Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little Lord Fauntleroy is a novel for children by the English American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was published as a serial in St Nicholas Magazine between November 1885 and October 1886 and then as a book in New York on 7 October 1886.

Cedric is the boy at the centre of it. He has grown up in America with his mother, and he knows that his father was English and that the family in England has never wanted anything to do with them.

Then the family changes its mind, because the old earl has no other heir, and Cedric is taken to England to be brought up as the next Lord Fauntleroy. What he finds there is a grandfather who is bitter, proud and determined not to like him, and the novel is the account of the two of them learning to live together.

The book was illustrated by Reginald B. Birch and was successful enough that the clothes the illustrator gave the boy became a fashion. It also set a precedent in copyright law, when Burnett won a case in 1888 over the rights to theatrical adaptations of it.