Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist: The Pressures of

Modernity in Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle Series

Catherine L. Elick

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 4, Winter

2007, pp. 323-339 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2007.0054

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/224249

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist:
The Pressures of Modernity in Hugh
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle Series

Catherine L. Elick

At first glance, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, which began appearing
in 1920 and continued past his death in 1947,1 seem to have nothing more
than their dates of publication to recommend designation as modern
literature. Lofting’s relatively straightforward narratives about his Victorian-era
protagonist fail to conform to many of the features of modern fiction articulated
by David Lodge in his essay “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and
Metonymy.” The Doctor Dolittle books are not “experimental or innovatory
in form,” nor do they “[eschew] the straight chronological ordering of . . .
material” as modernist fiction for adults frequently does (Lodge 481). They are
not “much concerned with consciousness, and also with the subconscious or
unconscious workings of the human mind” (Lodge 481). In this regard, in fact,
their emphasis on exterior events rather than interior thought would no doubt
have caused Virginia Woolf, one of the giants of modernist fiction herself, to
dismiss Lofting as a “materialist” (147), as she labels H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett,
and John Galsworthy in her seminal essay on “Modern Fiction.”
With these marks against him, what reasons might remain for deeming
Lofting’s work modernist? Perhaps the first justification is a biographical one:
he participated in that global trauma that helped give birth to the problems
of modern life and the complexities of modern art, the First World War. That
the cataclysmic effects of World War I account in large part for the shift in
sensibility that we call modernism is a critical truism. As William Barrett suc-
cinctly states, “Not only did the war transform governments, social systems,
and national boundaries; the very quality of life itself was never to be the
same as in the years before 1914” (70). When we think about the effects of
World War I on literature, we think first of the angry antiwar expressions of
soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen or of the disillusionment inherent in works

Catherine L. Elick is Professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she

teaches courses in children’s, British, and modern literature.  She is currently working
on a study of animal agency and animal-human power relations in twentieth-century
children’s fantasies.

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist© 2007 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 323–339.
323
like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), considered by M. L. Rosenthal to be “a
post-war poem charged with nausea at the thought of the young men who had
died” (89). We forget that some of the best writers of British children’s fantasy
also experienced combat in the trenches of the Great War—J. R. R. Tolkien,
C. S. Lewis, and A. A. Milne, among them. However, no children’s writer has
acknowledged as openly as Hugh Lofting that the carnage of the First World
War served as inspiration for his work. Notably, it was not the devastation to
human lives and values that wrenched Lofting into writing illustrated letters
about the unconventional Doctor Dolittle to his children Elizabeth and Colin
but the violence visited upon animals. In an author’s commentary first pub-
lished in 1934 in The Junior Book of Authors, Lofting describes his distress over
animals’ suffering during the war:

Oftentimes you would see a cat stalking along the ruins thruout [sic] a heavy
bombardment, in a town that had been shelled more than once before in that
same cat’s recollection. She was taking her chances with the rest of us. And the
horses, too, learned to accept resignedly and unperturbed the falling of high
explosives in their immediate neighbor-hood. But their fate was different from
the men’s. However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired
of; all the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his
aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.
This did not seem quite fair. If we made the animals take the same chances
as we did ourselves, why did we not give them similar attention when wounded?
But obviously to develop a horse-surgery as good as that of our Casualty Clearing
Stations would necessitate a knowledge of horse language. (237)

As Lofting explicitly acknowledges, the war moved him to envision situations

in which the unfair balance of power between humans and animals might be
shifted. In this respect, certainly, Lofting’s impulses are very modern. They
reflect what Paul Poplawski calls “the revolutionary dynamic within modern-
ism,” “its ideological critique . . . of the complex social developments associ-
ated with industrialization, urbanization, and democratization” (ix). In the
Doctor Dolittle books, the urge for reform remains centered on the one issue
that stimulated Lofting to write in the first place: the treatment of animals by
humans. Pivotal in redressing injustice is the assumption that animals have
languages and that a human character might understand them.
To contextualize Lofting as a modern writer, we should remember that the
first book in his series, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, was published in 1920, just
two years after the war ended, and that The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, second
in the series and winner of the Newbery Medal, was issued in 1922, that annus
mirabilis that saw the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James
Joyce’s Ulysses, arguably the greatest poem and novel of the modern period.
The Doctor Dolittle books respond to the pressures of the modern period in
surprisingly similar ways as these great works. Like Eliot and Joyce, Lofting links
contemporary issues with ancient legends or myths. Just as Eliot alludes to an-
cient fertility myths and the Christian Grail legend and Joyce creates elaborate

