And so Cedric Errol - seven years old and living with his widowed mother in genteel poverty in New York - is swept away from his friends the the grocer Mr Hobbs and Dick the boot-black boy. He is now Lord Fauntleroy and must live in a castle in England with his rich important and bad-tempered old grandfather who has a particular dislike of Americans. And the worst of it is that he will be parted from his dearest mamma. But Cedric will soon show his grandfather that the Old World has much to learn from the New.