyfe.” and suggests, “’perhaps I got my spelling from them.’” The characters is most to related to were; Mr. Hobbs, who is described as “not a clever man nor even a bright one; he was, indeed, rather a slow and heavy person, and he had never made many acquaintances. He was not mentally energetic enough to know how to amuse himself, and in truth he never did anything of an entertaining nature but read the newspapers and add up his accounts.”; and the Earl. “He was thinking of the old Earl of Dorincourt, sitting in his great, splendid, gloomy library at the castle, gouty and lonely, surrounded by grandeur and luxury, but not really loved by any one, because in all his long life he had never really loved any one but himself; he had been selfish and self-indulgent and arrogant and passionate”. If the shoe fits. The plotline with Minna and impostor Lord Fauntleroy (iLF) is vague, but, on the surface, it seems to make no sense. I referred to this part of the story as Fast and Furious Presents: Mr. Hobbs and Dick, as they conduct some solo investigative work. What’s the timeline? Minna is violent and leaves Ben going to the UK. It seems she takes iLF and sticks him somewhere, gets married, and then comes back for him to pull off her scam. I have so many questions about this, but it is too heavily obscured by the author to interpolate a satisfying answer.