Doctor Dolittle, the hero of Hugh Lofting’s children’s series about an English country doctor who learned to speak the language of animals, turns 100 this year. My own acquaintance with the doctor dates back to 1963, when, at age 9, I triumphantly completed “The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle,” my first big book, weighing in at 364 pages — a jumbo size for any work for children. I caught up with the doctor again this spring, when school went virtual. I had been reading high-minded founding father biographies to third graders at the Academy of the City, a charter school in Queens, where I serve on the board. I felt that the kids needed an escape from a reality turned dismal, and I thought of the good doctor and his talking parrot, dog, pig, monkey and pushmi-pullyu.
We finished the first book in the series, “The Story of Doctor Dolittle.” Say what you will about Zoom, but I can report that the kids were transfixed. Their questions hinted at their degree of imaginative immersion: “How did the monkeys get back to the ground after they made the bridge with their arms?” “Does the pushmi-pullyu actually have two heads?”
“The Story of Doctor Dolittle” appeared in 1920, and was republished almost annually thereafter, as were many of the 11 other books in the series. In a preface to the 1922 edition, the novelist Hugh Walpole called the book “a work of genius” and “the first real children’s classic since ‘Alice.’” Yet almost everyone knows about Alice, and Pooh, and Peter Rabbit. If it weren’t for the movie versions — first starring Rex Harrison, then Eddie Murphy and, this past winter, Robert Downey Jr. — Doctor Dolittle’s name might be remembered no better than Walpole’s own. I didn’t read Lofting’s books to my son; most of you probably didn’t either. The doctor’s centennial has gone unnoticed. What happened?
No one could say that the books have grown quaint or stale; just ask my third graders. Nor was Walpole indulging in hyperbole. Doctor Dolittle is a wonderful creation: a Victorian eccentric from the pages of Dickens; a perpetual bachelor who drives conventional humans from his life but is much loved by the poor and the marginal; a gentleman whose exquisite politesse never falters, even before sharks and pirates; a peace-loving naturalist prepared to wage war to defend his friends from evil depredations. Only by the standards of the world of grown-ups does he “do little.”
Lofting can hit many registers, but he saves the lyrical for the animals themselves, who experience life as fully as we do, though you’d never know it if you can’t understand them. Here is Clippa, a fidgit — a small fish — who has been imprisoned in an aquarium along with her brother, and who mourns her vanished life with a depth of feeling unknown to the Little Mermaid and her friends: “To chase the shrimps on a summer evening, when the sky is red and the light’s all pink within the foam! To lie on the top, in the doldrums’ noonday calm, and warm your tummy in the tropic sun! To wander hand in hand once more through the giant seaweed forests of the Indian Ocean, seeking the delicious eggs of the pop-pop!” And then the poor thing collapses in sobs.
Lofting really was a genius of children’s literature. But he was also a product of the British Empire. When Doctor Dolittle goes to Africa to cure the monkeys, he stumbles into the Kingdom of Jolliginki. Prince Bumpo, the heir to the throne, is a mooncalf who mistakes fairy tales for real life, speaks in Elizabethan periphrasis and murmurs to himself: “If only I were a white prince!” In the pencil sketches with which Lofting illustrates his texts, Prince Bumpo looks like the missing link between man and ape. Lofting’s biographer, Gary D. Schmidt, defensively notes that Doctor Dolittle himself rarely utters a bigoted word. But the doctor is only a character; the narrator and the illustrator are none other than our author. While Lofting never fails to give his Africans a measure of nobility, he is also quite certain of their savagery.
The edition I read was probably published in 1950, three years after Lofting’s death. By the 1970s, he had gone into eclipse. Over the years, new editions appeared that attempted to address the racism, including one in 1988 from which all pictures of Prince Bumpo and his parents had been removed, along with all references to their skin color, not to mention their wish to change it. “If this verbal and visual caution occasionally seems almost craven,” a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review wrote, the blind spots for which it sought to compensate were real.
Lofting’s own story is almost as remarkable as the doctor’s. Though we might imagine a donnish Lewis Carroll or C. S. Lewis as the author of such twee fables, Lofting was a wanderer and an adventurer, a civil engineer who prospected for gold in Canada and built railroads in Nigeria and Cuba before settling in the United States and starting a family in 1912. When the war broke out he returned to England to enlist, and was sent to the trenches in France and Flanders. His children begged for letters, with drawings. Lofting would not relate the unspeakable truth. He had observed, as he wrote many years later, that the animals serving alongside the soldiers had, like them, become “fatalists,” trudging into the same hail of artillery fire. But when a horse was wounded, it wasn’t sent to the dispensary; it was dispatched with a bullet. This was cruel. Lofting imagined that we would spare animals if only we could see inside them, as we can our fellow humans. And so he wrote letters home about talking animals. These letters formed the basis of “The Story of Doctor Dolittle.”
Because he does understand animals, Doctor Dolittle comes to recognize their astonishing gifts of smell, sight, hearing. The animals are the books’ heroes every bit as much as the doctor himself; it is they who miraculously find lost and starving men or turn back a marauding tribe. The doctor loves them as they deserve to be loved, and protects them from abuse, just as his creator dreamed of doing — for all that he internalized the racist human hierarchy of his day. In “The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle,” the doctor offers to step into a bullring and outperform a great matador, on the condition that the local authorities agree to end bullfighting forever should he win. Of course they accept the lunatic wager. The good doctor arranges everything with the bulls beforehand: They charge straight at him before dropping to the ground in front of him or letting him perform acrobatics on their horns. The great matador gnashes his teeth while the señoritas throw flowers and jewels at the doctor’s feet.
Even the very young reader will not miss the moral anger beneath the whimsy. Lofting was no Kipling. The experience of the trenches turned him against war and the glorification of combat, including in children’s books. In 1942 he risked his reputation by publishing “Victory for the Slain,” an epic poem deploring the war in which England was already enmeshed. He aspired to be a novelist, a journalist, a moralizing essayist; owing to the peculiar bent of his genius, he was to achieve all that through the fidgit — and, of course, the portly gentleman in the waistcoat and battered top hat.
Unlike his creator, Doctor Dolittle is, in fact, a man for our time. When he finds the citizens of the Monkey Kingdom suffering from an infectious virus, he spends three days and three nights vaccinating the healthy and places the sick in quarantine for 14 days. They all recover.
