83 pages • 2 hours read
Richard Atwater, Florence AtwaterMr. Popper's Penguins
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Stillwater”
Mr. Popper is a housepainter who lives in the small city of Stillwater. He is a dreamer, and even when he was “painting the outside of […] people’s houses, he would forget what he was doing” (2). The cause of his absentmindedness is that he dreams of visiting other places, such as India or the South Seas. The locations that he is the most interested in visiting are the North and South Poles.
Mr. Popper is happy in Stillwater and loves his wife and two children, Janie and Bill; however, often he wishes that he were a scientist so that he could have gone on Polar expeditions. In order to pursue this interest without being able to travel, Mr. Popper reads voraciously about the Polar explorers and follows the paths of their expeditions on a globe. He watches movies about the Arctic and Antarctic and is quite an expert on these continents and the people who have explored them.
At the end of September, Mr. Popper is happy to arrive home to his small house at 432 Proudfoot Avenue because there will be no more painting work until the spring. This will give him time to read books about his favorite subject, the Poles. Mrs. Popper says that it will be nice to have him at home, but she worries about cleaning the house while he is there and has concerns about whether the money they have saved will be enough to see them through the winter. She tells the children that they will have beans to eat every day, adding, “No more roast beef, no more ice cream, not even on Sundays” (5).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Voice in the Air”
After the Popper children go to bed that night, Mr. and Mrs. Popper sit in their living room together. Pictures from National Geographic magazine decorate the room. Mrs. Popper works on mending clothes, while Mr. Popper smokes his pipe, reads his books, and looks at his globe.
Although Mrs. Popper worries about the long approaching winter without income, Mr. Popper is looking forward reading his books. On this particular evening, he is reading a book titled Antarctic Adventures, which describes the adventures of explorers who have visited the South Pole. When he describes the book to his wife, she thinks that the Antarctic sounds “very dull and cold” (8), but Mr. Popper explains that she would not have this opinion if she had watched movies with him about Admiral Drake’s expedition. Mr. Popper describes that the best part of this region is the penguins, and that “[t]hey are the funniest birds in the world” (9). They do not fly, and sometimes they lie on their stomachs and slide on the ice. Mr. Popper announces that he would like to have a penguin as a pet. Mrs. Popper disagrees, citing the mess and expense that would be involved, but her husband persists in telling her more about the creatures.
Mr. Popper suddenly realizes that it is September 29, the night that the Drake Antarctic Expedition is going to broadcast by radio from Antarctica. Mr. Popper previously sent Admiral Drake a letter explaining how much he enjoyed seeing photos of the last expedition, noting that he found penguins to be very entertaining. The Admiral, communicating with Mr. Popper by radio, thanks him for the letter and tells Mr. Popper, “Watch for a surprise” (11).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Mr. Popper, the protagonist, is introduced at the beginning of Chapter 1. He is an ethereal, otherworldly individual who dreams of visiting far off, exotic countries, although he has never left the small city of Stillwater. Preoccupied and somewhat eccentric, he is a dreamer who once started a local decorating trend when he mistakenly painted “three sides of a kitchen green, and the other yellow” (3). Housewives in Stillwater were pleased with the effect and hired Mr. Popper to replicate it in their own homes.
He is portrayed as living happily with his wife, Mrs. Popper, and his children, Janie and Bill. Nonetheless, he regrets having missed seeing India, the South Seas, and most importantly, the North and South Poles, prior to settling down. Mr. Popper’s interest in the Arctic and Antarctic is intense. He papers the living room of his family home with photos of these regions clipped from National Geographic magazine. Mr. Popper is philosophical in his approach to life. While the responsibilities of a family preclude his travels to unusual locales, he is not embittered. He appears to balance these areas of his life quite well.
Mrs. Popper, on the other hand, is a highly pragmatic individual. She works hard to provide a good home for her husband and children. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Popper is very concerned with the practicalities of daily life. While Mr. Popper rejoices in the fact that he will have no painting jobs during the winter and will have time to read books about the North and South Poles and the Polar explorers, his wife frets that it will be “hard to sweep with a man sitting reading all day” (5). In addition, she worries about whether the family has saved enough money to pay for the expenses of the winter season without any income. She tells her children that they will eat beans on a daily basis and that there will be no specialty items on the menu.
These disparate spouses provide an interesting lesson for young readers regarding the unexpected combination of personalities that can form a lasting marriage. On the one hand, it could be argued that two dreamers, such as Mr. Popper, would understand one another’s impractical desire to eschew material goods and income in favor of world travel and adventures. Conversely, Mr. Popper is well served by the presence of a loving spouse who will see to it that the family’s resources are amortized properly over his annual employment hiatus. Similarly, Mrs. Popper is exposed to a mindset different from her own as Mr. Popper studies up on penguins and Polar explorers. While she spends her days tallying household accounts and performing necessary domestic chores, her husband spends his free time writing to explorers who contact him via short wave radio and tell him to await the arrival of a surprising gift.
