Working hard to survive in a harsh world, the Peppers still find joy and love in their little brown house - until a chance encounter with a wealthy family changes their fortunes forever. When it was first published in 1881, Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers was an immediate bestseller. Its account of the five Pepper siblings’ adventures in the American Gilded Age attracted an army of young readers who clamoured for sequels well into the twentieth century. Progressive for its time in its depictions of the children’s lives, this groundbreaking edition will strike a new chord with young readers in the twenty-first century: it is the first version of the book to give readers a full introduction to the text, providing an account of Sidney’s life and times, a full description of the book’s historical and literary context, and a sense of what insights the Pepper family’s extraordinary experiences might provide for our own moment of upheaval. A must-read for all fans of American classics such as Little Women and What Katy Did.