(no subject)

[skygiants]

Five Little Peppers And How They Grew is probably the work of Improving Edwardian Literature that I remember best from my childhood (after Little Women, or maybe tied with Little Women, if that counts as Improving Edwardian Literature.) It's a classic rags-to-riches story -- five plucky poor children work hard and virtuously support their mother and have grand times because they're all so cheery and virtuous despite the fact that they appear to be constantly on the verge of starving to death. But then they make friends accidentally with a nice young rich boy, and charm his cranky but SUPER rich father, and then the cranky rich father basically adopts the entire family including the mother and they all settle down into happy and implausible prosperity. It's like Annie times six!

(I feel it's important to note that the cranky rich father doesn't marry the mother or anything, he just decides to let them all stay in his house forever. IT'S A BIG HOUSE. IT'S FINE.)

There are also like twelve sequels, which I vaguely knew when I was a kid but never read. Recently I was struck with enormous curiosity about them, because, like, OK, what does happen to an impoverished country family after they've been implausibly adopted into the upper crust? So I read Five Little Peppers Midway and Five Little Peppers Grown Up.

These books are such a strange mixture of high drama over really minor things and high drama over things that are SUPER SOAP OPERA. Like, it's high drama all the time, and it's the exact same emotional tone whether it's The Littlest Pepper accidentally getting locked in a closet for a few hours ("OH MY GOD, SHE MIGHT HAVE DIED!!!!") or The Most Mischievous Pepper not wanting to do his schoolwork ("OH MY GOD, HE'S DISAPPOINTING MAMSIE!!!!") or, you know, everyone almost dying in a train crash that takes the lives of several other passengers.

Aside from having high drama, the Peppers' other favorite things to do are to reminisce about their happy days in their poverty-stricken hovel ("isn't it great there aren't any other poor families in the village who need it right now so we can go and hang out there whenever we want!") and passive-aggressively guilt each other into behaving the way virtuous Edwardian children should -- Polly Pepper, the Oldest and Prettiest and Most Virtuous, is a huge fan of the silent treatment. If anyone dares to speak up about having feelings of unhappiness, like the Most Mischievous Pepper having a horrible time at school because, you know, he grew up in a poverty-stricken hovel and barely learned to read, they get gravely disappointed and silent treatmented at until they hastily backtrack and pretend they never had those feelings at all. Emotional health for everyone!

It's also really weird because, like, five years go by between the first book and the second and all of the kids sound exactly the same. Including the Littlest Pepper, who is now eight, but still crawling into everyone's lap and being adorably charming exactly the same way she did when she was three.

The actual main plot of Five Little Peppers Midway, such as it is, centers around a mean aunt of the cranky rich father's who comes to stay in the house and disapproves MIGHTILY of the fact that he's adopted a whole bevy of plucky poor people. She tries in vain to get other people to agree with her that this is kind of weird, but everyone else in the upper-crust society is just like "Oh, but the Peppers are so charming! I too wish I could adopt them!" because this is a strange alternate universe in which adopting the virtuous poor is totally normal.

Apparently taking this to heart, the Evil Aunt decides to get her revenge by trying to turn the Littlest Pepper into her own personal companion, which is what ends with the Littlest Pepper getting locked in a closet for a few hours and ALMOST DYING!!!!, and then there's a kind of amazing climactic scene where the Evil Aunt turns out to be a crack shot with a pistol and saves the house from burglars, and then she dies and leaves the Littlest Pepper all her money out of guilt for accidentally getting her locked in a closet that one time. So that's all right. And then the Littlest Pepper decides to donate all her dolls to poor people --

-- oh, yeah, that's something else, by the way. Now that the Peppers aren't poor anymore, they super get their kicks out of being really conspicuously and condescendingly charitable? Like, the scene with the dolls involves Daddy Warbucks bringing a small horde of poor children around the back and having them all explain loudly to the Littlest Pepper that they've NEVER had a doll so she can feel much better about herself for giving all her dolls away, and it's kind of gross.

Then after the Littlest Pepper inherits all that money, in Five Little Peppers Grown Up she decides to set up an orphanage for poor kids and it's even grosser -- like, it's Christmas, and all the Peppers swoop in with their rich friends and dispense largesse and make these poor kids listen to a long lecture on how they wouldn't have ANYTHING, NONE OF THIS, NOTHING, if it wasn't for the generosity of the Evil Aunt. What a way to spend Christmas! (And the one black kid at the orphanage cries and clings to the Littlest Pepper and everyone else is weirded out and tries to detach her, because these books are also quite racist.)

