Royalty in Rags: a Victorian Survival Guide

Review of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s "The Little Princess" (1905)

Apr 11, 2025

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess (1905) is the story of a little girl who goes from coddled heiress to Dickensian chimney sweep, but handles herself with poise, grace, and quiet resilience.

This novel has become a beloved mainstay in the literary canon for children for its portrayal of inner strength, kindness, and triumph of virtue. But it is also a cultural window into British imperial thinking, social hierarchy, and psychological performance.

The book was an instant hit, especially after it was expanded from its 1888 avatar as the serialised novella Sara Crewe. It spawned numerous stage and screen adaptations, including a 1939 film starring Shirley Temple, which diluted the novel’s darker undercurrents in favor of cinematic charm. A Japanese anime adaptation (1995) restored some of the text’s psychological weight, while Alfonso Cuarón’s 1995 film version offered a visually sumptuous, if thematically simplified, reading.

All Hail the Sovereign of the Attic

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies as the richest pupil they've ever admitted. Her father, Captain Crewe, indulges her every material whim while instilling in her the value of imagination and kindness. "I am a princess," Sara frequently reminds herself. "All princesses must behave in a certain way." This mantra serves as her North Star even after news of her father's death and financial ruin sends her plummeting from student to servant.

"Whatever comes cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."

While most of the pupils treat her as a pariah, Sara treats them with grace and is able to develop a few close relationships. Her friendship with slow-witted, but golden-hearted Ermengarde is particularly touching. Sara elevates her with patience and respect, refusing the easy snobbery of the classroom. With little Lottie, all tantrums and tears, she plays the benevolent big sister, spinning stories to soothe her.

Her most poignant relationship is with Becky, the scullery maid. Here, Sara’s empathy is tested—she shares food, stories, and dignity with someone society tells her to ignore. Even when stripped of wealth, Sara treats Becky as an equal, not a project.

“If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things—help and comfort and laughter—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.”

Miss Minchin, meanwhile, tests her the most, treating her worse than other servants. But Sara doesn’t lash out—she out-behaves her oppressor, and even protects Ermengarde and Becky from her wrath. When she can't, she helps her friends reimagine obstacles as opportunities, and punishments as Every interaction is a mirror in which her stoic ideal of princesshood is relentlessly, performatively affirmed.

“If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago,” her father used to say, “she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”

Throughout, Burnett's pacing is tight, the stakes are brutal, and even the quiet moments hum with tension. Burnett understands suffering, and she understands performance, and in Sara, she fuses the two into a heroine who commands the stage. It's difficult not to remain unmoved when she transforms a dusty attic into a palace with nothing but daydreams. There’s a particular agony in seeing a child maintain poise while the world stomps on her dreams. But there's also incandescent joy in watching that same child weave magic from misery.

In this, Burnett draws heavily from Charles Dickens' tradition of social commentary through a child's perspective. Sara's reversals of fortune mirror those in David Copperfield, while Miss Minchin could be a cousin to Miss Havisham. Elements of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre appear in Sara's resilience and moral fortitude despite mistreatment.

What might leave a bad taste in your mouth

While its position in children's literary canon is undeniable, you should probably not read it as an adult. An adult eye sees instantly through the novel's daydreamy haze that this is, in the best Victorian tradition, a blunt-force trauma of morality, delivered in lace gloves and syrupy dialogue.

“Between the lines of every story there is another story, and that is one that is never heard and can only be guessed at by the people who are good at guessing.”

Sara is less a child and more a moral treatise on legs. She doesn’t rage. She doesn’t rebel. She doesn’t even snap at the parade of grotesque adults who treat her like refuse. She bears it all with such supernatural poise that you begin to wonder if she’s human or just a parable cooked up in a Sunday School furnace.

“When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word — just to look at them and think. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in — that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.”

The supporting cast is functional, not layered. Miss Minchin, the school’s sour-faced tyrant, is drawn with the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Becky, the loyal scullery maid, never quite rises above the role of “cockney prop.” Even poor Ermengarde is more useful as a contrast to Sara’s perfection than as a human being in her own right. Only Sara, strangely, seems to have full inner dimensions, and even those are gilded. These aren’t people. They’re chess pieces arranged to teach moral lessons in tableau.

In style, Burnett has one mode: pathos. She lays it on like marmalade, thick and sticky, until the plot threatens to collapse under the sheer weight of its own nobility. Every scene of suffering is so decorously drawn that you half expect angels to descend and play violins. And it continues right down to the ending, which is so staggeringly saccharine that it could induce diabetic shock. The book insists on wrapping every injustice in satin and lavender, and by the final pages, you’ll be clawing for something acidic just to recalibrate your taste buds.

And the happy ending doesn't even work that well. Sara's deliverance comes in the form of a mysterious "Indian gentleman", a benefactor who arrives as a deus ex maharaja, meets Sara serendipitously, and restores her wealth at his own expense. He doesn't do it to reward her virtue, though that does facilitate matters somewhat, but for a reason completely unrelated to her behaviour. It wouldn't have mattered if Sara had acted abominably, or lost herself in depression, or taken to crime. The benefactor would have given her an inheritance just the same.

Admittedly, the novel's moral precursor for adults, Jane Eyre, also suffers from the inheritance problem. But whereas you'd be sure that Jane could take care of herself even without the inheritance, Burnett doesn't give us enough to suggest that Sara could too. Yes, like Jane, she's skilled enough to be a good governess or a teacher, but it's just as plausible that decades of regal imagination dashing against destitute reality could turn Sara into another Miss Minchin.

This is also a book deeply of its time—soaked through with colonial fantasy. India, in A Little Princess, is less a nation and more a mood board: exotic, mysterious, vaguely spiritual, and most importantly, the source of vast, unaccounted wealth. Sara’s spiritualism, peppered with vague references to karma and “the gods,” is so watered down and misrepresented it practically glows under the UV light of post-colonial criticism. As in her more famous novel, The Secret Garden, Burnett wants to use the Empire as a narrative stage prop, without engaging with its implications. It’s lazy and patronising.

But why subject a children's book to a mature, critical reading in the first place? Because, unlike other children's books, it doesn't stand on fantastical, farcical, or comical pillars. It claims to be a serious, realistic book for children, offering a mature way of living. Burnett is absolutely sincere, which is probably the only saving grace of this novel. She isn’t winking at you from behind the curtain. She believes in the power of moral imagination. She believes that decency matters, even when no one is watching. She believes in a child’s power to reject definitions imposed upon her by others. And in that sincerity, there’s something rather radical.

The Verdict:

Is The Little Princess a classic? Certainly. Is it a good book? That’s trickier. While there’s an undeniable emotional architecture holding the book up—a core of resilience that still resonates—the prescribed behaviour itself needs scrutiny. Reimagining one's situation and responding with grace are strong survival mechanisms, but the book doesn't draw the line beyond which they become denial and moral posturing.

“Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes.”

You don’t read this book, or read it to children, for realism. You read it because you want to believe that dignity can survive degradation. That kindness is power. That a child can stare into the abyss and still say, “I pretend things, and they are real.”

Hiding behind that belief, however, is a strong probability that the expected reward for such resilience and good behaviour may never come, and if it does, it may not be as bountiful as it was for Sara. If you're reading to children, or discussing the book with them, you might want to address this possibility.

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