Little Lord Fauntleroy
So, while Ernest dressed as a girl would be bizarre today, no one would have batted an eyelid during Victorian times. Young boys often appeared in feminine clothes. The fad may have come from author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy suit, so well described by Burnett and depicted in Reginald Birch’s pen-and-ink drawings, created a trend of formal dress for American middle-class children: velvet suits, fancy blouses, and large lace or ruffled collars and even boys had ringlets in their hair!
Children were also viewed differently back in those days – when they weren’t sweeping chimneys or down mines – parents often dressed their kids as dolls in photographs. While this is all true, it doesn’t explain why his mother pretended Hemingway and his sister were same-sex twins and called him Ernestine.
