“Seeing all those curls lying on the floor”

Frances Hodgson Burnett finished Little Lord Fauntleroy with young Cedric still wearing the same clothes and hairstyle as when he started.

For boys who disliked that book’s fashions, however, the moment a lad could have his “love-locks” cut became a rite of passage. It was akin to transitioning from skirts to breeches, and later from breeches to long pants. It signaled not only growing older but also moving away from maternal influence.

The slapstick comedian Moe Howard described such a moment in his memoir, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, published posthumously in 1977. Born in 1897 as Moses Horwitz, he recalled having ringlets as a boy in elementary school:

My school career began in September 1903, when I was six. Whenever I attended school—which in later years wasn’t very often—I was constantly fighting. I fought on my way to school, in school, and on my way home. As I said before, my hair had grown very long, and every school day I would awaken a half hour before everyone else so my mother could wind finger curls through my hair; they reached almost to my shoulders. There were about twenty of them in all, and they resembled a bunch of cigars stuck on my head. Knowing that it was my mother’s greatest delight to spend that half hour arranging my curls, I didn’t complain. But soon it became the battle of my school career.

After recounting lots of fights over how “girly” he looked, Howard recalled meeting a couple of boys who befriended him anyway—but still didn’t like the hairstyle.

I gazed into Donald’s mirror and saw my curls hanging down, a good ten inches long. I glanced over at Donald and Rusty, two normal-looking young boys. I looked in the mirror again, and then something on Don’s dresser caught my eye. A shiny object with black enamel handles. I looked at myself again, trying to create one last impression.

I grabbed the scissors and, with my eyes closed, began to circle my head, clipping curls all the way around. I didn’t dare to look at the floor to see what had fallen. When I finished, I dropped the scissors, afraid to look at myself. Tears quietly flowed down my cheeks.

When I finally opened my eyes, I found Rusty and Don pointing at me and laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist looking into the mirror. I choked up. There wasn’t a laugh in me. There in the mirror I caught sight of the haircut that was to make me famous in the 1920s. I laughed, then I cried, and I shuddered seeing all those curls lying on the floor and realizing that I had destroyed one of my mother’s few pleasures. . . .

My brother Shemp spotted me first. He let out a war whoop. “Take a look at your son with the fright wig. He thinks it’s Halloween, and what do you know, it’s not a wig; it’s a brand-new haircut.” Then Mother, Irving, and Jack came in. They stared speechless for a moment. Then Mother looked at me. I looked at her and the tears welled up in my eyes, then the tears welled up in hers. She said softly, “Thank God you did it. I didn’t have the courage.”

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel offers a semi-fictional treatment of the same transition. The autobiographical novel by and about a boy born in 1900 in North Carolina says:

Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.

And a few years and many pages later:

He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls.

TV Tropes lists many female examples of the Important Haircut in recent books, movies, and other entertainment. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that passage was just as important for many boys.