But that's not the main plot of Five Little Peppers Grown Up, the main plot is about how everyone wants a piece of Polly Pepper and people are proposing to her left and right -- usually by first going to the nice young rich boy who adopted them in book one and being like "well, YOU'RE practically her brother, YOU ask her if she'll marry me!" Which is awkward every time, given that a.) Polly has four actual brothers and b.) he is clearly the series designated love interest. Eventually, at last, he too proposes. When she's in a room with her mom. While holding her hand, and also her mother's. This would not be my idea of romance, but then I'm not a member of the most virtuous no-longer-poor family in the whole world.

Anyway, now I know What Happened To The Peppers and my curiosity is satisfied. I think I'm OK leaving the other nine sequels, though.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

I reread the first book through Project Gutenberg a while ago, and the thing that struck me most was the complete whiplash from DRAMA WOE DRAMA to 'Yay, we're all so happy in our cosy little hovel with bee-yooou-ti-ful brown bread and cold potatoes!', sometimes going up and down twice in the space of a single short chapter. It was kind of exhausting, so I think I started skimming to the end. You're a braver woman than I for even attempting the sequels!

[skygiants]

Yeah, right? And then in the sequels there are all these wistful moments where they're like "well, it's nice not to be worried about OUR FUTURE OR OUR LIVES and all, but wouldn't it be great just to go back and hang out in our hovel? Let's sit around with all our rich friends and talk about how great it was!" And the rich friends hang on every word, because they understand there is nothing better in life than virtuous brown bread and cold potatoes. Until someone is dying of scarlet fever and CAN'T AFFORD MEDICINE.

[luzula]

Heh. I'm glad you read and summarize these things so we don't have to. *g*

[skygiants]

I mean, they were fascinating to read! In a bizarre sort of way.

[thistleingrey]

This, exactly.

[percysowner]

I know that I read and reread Five Little Peppers and How They Grew but I can't remember what actually happened and I certainly never read the sequels. It's nice to get caught up on what happened to all of them, or at least what happened to Polly and the littlest Pepper. Having read this and Little Women (which I remember quite a lot about) my biggest reaction as a child was that people certainly didn't have standardized names for what they called their mother. The Marches had Marmie, the Peppers had Mamsie and I just called my mother Mommie, like everyone else on my block. I suspect this was not the enlightening moral that I was supposed to learn.

I went to Wikpedia to remind myself of the plot and read When Phronsie is kidnapped by an organ grinder and I just dissolved into tears of laughter. Like I said, I reread it, but now, some kid being kidnapped by an organ grinder would require huge suspensions of seeing any kind of reality in the book.

So thanks for taking the bullet and reading the sequels for all of us who never did.

[rachelmanija]

I did not remember the organ grinder! Though now that sounds vaguely familiar.

I recall Joel getting measles and almost going blind and being consoled by delicious food including a glass of bright red jelly. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how you'd eat jelly from a glass. Probably it was something like Kool-Aid?

[kore]

I think it was probably something more like Jello: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/great-british-jelly IIRC gelatin desserts are called "jelly" in some old books, altho to us modern readers it means fruit preserves (and does in Little Women too - maybe a UK-type thing?). Since it was in a 'glass' it was probably cut into shapes or cubes, like how Jello squares are served in tumblrs today. Think something like blancmage (or, shudder, ASPIC).

[skygiants]

I always just figured with a spoon! Like fancy applesauce.

[kate_nepveu]

I know that I read and reread Five Little Peppers and How They Grew but I can't remember what actually happened

Yes, that. It lived on a shelf at my parental grandparents--indeed, it might still be there--and I would go off and read it on visits.

[skygiants]

I'm not sure how I acquired my copy, but I'm willing to bet grandparental intervention played a role.

[tiamatschild]

The organ grinder thing was actually a really common popular culture anxiety at the time! There was a lot of human trafficking and a lot of fears about human trafficking, much of which centered around organ grinders and other street performers - organ grinders often had either small human children as assistants, or small non human primates, and the children actually often were trafficked.

Statistically speaking most of those children were not English speaking US citizens. They'd usually been smuggled over borders to places where they didn't have family and had minimal language skills. But middle class reformers were really anxious about the idea that this was happening to English speaking white kids. The whole thing was closely related to that White Slavery prostitution panic.

So uh. It was less weird then than it sounds now?