324 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

correspondences between his modern-day Dubliners and ancient Greek gods
and heroes, so Lofting traces the imbalance of power between animals and
humans back to the Biblical flood myth in Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake
(1948), a subject to be discussed at greater length later in this article. Also like
Eliot and Joyce, Lofting expresses a typically modern ambivalence toward the
past. On the one hand, works like The Waste Land and Ulysses suggest, life in
the past was nobler, more spacious, than life now. All one need do is contrast
the carping, neurotic wife in “A Game of Chess” (the second part of The Waste
Land) with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or the romance of Elizabeth I and Leicester
with the mechanical sex of Eliot’s typist and her “young man carbuncular” (line
231) in “The Fire Sermon” (the third part of The Waste Land) to see how sordid
and soulless modern life has become, Eliot implies. On the other hand, modern
writers suggest, the past should not be romanticized indiscriminately. Were
not those wrongheaded notions about progress and heroism that developed
in the nineteenth century responsible for provoking the cataclysm of world
war? By conceiving his protagonist to be an early Victorian gentleman,2 but
one who is also disillusioned with humanity—he’s a physician who gives up
doctoring humans to help animals—Lofting creates both a rosy lens for viewing
the past and a platform from which to criticize the march of human history.
So, while Lofting indulges in the wish fulfillment of a world where horses are
helped by fitting them with spectacles rather than gas masks, he also mounts
a critique of those eminent Victorian virtues that propelled English society
into the Great War.3
Dressed in a tailcoat and his ubiquitous high hat and employing the sociolect
of the public school–educated Englishman, Doctor Dolittle nevertheless comi-
cally deflates many of the ideals held dear by the British Empire. First, romantic
love and the chivalric treatment of women embarrass him. When he is kissed
by a grateful mother for rescuing her son, John Dolittle “giggled and blushed
like a schoolgirl” (Story 141). When Sarah, his sister and housekeeper, objects
to having a crocodile in the house, it is she, not the crocodile, he is willing to
part with.4 Second, respect for the law is a vexed issue for the Doctor, who finds
himself in prison many times in the course of the series5 and whose nighttime
raids on a circus and pet shop qualify him as an early animal rights activist
willing to use illegal undercover operations to save animals. Third, wealth as
the just reward for labor is not a value espoused by the Doctor. In The Story of
Doctor Dolittle he describes money as a “nuisance” on three occasions, and he
waivers between exasperation with and naïve disregard for money throughout
the series.6 Fourth, war as glorious is a repulsive notion to him, not surprisingly
for someone whose creator survived the trenches of France and Flanders. (I
will explore his views on war later in this article.)
The one foundational principle of Victorian society that may be upheld in these
books is the White Man’s Burden of imperialism. Racism in the Doctor Dolittle
books became a focal point of critical response to the series beginning in the late
1960s, at times threatening to overwhelm all other considerations. Isabelle Suhl

