five little peppers and how they grew by margaret sidney

Sidney wrote nonfiction, fiction, and poetry including the 1898 published Old Concord which targeted an adult audience. While she loved children and writing children’s fiction was a pleasure, she wrote other kinds of fiction too. She was also a member of the Old Concord Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolutions and for several years, she was the president and founder of the National Society of the Children of the American Revolution. She also got involved in the commemoration and celebrations of the many works of the author Nathaniel that she greatly respected. Just like her husband, Margaret Sidney was an active participant in national and local historical and civic causes including the protection of their historical home. The Lothrop house had once been the residence of Nathaniel Hawthorne and since none of the remaining Lothrops had any interest in living in it, it has been turned into a museum and National Historic Landmark. Together, the Lothrops had bought “The Wayside Cottage” in Concord, Massachusetts, though daughter and mother shuttled between Europe and their home in the United States for several years. When her husband died in 1892, she had to take care of their child alone though the child had a good life. Together they got one child in 1884 who they named Margaret. In 1881, Sidney got married to her editor Lathrop, who would later found the Boston based D. Rather she writes stories from her imagination as she crafts adventures full of mischief but with characters responsive to good deeds and kindness.

Sidney’s stories did not grow from her soul and heart like those of Hawthorne or from her childhood like those written by Louisa May Alcott.

Her stories were so popular with readers that Daniel Lothrop the editor requested that she write a 12-part series on the lead protagonists she had named “the Peppers.” She published her first full-length novel “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” in 1881 and the novel went on to become a bestseller and spawned several more titles that were just as successful. Margaret started publishing in 1878 when she began sending some of her short stories to the editor of “Wide Awake,” a very popular children’s magazine in Boston. When she was a child, her family often traveled extensively in New England and it was from these travels that the creative but then young Sidney got the material and inspiration for her future characters and stories.

She was born in 1844 to an architect from New Haven Connecticut named Sidney Mason Stone. Margaret Sidney is the pseudonym of children’s author Harriett Lothrop.

Five little peppers and how they grew by margaret sidney