[skygiants]

Oh huh, I didn't know any of this! I mean, it's not particularly surprising because it's the kind of thing middle-class reformers love to get up in arms about, but I wasn't aware it was so much of A Thing.

(As a sidenote, it wasn't until I read the sequels that I even realized that the books took place in the US -- as a child I somehow had the vague impression that all poverty-stricken turn-of-the-century hovels were in the UK by default.)

[skygiants]

Polly and the Littlest Pepper are clearly the author's favorites, but the Most Mischievous Pepper also gets a look-in when he grows up to become a priest and gets frequently attacked by all the other boys at college who are FOR SOME REASON deeply personally affronted by all his do-gooding.

I was also deeply confused by the organ grinder thing as a kid! At age six or seven, I couldn't imagine why the organ grinder would want a poverty-stricken toddler, even the most adorable and virtuous poverty-stricken toddler on the block.

[silveraspen]

I knew about those two and had actually read them but I did not know there were MORE sequels! I think I will let them stay unread.

[skygiants]

My research (Wikipedia) indicates that there were four main books -- including one after this that's all about the adulthood Littlest Pepper, who presumably (hopefully) has managed to stop acting like she's eight -- and then a bunch of interstitial books that she wrote once her publisher husband realized they were making bank. Peppers at School! Peppers Abroad! More Wacky Pepper Stories! Sort of like that one Anne of Green Gables book that nobody likes.

[kore]

I read these as a kid! I had a set! (I also had a set of the complete Alcott. And Poe. Oh, parents.) I don't remember them at all.

Eventually, at last, he too proposes. When she's in a room with her mom. While holding her hand, and also her mother's.

....especially not that! Whoah.

[skygiants]

Hah, I had this book and Little Women but none of the rest -- I think the grandparents or whoever purchased them for me assumed that once I had the famous one I was set. And Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, is the other one I remember.

"Now I can really call you Mamsie at last!" he exclaims rapturously. OKAY, FANCY RICH KID, if that's ... what floats your boat ....

much too long a comment

[kore]

Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, is the other one I remember

Aww, I remember that one! And Swiss Family Robinson, What Katy Did, Cuckoo Clock, whoo, I haven't thought about these books in years. Decades even. YA before YA, sort of. I think I tried gnawing through Water Babies but gave up after a few chapters, and for some reason I didn't read MacDonald til uh grad school (Phantastes! Lilith!). Heidi (I tried to convince my parents to fix melted cheese for dinner. They said no)! Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm! HOWARD PYLE, I didn't know his name, but I had all those books, Wonder Clock especially. I still have the edition my stepsister gave me when I was like seven. Did you read that Hitty-the-doll book? I had a huge gorgeous illustrated edition, it was like bigger than a magazine. My grade school/jr high libraries had a lot of Wells and Verne (along with Asimov and Clarke) and I munched steadily through those, as my parents resisted buying me sf-type books because they were "trashy." A friend of mine still rereads Box of Delights and Midnight Children, sadly I missed those completely.

And my grandparents gave me bound volumes of what I want to say was the St Nicholas Annual? (not sure, the books got sold when my family moved, haven't been able to remember them clearly) which I PORED over despite them having nothing to do with my life. I remember especially this long, complete illustrated edition of Cock-Robin which just went on and on for pages and pages, and I read it like it was a pulp thriller.

Re: much too long a comment

[skygiants]

I never read the Swiss Family Robinson, though I was deeply attached to the Disney movie (well, of course I was, it had a cross-dressing girl in it.) I also never read What Katy Did, but for some strange reason I had a copy of the sequel, What Katy Did At School, and read that MULTIPLE times over. And I definitely read Water Babies and Princess and the Goblins. I must have read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, because I remember having a seething resentment because of how little I identified with the titular Rebecca...

I DEFINITELY read the Hitty-the-doll book, but I only remember the illustrations, not anything about the plot. I didn't discover Verne until later -- I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea just a few years ago and was hilariously delighted to discover that it's basically the marine biology version of Phantom of the Opera.

Re: much too long a comment

[kore]

I STILL FIND CAPTAIN NEMO REALLY HOT ahem

and possibly played by young Aamir Khan

[grrlpup]

I also read the first book as a kid but not the sequels. I read it several times, because I owned it, but remained kind of baffled. I did love the name Phronsie, though.

[skygiants]

Phronsie/Sophronia is a great name! If kind of amazingly mismatched with Mary/Polly, Davie, Ben and Joey...