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 325

contends that “the ‘real’ Doctor Dolittle is in essence the personification of the
Great White Father Nobly Bearing the White Man’s Burden and . . . his creator
was a white racist and chauvinist, guilty of almost every prejudice known to
modern white Western man, especially to an Englishman growing up in the
last years of the Victorian age, when the British Empire was at its zenith” (110).
Donnarae MacCann similarly claims that “It is the presentation of racial in-
feriority as ‘self-evident’ in Lofting’s African and Native American realms that
makes his mockery so insidious” (367). When the books were reissued in the
late 1980s, efforts were made to eliminate racism from the texts and illustra-
tions. Christopher Lofting, the author’s youngest son, oversaw this process and
acknowledges that “much soul-searching” preceded the decision to revise the
original text but that finally the decision to make alterations was taken because
“Hugh Lofting would have been appalled at the suggestion that any part of his
work could give offense and would have been the first to have made the changes
himself ” (153). However, not everyone has seen the excision of racist material
from the Dolittle books as positive or necessary. Jane W. Shackford suggests
that “shared exploration and discussion of questionable images” with children
is a better alternative to censorship or banning (182). Gary D. Schmidt argues
that “The Doctor is never the source of overt racism himself, though he does
seem to participate in the ethnocentrism of his Victorian contemporaries” (53)
and that “where the novels have lost their objectionable passages, they have also
lost their historical context, their textual integrity, and their keen portrayal of
Dolittle’s belief in human equality” (177).
If one focuses less on Doctor Dolittle’s reactions to native peoples and more
on his relationships with animals, it is possible to agree with Edward Blishen’s
assessment of Lofting’s protagonist as “deeply nonconformist”: “But no one
else has set out, quite as he did, to create a hero, and a notion of heroism, that
is radical, pacifist and profoundly opposed to common ideas of conventional
respectability” (54). Radical, pacifist, unconventional—these adjectives un-
derscore the Doctor’s modernity. One also recognizes that, without any overt
reference to religion,7 Hugh Lofting has created in Doctor Dolittle an exemplar
of Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, a man who “resists not evil”
by refraining from war and who looks to the birds of the air and the lilies of
the field both as models of behavior and as friends. Indeed, Doctor Dolittle
has the disquieting charisma of a holy fool.
However, it is not just any saintly figure but specifically St. Francis of Assisi
whom Lofting’s hero calls to mind. Lofting makes the connection between
Doctor Dolittle and St. Francis explicit for the reader in Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo
(1925) when he has narrator Tommy Stubbins reflect on a scene in which the
Doctor is greeted by some birds: “It reminded me of the pictures of St. Francis
and the pigeons, as the starlings, crows, robins and blackbirds swarmed down
about him in clouds as soon as he appeared” (30). Critics, too, have underscored
the similarity between the Doctor and the Saint. Wolfgang Schlegelmilch calls
the Doctor “a Franciscan figure living in harmony with nature” (266), and

326 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

Margaret Blount comments that “The Doctor, on his travels round the world
like a modern St. Francis/Robin Hood, righting various wrongs that have been
done in the animal kingdom is, of course, in an impregnable position; most
saints are” (200). The analogy with Saint Francis of Assisi is a natural one, since,
as Lofting explains, it was “the very considerable part the animals were playing
in the World War” (Junior Book 237) that inspired him to create a character
who understands animals’ languages and can thereby set about righting certain
wrongs they suffer.
Certainly, there are a number of abuses to animals that Hugh Lofting has
his protagonist challenge directly, as every reader of the series recalls. In The
Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, the Doctor colludes with the bulls to put on a far
better show in the ring than the matadors and wins a wager to end bullfighting
in Monteverde forever. In Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (1924), he saves Nightshade
the vixen and her cubs during a foxhunt by placing them in his pockets and
speaking peremptorily to the foxhounds in their own language. Doctor Dolittle’s
condemnation is especially harsh when animals are held captive to be sold or
to perform without concern for their welfare. So, he rescues Chee-Chee the
monkey from an organ grinder and Jim the crocodile from a zoo in Story, and
he saves a number of circus animals, including Sophie the seal, Beppo the horse,
and some blacksnakes that are routinely being chloroformed so that they might
be handled in Circus. He is also concerned that wild captive animals be released
into their native habitats; consequently, after the circus disbands, he pays to
have the elephant, leopard, and lion shipped to Africa and the blacksnakes and
opossum returned to North America in Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan (1927). Also
in Caravan, he liberates wild birds that have been trapped and held for sale in
a badly run pet shop.
In addition to saving individual animals, Doctor Dolittle attempts radical
reforms of human institutions so that animals that have been abused are now
empowered. For instance, under his management the circus and canary opera
(in Circus and Caravan) are run on a cooperative basis; animals are given the
choice to perform, and they share the profits with humans. He also institutes
an innovative zoo in his own garden that is a “regular ideal Animal Town” (Zoo
33), one in which the animals themselves make the rules and “the latches to
the houses were all on the inside, so that the animals could come in and go
out when they chose” (Zoo 37). Other philanthropic organizations include
the Retired Cab and Wagon Horses’ Association (Circus) and the East End
Free Bone Counter for Indigent Dogs (Caravan), a kind of soup kitchen for
the poor dogs of London run by Jip the dog and funded with Jip’s own earn-
ings. Although the institutions the Doctor founds rarely affect large numbers
of animals or last very long, they are noteworthy precedents for establishing
animal autonomy. For example, the Animals’ Bank created in Doctor Dolittle’s
Caravan remains open for only about a fortnight but is nevertheless considered
“a remarkable event in the social history of animal life” (203). As Jip passion-
ately proclaims, “Once it became established that animals had a right to hold

