One understands why Louisa May Alcott was popular. Her books are real. This series is sentimental to the extreme. And yet I enjoyed seeing what Sidney had in mind for her characters. I liked "the other guy" much better than "the one who gets the girl" though.

Oh my, how I loved this books as a child. They were very dear to me and are firmly entrenched into my memory strong enough to have become parts of my character. There are is a veritable plethora of life examples and lessons to be learned through these works of literature that take us back to a simpler time and place, entirely different family values and senses or morality and ethics; there is much to be learned from these simple books. Most of all, family and love, loyalty and a moral compass much needed in today's society, camaraderie and ...well, the list is entirely too long. I think the books are relevant to the youth of today, if nothing else to provide an example that though some things change with time, a great many others do not.

I liked it for the nostalgia factor if nothing else. The Pepper children aren't quite grown up, but they're all in their teens and Polly and Ben are in their early 20s. The writing is overblown but I think that's the style of the time it was written. There are lots of raptures and storms of tears and a broken arm apparently requires invalid status, but these are relatively minor complaints to see what's happened to "The Five Little Peppers."

Fiction

A few sleepless nights have gotten me deep into this series.

This is probably the second best of the original four, after "How They Grew." I was impressed by the humor, very slightly adult, that Sidney was able to present - particularly the idea that every young man who falls in love with Polly confides their feelings to the person who really loves her, Jasper, who at one point just snaps and says ( I'm totally paraphrasing here) "Guys, stop telling me this!" There are also some hints of darkness around the edges, with issues the younger boys are having at school, which surprisingly don't get neatly tied up in the end. If you have come to appreciate the Peppers, this is a good piece of their lives to experience .

Entertaining, G-rated, classic children’s book

This book was written in 1892 as a contemporary novel, and the fashions and social attitudes reflect that era. There are no automobiles, only horse-drawn carriages, and when the characters travel long distance, they take a train.

The events in this story take place nine years after the events in Book 1 of this series, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (“HTG”), which was published 11 years prior, in 1881. It is stated in the story that Phronsie is currently 13, and Polly is 20. No other ages of the Peppers or Jasper King are overtly stated. However, doing the math, based on the stated ages of the other siblings and Jasper in HTG, Ben would be 21, Jasper 22, Joel 18, and Davie 16. The problem with that is that the story also indicates that Davie is a freshman at Harvard, and Joel is an upperclassman, presumably, a junior. The typical age for a freshman is 18 and a junior is 20.

Dr. Fisher and the mother of the Pepper brood, “Mamsie,” got married during Book 2, The Five Little Peppers Midway (“Midway”). During that book, MS states that Phronsie is eight, so during this book, that would mean the Fishers have been married five years. They have had a baby, King Fisher, who is described as a toddler, making him around 18 months old. Mamsie’s age is never stated in any of the books, but if she married young and had Ben at age 19, she would be around 40 years old and would have had Baby Fisher at age 38. We never learn Dr. Fisher’s age, but he is so spry, he is probably around the same age.

During this story, three different young men in their early to mid-20’s propose to Polly. She turns them all down, but the aunt of one of them tries to gaslight her into going through with an engagement to him. Fortunately, as is no big surprise—and therefore not much of a spoiler—at the very end of the book, Jasper proposes marriage, and Polly accepts. This book ends abruptly after that big event but, fortunately, Book 4 of this series, Phronsie Pepper (“PP”), offers a kind of extended epilogue of their marriage.

In HTG, Mr. Horatio King, Jasper’s father, is described as “old.” In that story, Jasper has a married sister, Marian, who has three children, the oldest of which is 10 years old. If Marian had him at age 19, she would be 29, 16 years older than Jasper. If Mr. King married young, and Marian was born when he was 21, he would be 50. In Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott, published six years before HTG, in 1875, Rose Campbell’s Great Aunt Peace is only 50 years old and, similar to MS’s description of Mr. King, Aunt Peace is also labeled as “old,” and both are described as having white hair. However, Mr. King is never described as having wrinkles, stooped posture, or any kind of frailty. My assumption is that Mr. King is a widower, but his wife is never mentioned in any book in this series. In the book that is chronologically last in this series, PP, it is not overtly stated how old anyone is but Polly and Jasper’s oldest child, who is five, but, doing the math, Phronsie would appear to be 20 years old. That means 16 years have passed since we first encountered “old” Mr. King, which would make him 66 years old, which in that era, or even 100 years later, would actually be considered “old.” Yet even at 66, MS portrays him as being as strong and limber as he is at age 50. Which means the entire concept of “old” to MS is rather arbitrary.

