Little Lord Fauntleroy

by Frances Hodgson Burnett Narrated by LibriVox Community

Overview

Little Lord Fauntleroy is a sentimental children's novel by American (English-born) author Frances Hodgson Burnett, serialized in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885. It was a runaway hit for the magazine and was separately published in 1886. The book was a commercial success for its author, and its illustrations by Reginal Birch set fashion trends. Little Lord Fauntleroy also set a precedent in copyright law in 1888 when its author won a lawsuit over the rights to theatrical adaptations of the work. (Summary from Wikipedia)

Editorial Reviews

English journalist and novelist Marghanita Laski

The best version of the Cinderella story in modern idiom that exists.”

From the Publisher

"The author of Little Lord Fauntleroy was the J.K. Rowling of her time." —Economist


"Really, we can all learn a lot from little Lord Fauntleroy. So maybe we can forgive him the knickerbockers and the red stockings." —John Boyne

FEB/MAR 08 - AudioFile

This meticulous abridgment does a good job with Burnett's classic rags-to-riches story. Kindly fate transports an American boy, Cedric Errol, to England when he is discovered to be heir to the earldom of Dorincourt. Prepared to hate the American upstart, the crusty earl finds he can't resist his grandson’s love. Teresa Gallagher's gentle, refined voice brings the precocious Cedric into listeners' hearts with arresting success. Equally well depicted are the pithy sayings of the ancient earl and Cedric’s mother's bell-like tones. Characters and significant dialogue appear seamlessly, and there are few continuity issues in the abridgment. Narration and script combine to present a merry audiobook. C.A. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169391343
Publisher:	LibriVox
Publication date:	08/25/2014
Sales rank:	535,232

Read an Excerpt

The Connecticut countryside, 1849

The grave was dug. Carefully, Lucas Whitaker hammered small metal tacks into the top of the coffin lid to form his mother's initials: H.W., for Hannah Whitaker. Then he stood up to straighten his tired back. All that was left was to lower the pine box into the cold, hard ground and cover it with dirt.

But Lucas didn't move. He stared blindly at the double line of grave markers in the little family burial ground. There were the graves of two infants, his brother and sister, each of whom had died so soon after birth that Lucas could scarcely remember anything about them except the sight of their tiny, red fists waving in the air and the sound of their feeble crying.

Their graves were so small that the fieldstones stuck in the ground to mark their heads and feet were no farther apart than the length of Lucas's arm.

Next were the stones marking the place where Lucas's Uncle Asa was buried. Asa had died of consumption two years before. Soon after, Lucas's sister Lizy, just four years old, had fallen to the same dread disease.

When they'd buried Lizy, Lucas and his father had worked together in stunned silence, afraid to think about, much less speak about, the mysterious way in which the sickness could sweep through a household taking one family member after another.

That night Lucas's mother had clasped him to her, weeping. "How long shall I be allowed to keep you?" she'd whispered.

But the next to be afflicted had not been Lucas. He shuddered as he remembered the way the large, powerful man who had been his father had turned slowly into a thin, pale stranger, too weak to stand. Until at last Lucas, working alone on ahot August day, tears mingling with the sweat of his labor, had buried his father, too.

Now, standing on the rocky hillside by his mother's grave, with the raw wind of late February tearing at his hair and clothing, Lucas felt nothing but a dull, gray weariness. Since the death of his father and Asa, it had taken every bit of strength he had just to make it from day to day. He'd learned to push his sorrow deep inside somewhere in order to get on with the hard work that was always waiting to be done on the farm.

When his mother's cheeks grew first flushed and red, then gray and gaunt, when she began to be taken by fits of coughing that left her clutching her chest in pain, Lucas gave up trying to keep the farm going. He spent his days by his mother's bedside, watching her waste away just as Lizy, and Pa, and Asa had done. He coaxed her to take spoonfuls of tea and wheat porridge. Holding her thin shoulders as her body was racked with coughing, he thought helplessly that it was as if something--or someone--were draining the very life from her.

Desperately, he tried the only remedy he knew, filling a pipe with dried cow dung and begging his mother to smoke it. The coughing only grew worse.

One day, a neighbor by the name of Oliver Rood rode out to the farm and offered to take care of the animals. "I hear your mother's real bad sick, Lucas. I'll take the creatures off your hands for the present, and come back in a few days to see how you're getting on."

"I'd be grateful to you, sir," said Lucas.

Finally, the time came when he could no longer pre tend that his mother would live. There was nothing to do but stay by her until death came. When she was gone, he felt something rise in his throat, a mixture of terror and anger and grief so strong that he was afraid to give voice to it.

Summoning all the strength of his will, he pushed the feeling down and down . . . until he'd felt the way he did now, his insides as numb and cold as the rough red hands that grasped the shovel.

Quickly, he finished the job. Then, opening his mother's Bible, he tried to read, but the words sounded stiff and hollow and held no comfort. He closed the book. There were people who had told him to adapt the deaths in his family as "God's will." But, hard as Lucas tried, he couldn't understand why God would want such things to happen.

Other folks had told him disease was the work of the devil. Still others believed it was witches who caused illness. He shook his head, baffled by it all. People got sick. They died. That he knew.

There were no friends or family to join him in mourning. The closest neighbors, the Hapgoods, had sold their farm and gone west, where the land was supposed to be cheap and plentiful. Lucas hadn't carried word to the Roods, or to any others. Their farms were far away. They had their own work and their own problems.

Lucas was alone.

Copyright ) 1996 by Cynthia C. DeFelice

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