Five Little Peppers
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney
Thanks to Jill Browne, guest writer, writer of Accessible Travel in Outdoor & Adventure on Suite101.com.
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It has been many years since I read this novel of a struggling family somewhere in what I believe was the US East coast or perhaps the mid-west. I can still picture the kitchen though, in that cold little house where every day was a struggle for a poor widow and her five children.
One thing which always impressed me was that the family adhered to a book called Pilgrim's Progress to get them through the tough times. Very often they found themselves in the Slough of Despair, from which only grit, determination, and faith could rescue them. Pilgrim's Progress is not an easy read! These kids must have been very smart to understand it at all.
Now as an adult I appreciate the history lessons we get from the old children's books like this one (from 1880 or so). Poor children would go to bed hungry. A family would starve if something happened to the breadwinner. Having a few raisins was not just a treat, but an absolute luxury. There wasn't enough paper to write so much as a letter – they had to take a page from their only book to do so.
It was fortunate for the Peppers that their mother found a well-off man (a distant cousin, I think) and remarried before everyone died of the sheer grimness of it all.
Those are my recollections of this story: that it portrayed very vividly and descriptively a life of hardship and the feeling of being perched on the edge of disaster. I would like to re-read it now. It has something to say to us about poverty, want, and the whole idea of wealth and security.
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