In Book 2 of this series, Five Little Peppers Midway (“Midway”), Eunice Chatterton, a cousin by marriage of Mr. King, puts Phronsie in her will as her only heir. In this story, we discover that Phronsie inherited $2 million from Eunice, which is equivalent to $64,240,000 in 2022 dollars. Phronsie has also inherited a huge mansion, which she has, with Mr. King’s assistance, converted into an orphan asylum. In this book, we meet Charlotte Chatterton, the daughter of Alexander Chatterton, who is Eunice’s nephew by marriage. Charlotte’s age is never given, but the implication is that she is around Polly’s age, that is, 19 or 20. In Midway, we learn that Eunice has only one nephew she cared about, and in that book she is grief stricken when she learns that he has drowned at sea. She has another nephew whose name is not mentioned, when she goes to stay with him during that story. However, it is very likely Alexander because, late in Midway, Eunice mulls over a vindictive plan to “spite Alexander’s daughter by…adopting Phronsie.” She arrogantly and irrationally assumes—even though Phronsie is transparently the beloved pet of Mr. King, Jasper, and the entire Pepper family—that she can gaslight Phronsie into becoming her biddable little unpaid servant. After Eunice greatly harms Phronsie physically and psychologically, when she sends her to the attic in the King mansion to get something for her, as Phronsie’s first serving-maid assignment, and Phronsie gets locked for hours in the attic and collapses, Eunice feels so guilty, that is why she makes Phronsie her heir. In this story, Phronsie is determined to share some of her enormous inheritance with Charlotte, since Charlotte is actually related to Eunice and Phronsie is not. However, that transfer of wealth takes place after the end of this story, and the amount Phronsie ultimately gives to Charlotte is not stated in this book.

Interestingly, during Phronsie’s discussion with Mr. King about her generous plan, he thinks to himself that, even if Phronsie gives away all her millions to Charlotte, he has more than enough money to make it up to her. This gives the impression that Mr. King’s wealth is in the vast range of tens of millions of dollars. Which means that MS probably meant to portray him as the equivalent of a modern-day billionaire. During this story, we also finally, definitively, learn that Mr. King—who is never portrayed as going to the office in any of these novels—has never worked a day in his life but, rather, has been a snooty gentleman of leisure. As a result, he is shocked that Jasper has chosen to pursue a career in the publishing industry. (Which, by the way, is the career of MS’s own husband in real life, so the details about Jasper’s job are quite authentic.) Mr. King’s scornful attitude toward having his son working “in trade” is quite reminiscent of the haughty mind-set of the British nobility in historical novels.

Once again in this book, as in Midway, Five Little Peppers Abroad (“Abroad”), Five Little Peppers At School (“School”), and Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (“Friends”), introverted Ben and Davie receive little attention from MS. As always, Polly, Phronsie and Joel, as well as Mr. King, get the lion’s share of the action. For the first time, though, throughout this series, Jasper gets quite a bit of page space.

Margaret Sidney was the pseudonym of successful, American children's author, Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop, who was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1844 and died in 1924, eight years after writing the last Pepper book. She began her writing career in 1878 at age thirty-four by publishing stories about Polly and Phronsie Pepper in a Boston children's magazine. She married the magazine's editor, Daniel Lothrop, who began a publishing company and published Harriett's Pepper series, starting in 1881. Here is a list of the twelve Pepper books by date written, which were produced over the course of thirty-five years:

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881)
Five Little Peppers Midway (1890)
Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892)
Five Little Peppers: Phronsie Pepper (1897)
Five Little Peppers: The Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899)
Five Little Peppers: The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900)
Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902)
Five Little Peppers At School (1903)
Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (1904)
Five Little Peppers: Ben Pepper (1905)
Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907)
Five Little Peppers: Our Davie Pepper (1916)

Margaret Sidney originally had no plans to write more Pepper books after the fourth book, PP, was published in 1897. She states this firmly in her introduction to that book. However, over time the pleas of avid fans from all over the world caused her to give in and write eight more Pepper books. The events in School and Friends occur around the same time as the events in Midway. The events in Abroad occur right after Midway. The events in Ben Pepper occur after Abroad. The events in The Adventures of Joel Pepper and Our Davie Pepper occur during the same time period as the first part of HTG, when Joel and Davie are nine and seven years old, respectively. The Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House and The Stories Polly Pepper Told consist of short stories about the Peppers before they went to live with Jasper and Mr. King midway through HTG.