(I do also love that when the mom eventually remarries a guy named Dr. Fisher, they name the final spawn of the union King Fisher.)

[lnhammer]

Wait -- Pepper is the surname of a family of humans? This isn't a semi-modern vegetative version of a beast-fable? -- with, yanno, anthropomorphized chilis running about?

Oh.

---L.

[skygiants]

Perhaps some of the virtuous behavior modeled in these books would be more applicable to anthropomorphized Piperaceae!

[lnhammer]

One can hope.

There was a copy of this in the box of handmedown books from my mother's siblings, but I never read it. The couple middle Oz books were read exactly once (no Dorothy = no interesting), but the handful of first run Bobbsy twins books were read over and over.

---L.

[skygiants]

I read all the Oz books and the very first Bobbsey twin book (I remember that Nan wanted VERY MUCH to be a stenographer!) but not many of the other mystery-solving ones.

...the Bobbsey twins did eventually solve mysteries, right? I'm not just making that up because everybody else also solved mysteries?

[lnhammer]

They did -- in a very formulaic way, of something that came up as they were doing general child adventures.

I never did find the very first book.

---L.

[chordatesrock]

So glad I never read any of the sequels.

[skygiants]

I mean, from a historical perspective, it's pretty fascinating!

[evewithanapple]

If anyone dares to speak up about having feelings of unhappiness, like the Most Mischievous Pepper having a horrible time at school because, you know, he grew up in a poverty-stricken hovel and barely learned to read, they get gravely disappointed and silent treatmented at until they hastily backtrack and pretend they never had those feelings at all. Emotional health for everyone!

OH MY GOD, MY MOM IS POLLY PEPPER.

[skygiants]

CONGRATULATIONS, you were raised in a model environment of nineteenth-century virtue. @___@

(My favorite/least favorite part is how, after Polly or her mother has silent treatmented whatever child is out of line into expressing the appropriate emotions, they cap it off with "Well, I know that you mean it now you've said it because I know you wouldn't lie to me! :D")

[fahye]

Is there something about beautiful Virtuous Poor Girls called Polly who eventually marry an adoptive brother figure, because I SWEAR that was the plot of a Louisa May Alcott book as well.

[shark_hat]

An Old-Fashioned Girl! (In which the best thing is the grandmother fulminating about the manners and morals of Young People Today. Those uninhibited Victorian young people, that is.)

[skygiants]

THE SCANDALOUS WALTZ!

(I've not read it, I'm just imagining.)

[skygiants]

You know, I'm pretty sure Louisa May came first and I BET Margaret Sidney had read it.

As a sidenote, I've got a mental note to myself to read the Alcott pseudonymous Gothics.

[kore]

They are totally OTT and fun. Behind A Mask is great, but there's separate editions of The Inheritance and a couple? of the others, too.

[ceitfianna]

I remember reading this book, the title is familiar but I don't actually recall any of it. I read a lot of books like this when I was younger set in various times.

[skygiants]

Yes, classic historical improving literature! I think everyone somehow manages to acquire a set.

[lizbee]

This reminded me of Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner, which opens by apologising for the fact that it's not Improving [Victorian] Literature, but Australian kids just don't do that.

(They do learn Important Lessons, mind, such as tight corset lacing is dangerous, and running away from boarding school causes pneumonia, and getting your spine shattered can lead to death.)

[skygiants]

(These ARE important lessons! The Peppers mostly just learn that measles can lead to blindness, but not if you work very hard and are sufficiently virtuous.

...also that however much paper you stuff into a broken stove, it still probably will not make the stove un-broken.)

[cahn]

...there are nine more sequels?! About their grandchildren?

This was one of those books I kept seeing in the library as a kid and never read. I think I thought it was about a vegetable garden...

[skygiants]

For a book named after vegetables, there is a really tragic lack of them throughout!

I think there's just four main books, and then the rest are going back and filling in gaps with More Pepper Adventures In Rich People Land, because Margaret Sidney had stumbled on a gold mine of Improving Literature and she knew it.

[littledust]

I... also have no recollection of what happened in the first book, although I know I read it. Now I'm just o_O and pondering how the book warped my small child brain.

[skygiants]

I'm not sure it left all that much of an imprint on mine, except a vague and lasting sense of confusion about why everyone there thought raisins were a delicious luxury when I thought they were gross. (Answer: because they were too charmingly and virtuously poor to afford sugar!)