The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1923)
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Ricky and Rachel Raccoon were the brother/sister duo my dad dreamed up for me at bedtime every night as a kid. Some nights they’d get lost in the woods and chased by hooting owls, other nights they’d be traipsing through farm gardens and getting fat on corncobs. Though I’m not a father yet, one of the things I most look forward to is being able to conjure that same sense of wonder and exploration with my own children, inventing stories to charm them to sleep.
World War I got in the way of that reality for Hugh Lofting. In 1916, the American-based Englishman joined the British army and spent months in combat before being wounded in France, after which he spent another two years in service before being discharged. Imagine not seeing your kids for three years, knowing that you’re missing out on their formative years and are likely to return to them as a complete stranger. Not wanting to be completely absent from his children’s lives, yet also not wanting to fill his letters with horrors of war and his own convalescence, he invented an eccentric English doctor who could talk to animals, sending dispatches of his adventures back home to be read in absentia. It was the 1918 version of telling bedtime stories to your kids via Zoom.
The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle wasn’t the first book in the series—that would be The Story of Dr. Dolittle, which came out two years prior. It was a massive hit by all accounts, garnering enough praise for Lofting’s publishing company to push out nine sequels during Lofting’s life, three posthumous collections after his death. Dolittle the character became an industry, so much so that when Lofting tried to kill the series by sending his protagonist into outer space in 1928’s Dr. Dolittle in the Moon, he was eventually pressured to bringing him back to earth five years later for Dr. Dolittle’s Return.
It’s just a hunch at this point, but I’m guessing The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle is one of precious few sequels on this list. No other books received Newbery Honors in 1922, so it’s impossible to know what else Voyages was stacked up against, but its appeal as children’s literature is obvious. For one, it doesn’t resemble a sequel at all. The first book was written about the doctor in the third person, but Lofting (or his publishers) thought the series would be more relatable to children if a child was narrating the sequel. We’re freshly introduced to Doolittle’s world through the eyes of scrawny Tommy Stubbins, a narrative play that does exactly what it was designed to do. No one who picked up Voyages without reading Story first would have any idea—aside from a couple references to past adventures—that they’d missed out on the first volume.
The other main draw to the book is every kid’s wildest dream: being able to talk to animals. Dolittle has a duck housekeeper, bird messengers, a dog who buys groceries, and a monkey who travels from Africa to England in full drag (more on that later) just to hang around the house. Voyages is the first Newbery winner I remember reading as a kid, and I completely fell in love with the idea of learning animal languages and listing pets among my best friends. It’s this central conceit that captured imaginations and propelled the series to its decades-spanning success, and also likely the reason I found copies of the Dolittle series in my classrooms growing up instead of the comparatively massive and charmless Story of Mankind.
Unfortunately, the Dolittle series is also notable for being wildly racist, so much so that in 1988, after several years of being blacklisted from schools for their reductionist depictions of Africans and indigenous people, the texts were formally altered by Lofting’s estate to make them less offensive. I’m assuming the copy I read was an amended version—it was printed in 2012—but it’s cringey to imagine what kind of content was exorcised from the book in the context of all that was left in. Chee-Chee, Dolittle’s monkey friend, poses as a Black woman to travel to England, drawing ugly comparisons between apes and Africans. The main plot of the book finds Dolittle and company traveling to Spidermonkey Island, where Dolittle is accepted by one tribe of “Indians” as a god (and their eventual king) after leading them to war with another tribe on the island, who also end up revering him. The natives are described with the most childlike, ignorant stereotypes one could think of. The series could definitely use another language update.
But it’s the narrative approach to Dolittle’s encounters with other cultures that’s impossible to scrub out. Our English sailors main adventure takes them to a South American island, where they introduce civility and modern conveniences (like fire) to the backwards, lost-in-time natives. Dolittle’s hesitancy to leave the tribes, for they would surely revert to their ways of war and ignorance and helplessness without him to keep them morally in check, is representative of the British Empire’s paternalistic, racist attitude to the nonwhite world.
On one hand, it’s a fascinatingly explicit metaphor for colonialism that works as a sort of psychological history lesson. On the other hand, it’s a freakin’ children’s book. The characters are largely charming, and when it just sticks to the doctor and his animals, the book is a joy to read. I definitely didn’t pick up on the racist overtones of the books as a kid, which speaks to how prevalent these attitudes were in the 1990s. But in 2020, it’s not something I’d want my kids reading.
For all his success, Lofting’s life was notable for his griefs. He never fully recovered from his war wound and dealt with compounding medical issues throughout his adult life, and he lost his first two wives to illness. After his third marriage in 1935, he moved to California, where he lived until his death in 1947. The Dolittle books live on, and while it’s possible the others aren’t as problematic as Voyages turned out to be, it’s a series that probably lives best in your mind as a fond memory instead of in your library.
