MovieChat Forums > Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) Discussion > Pictures in 1880s NYC newspapers?

Pictures in 1880s NYC newspapers?

posted 8 years ago by allen-406-128450
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I am presuming the American location was NYC and the period was the 1880s. A major plot development (which we all knew had to occur for a happy ending) was when Dick (Rooney), the bootblack, back in NYC recognizes a picture of Minna (wife of his brother Tom) in the paper Hobbs the grocer was reading to Dick. Thus Minna and her son (in England at the time)are exposed as fraudulent claimants to the Earldom. Dick and Hobbs acted so naturally and pulled this exchange off so deftly that they are soon going the alderman for advice and I thought nothing about it until now. The next scene has Dick, Tom, Hobbs, Haversham and the Earl confronting Minna and giving her the comeuppance. Terrific melodrama and wrap up. But were pictures actually printed in newspapers of the 1880s?

[–] genplant29 7 years ago

Yes, as that was a lithographic image, rather than a regular photograph. Lithographic images have been published in books, newspapers, periodicals, etc. for centuries as they're an artistic depiction that can be inked and printed.

By the way, something I don't understand is how is it that Minna's son and Dick readily know and seem sufficiently fond of one another, the boy seeing and happily greeting "Uncle Dick," yet the boy's own father, Tom (Dick's older brother), doesn't even seem to realize Minna's child by him (Tom) had survived? She tells him, in the confrontation scene in England, that their baby died a few days after it was born. Have Dick and Tom been so completely out of touch for over a decade to the extent that it NEVER came up in normal conversation or correspondence between the two that Minna has had a living son all those years, and that the boy and Dick know one another, and that the boy recognizes Dick as his uncle?