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 327

property the same as people—well, there’s no knowing how far the idea might
go. You could have animals in all sorts of professions, earning salaries in jobs,
making profits in private businesses and everything” (Caravan 204). One of the
humorous reversals in these novels is that, while Doctor Dolittle cares nothing
for money, his animal friends value it. Perhaps this irony is understandable,
considering that money is a source of empowerment for them. In fact, having
money enables the animals to hire humans to serve them: Gub-Gub the pig
has his trotters shined every morning by a shoeblack, and Dab-Dab the duck,
the Doctor’s housekeeper, hires “a scullerymaid to help her with the washing-
up” (Caravan 201).
Clearly, Hugh Lofting is successful in envisioning situations in which other
species are empowered, and just as clearly, language is central to animal libera-
tion in these books. Lofting subverts anthropocentric (as well as ethnocentric)
assumptions by not following the usual fictional pattern and having his ani-
mals miraculously and inexplicably speak English. Although their words are
represented in English within the narrative, we are to understand that each
of the species speaks its own language and that Doctor Dolittle studies the
animals’ languages, not they his. In Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fic-
tion: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity, Robyn McCallum, interpreting
Bakhtin, argues that “thought is virtually impossible outside language, and
the formation of consciousness and subjectivity is thus inextricable from the
acquisition of language” (11). The concept of autonomous selfhood that we
reserve for humans, largely because of our self-expression through language,
must be extended now to other species. Animals have had linguistic ability all
along, the Dolittle books imply; it’s just that humans have been too obtuse
and too jealous of their power to acknowledge it, at least until Doctor Dolittle
receives instruction in animal languages from his first tutor, Polynesia the par-
rot. The Doctor’s initial language training is dealt with rather summarily in The
Story of Doctor Dolittle, but then, as many critics have noted, this first novel is
unique in the series for taking a simplified storytelling approach to narrative
description.8 Later novels make it clear that the Doctor’s dedicated efforts to
acquire fluency in animal languages are central to his work as a naturalist and
reformer. Thus, he makes a thorough study of the languages of shellfish in The
Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, insects in Doctor Dolittle’s Garden, and even plants
in Doctor Dolittle in the Moon.
Remembering Lofting’s desire to alleviate the suffering of regimental horses
in the First World War, it is significant that the Doctor’s first encounter with an
animal patient to be rendered in detail is with a horse. Having an understanding
listener to whom he can explain his ailment—as well as complain of the human
incompetence in treating it—encourages this plow horse to frame his story
in humorously ironic terms. In an exasperated tone, he tells the Doctor that
a veterinarian has been treating him six weeks for spavins, a disease affecting
the hock or hind joint of horses, when what he really needs is spectacles. The
alliterative similarity of the words “spavins” and “spectacles” suggests a whimsi-

328 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

cality to the veterinarian’s diagnosis, as if the words and the medical conditions
might easily be mistaken for each other. There is further ironic reversal in the
fact that, although the horse tells Doctor Dolittle he is going blind in one eye,
the veterinarian is so blind as to be treating the wrong end of the horse. This
medical maltreatment finally provokes the otherwise docile horse to kick at the
farmer’s boy when he tries to apply an unnecessary mustard plaster, resulting
in a carnivalesque reversal of roles: “The vet’s looking after him [the farmer’s
boy] now” (Story 15). The comic exuberance of this scene is sobered by the
long-suffering horse’s comment that “the trouble is that anybody thinks he can
doctor animals, just because the animals don’t complain” (Story 14). Animals
do not complain or, by implication, rebel against inept or cruel human treat-
ment, not because they have no voices to raise in protest but because humans
have been too smugly entrenched in their assumptions of superiority to hear
those competing voices.
Although Doctor Dolittle expends great effort to communicate with other
species, Lofting glosses over the difficulty that animals of different species might
have speaking with each other. Perhaps we are to assume that, like dependent
cultures (people enslaved or colonized, for example), they have learned several
languages or created a pidgin language. I suspect that we are just not supposed
to notice this elision and, instead, simply enjoy the many lively debates that
occur among the animals, often around the kitchen fireplace in their Puddleby-
on-the-Marsh home. One important consequence of these conversations is to
demonstrate that the human members of the household—John Dolittle and his
young assistant, Tommy Stubbins—value the views of the animal as much as
their own and that they are right to do so, since many times it is the animals who
offer the practical solutions to problems created by the impractical Dolittle.
These frequent fireside chats demonstrate Lofting’s skillful use of varied
sociolects and idiosyncrasies of speech to create a rich cast of characters
representing a provocative mix of values and viewpoints: Cheapside the
sparrow’s cheeky Cockney patter (“’Ulloa, Doctor, ’ere we are again! What
ho! The old firm! Who would ’ave thought you’d come to this?” [Post Office
72]); Gub-Gub’s unconscious puns, mostly about food (“But listen: I did know
a biblical family once. . . .Very biblical. They all wore bibs. . . .” [Return 27]);
and salty old Polynesia’s tendency to sing sea shanties and swear in Swedish
individualize them as characters. More surprisingly, their voices occasionally
seem to undercut the monologic tendency of these novels, in which Doctor
Dolittle is a figure held in such reverence that his views threaten to drown out
all others. As Robyn McCallum argues, “All novels are polyphonic in that they
are constructed out of represented and representing discourses, but as the gap
between these discourses widens, polyphony becomes more explicit” (30). In
these combative dialogic exchanges, the polyphony inherent in every novel
comes to the fore.
In a memorable scene from the first novel, the animal members of the
Doctor’s family must coax him to accept as a gift the pushmi-pullyu, a rare