This is a list of the Pepper books chronologically, in terms of story time:

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881)
Five Little Peppers: The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900)
Five Little Peppers: Our Davie Pepper (1916)
Five Little Peppers: The Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899)
Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907)
Five Little Peppers Midway (1890) (4 years after HTG)
Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902)
Five Little Peppers At School (1903)
Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (1904)
Five Little Peppers: Ben Pepper (1905)
Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892) (9 years after HTG)
Five Little Peppers: Phronsie Pepper (1897) (16 years after HTG)

If you read all of the Pepper books, you will discover that MS did not take great care as to continuity in the later books, perhaps because so many years passed between writing these books. For example, in Midway, MS states that five years have passed since the events of HTG, but no ages are given for any of the children except Phronsie. We are told she is eight, which is one year younger than she ought to be if five years have passed, because she is four years old in HTG. In Abroad, whose events begin immediately after Midway, Polly has her fifteenth birthday a few months into the events of the book, when it ought to be at least her sixteenth birthday given that she was eleven in the first book and presumably already fifteen or sixteen in the second book.

The Pepper books are not concerned with edge-of-the-seat action, which is one of the things I personally like about them. They are products of a much slower-paced era, and it is relaxing to experience that approach to children's fiction while being warmly enfolded into the loving Pepper and King families. All the Pepper books are strictly G-rated, and the values they show (not tell through preaching) are very useful ones for any child to be exposed to, such as: loyalty, honesty, civility, kindness, consideration, keeping commitments, accepting difficult circumstances without complaint and forging through them.

It's interesting reading this story over a century after it was published. I had to keep that time passage in mind while reading.

For their era the Peppers were a progressive bunch, treating everyone as equal. It's a notion that seemed to befuddle their peers, who loved them despite their oddness, but seemed to have no desire to emulate it.

The whole King/Fisher/Pepper crew live very dramatic lives. There was much less of the stiff upper lip I recall of my relatives, and lots of racing off to cry in Mamsie's lap. Any injury seemed to require weeks of bedrest and odd instructions such as not lifting one's arms up. Also, the entire family had to leave work or school and travel to wherever the invalids were. I had to keep reminding myself that antibiotics were not readily available,and there was little in the form of entertainment, so maybe moving in with the ill was how people occupied their time? Moving large groups of people into someone's house and letting strangers convalesce there is strange by modern standards. So is taking an apparently, but not certainly, orphaned child and giving it to a woman who has lost her own without any legal authority being involved.

Having grown up hearing that people became adults much earlier in the past, I also found Jasper's decision to let his father determine his life odd. Whose parents show up at work to interview their boss? Polly seemed more midteen than in her twenties. Also, every male of marriageable age makes a proposal to her based on not much more than she's sweet. Were the other young ladies all awful? Phronsie doesn't seem to have matured enough to be thirteen. Eight, maybe? She has the philosophical views of a second grader. By thirteen, I would have thought she'd seen enough to know God doesn't spare lives just because "it isn't nice". For Pete's sake! She allegedly funds an orphanage! How did she think these kids became parentless? Harvard comes off badly in this book with its students beating up Joel simply for going to some religious group regularly.

I think I'll stop my reading of this series here. Everyone seems to be in a good place for future lives,and I don't think I can take much more of the Pepper's sweetness and drama.

The five Pepper children are mostly grown up now. Polly is quite a young lady in society, but her greatest dream is to teach music lessons like she always planned. However, there are quite a few young gentlemen who have been captured by her beauty and her sweet manner. Polly is distressed by their attentions and wishes only to focus on her music and her family.

Jasper is working at a publishing firm in the city, but his father worries that the work is too demanding and that Jasper's health might suffer. Jasper must convince his father that he enjoys the work and feels happiest when he is working among books.

Polly's brothers have difficulties at school. Little Phronsie is not quite so little anymore. The entire Pepper family have to find their way into adulthood, accepting responsibility and proving their courage.

This is such a sweet and wholesome story! I love all the sweet Pepper children. The writing is charming, and the story is simple but interesting.

I especially loved Jasper's storyline, since he shows a lot of patience with his father. His self-sacrificing attitude earns him the respect and admiration of the entire Pepper family, especially Polly.

The rest of the books in the series should be prequels to this book, going back to the times when the Pepper family lived in the little brown house. I'm looking forward to reading more!

More of the same (see my review of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew). The two younger boys finally got a bit more personality in this book, which is why it got one more star than the others.

A pretty little romance with a sweet ending