“The Fauntleroy period had set in”

The hairstyle and costume popularized by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as illustrated by Reginald B. Birch, didn’t remain fashionable for very long.

But it remained vivid in the memory of Americans who lived through the 1880s and ’90s. Indeed, that look for boys became an icon of the Gilded Age.

For instance, Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) published The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. This passage, looking back on life in Indianapolis three decades before, describes Georgie Minafer as a boy:

…the Fauntleroy period had set in, and Georgie’s mother had so poor an eye for appropriate things, where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a silk sash, and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar, with his little black velvet suit: he had long brown curls, and often came home with burrs in them.

Except upon the surface (which was not his own work, but his mother’s) Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The storied boy’s famous “Lean on me, grandfather,” would have been difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little boy with long curls might be considered in many respects superior to their own. . . .

Thus, on a summer afternoon, a strange boy, sitting bored upon the gate-post of the Reverend Malloch Smith, beheld George Amberson Minafer rapidly approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout: “Shoot the ole jackass! Look at the girly curls! Say, bub, where’d you steal your mother’s ole sash!”

“Your sister stole it for me!” Georgie instantly replied, checking the pony. “She stole it off our clo’es-line an’ gave it to me.”

“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t got any sister!”

“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s in jail.”

When Orson Welles adapted Tarkington’s novel into a movie, his script kept that deathless dialogue exactly. It also specified that that scene took place in 1885, thus slightly before Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel appeared. Bobby Cooper played young Georgie, as shown above.

Tarkington created another portrait of childhood in Penrod and its sequels, but he set those books a generation later, and none of the boys has Fauntleroy curls.