Mr. Popper's Penguins

Summary

Mr. Popper's Penguins is a comic novel in twenty short chapters about a house painter in the small town of Stillwater who dreams of the polar regions. Mr. Popper is a gentle, rather untidy man with a patient wife and two children, Bill and Janie. Every autumn, when the painting work runs out, he settles down to a winter of reading about explorers, and he especially admires Admiral Drake, then leading an expedition to the Antarctic. He has written the admiral a letter of praise. One evening the Poppers tune their radio to a broadcast from the expedition, and Admiral Drake speaks directly to Mr. Popper, promising him a surprise. The surprise arrives by express in a large crate: a live penguin. Mr. Popper names him Captain Cook, after the explorer, and the bird settles into the family's icebox, waddles through the house examining everything, and collects odd objects as if for a nest. Life with a penguin in a small town brings comic trouble with neighbors, repairmen and the police. After a while Captain Cook grows sluggish and seems to be failing. Mr. Popper writes to the curator of a large aquarium, who replies that he has a female penguin with the same symptoms and suggests that both birds are lonely. The aquarium sends her to Stillwater, the Poppers name her Greta, and both birds revive at once. To keep the pair comfortable Mr. Popper opens the windows to the winter air and then has a freezing plant installed in the basement, turning it into a snowy, icy home. Greta lays ten eggs, and soon the Poppers have twelve penguins and a large unpaid bill. To save the family's finances, Mr. Popper trains the birds into a stage act, with drills, marches and comic routines. Popper's Performing Penguins make a hit at the local theater, and a theater owner, Mr. Greenbaum, sends them on a tour of theaters across the country. In New York City the penguins blunder into the wrong theater and cause chaos, and its angry manager has Mr. Popper and the birds arrested. Admiral Drake, just back and eager to see the famous act, pays the bail. He wants the penguins to start a colony at the North Pole, where there are none. A Hollywood offer to put the birds in films would make the family rich, but Mr. Popper decides that show business is no life for penguins and gives them to the admiral. As he mourns his loss, Drake invites him to come along as well, and Mr. Popper sails north with his penguins, promising Mrs. Popper to be home in a year or two. Little, Brown published the book in 1938 with illustrations by Robert Lawson, and it was named a Newbery Honor Book in 1939.

Top Lessons

• A dreamer who does his duty

  Mr. Popper is a daydreamer who reads about the poles, but when a real penguin arrives he takes the work of caring for it seriously, from the icebox to the freezing plant. The book shows that loving a dream well means doing the ordinary chores it brings.

• No one should be alone

  Captain Cook starts to fail, and the aquarium curator guesses that the trouble is loneliness. When Greta comes, both birds get well, which shows in a funny way that creatures are made for company.

• What is best for the penguins

  At the end Mr. Popper could become rich from a movie offer, but he decides that theaters and cities are no place for penguins and lets them go to the North Pole. He chooses their good over his own profit, though it means saying goodbye.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The one clinical thread is Captain Cook's decline: the penguin grows listless and his health seems to fail, and the aquarium curator, consulted by letter, judges that his only illness is loneliness, since a female bird in his own care shows the same signs. Her arrival revives both birds. The episode is a children's comedy, not a study of depression, but it offers a gentle, memorable picture of isolation as a cause of failing health and of company as its cure. Mr. Popper's careful arrangements to keep the birds cold and fed are a light-hearted portrait of conscientious caregiving.

• Middle chapters (Captain Cook's illness and Greta's arrival)

  Captain Cook declines, the aquarium curator suggests loneliness, and the penguins recover once Greta comes.