Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

Five children in a brown house with no money, a mother who takes in sewing, and a rich boy who comes into their kitchen and stays. Margaret Sidney wrote the first Pepper book for a magazine in 1880 and was made to write eleven more by public demand. The poverty of the opening chapters is done without sentiment; what happens when the family is rescued is the part the sequels could never repeat. Thirty-three plates of mothers and children, shepherds and coast scenes, among them paintings by Eastman Johnson and Mary Cassatt, run from 1825 to 1923 and echo the family life of the brown house.