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 329

two-headed creature offered in gratitude by the African monkeys, whom the
Doctor has saved from an epidemic. As Chee-Chee the monkey explains to the
naïve Doctor, “People will pay any money to see him”:

“But I don’t want any money,” said the Doctor.

“Yes, you do,” said Dab-Dab, the duck. “Don’t you remember how we
had to pinch and scrape to pay the butcher’s bill in Puddleby? And how are you
going to get the sailor the new boat you spoke of, unless you have the money
to buy it?”
“I was going to make him one,” said the Doctor.
“Oh, do be sensible!” cried Dab-Dab. “Where would you get all the wood
and the nails to make one with? And besides, what are we going to live on? We
shall be poorer than ever when we get back. Chee-Chee’s perfectly right: Take
the funny-looking thing along, do!”
“Well, perhaps there is something in what you say,” murmured the Doctor.
“It certainly would make a nice new kind of pet. But does the er—what-do-you-
call-it really want to go abroad?” (Story 77)

Many of the Doctor’s idealistic views—views that Lofting asks us to admire—are

being challenged here: that money is to be despised; that one’s needs will be
supplied providentially; and, most importantly, that animals should not be
captured, removed from the wild, and put on show for human profit. Signifi-
cantly, it is animals that are inciting a human to overcome his scruples and
take advantage of one of their own kind. In a subtle way, their views temper
rather than overturn the Doctor’s ideals. He agrees to take the pushmi-pullyu,
but only after it chooses to go, and he continues to think of this exotic animal
more as “a nice new kind of pet” than a source of profit.
Scenes like this in which voices in the text interact dialogically are frequent
in the novels. On other occasions, Lofting allows individual animals to speak
unchallenged, telling their life stories directly. Reminiscent of animal autobi-
ographies like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), these incorporated narra-
tives reinforce the idea that personal agency is linked to language. The animals
have always been the heroes of their own stories, but having John Dolittle and
Tommy Stubbins as comprehending and sympathetic listeners to their tales
underscores that their lives are to be valued. The ancient turtle Mudface’s story
is the longest of these incorporated narratives, taking up nearly one half of Doc-
tor Dolittle and the Secret Lake. Other examples include the six stories offered
by the Doctor’s immediate animal family for inclusion in The Arctic Monthly
(intended for polar bears and walruses as “light reading for the long winter
nights” [Post Office 112]); stories told by various rodents at the Mooniversary
Dinner of the Rat and Mouse Club, which make up eleven chapters of Doctor
Dolittle’s Zoo; the story of Pippinella the canary, which is central to Doctor
Dolittle’s Caravan; and the story of Quetch, the curator of the museum at the
Home for Crossbred Dogs, which makes up the first quarter of Doctor Dolittle’s
Garden. Critics have responded mostly negatively to Lofting’s technique of
incorporating first-person animal narratives. Schmidt considers Pippinella’s

330 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

life story in Caravan “unwieldy, not fully incorporated into the narrative, and
disproportionately emphasized” (84). About Mudface’s in Secret Lake, Schmidt
says that “it is not an easy uniting, for the two halves of the novel are radically
different in terms of their concerns” (116), and Francis J. Molson agrees that
“Lofting was unable to meld effectively the two distinct strands in the plot” of
that novel (158). It’s curious that this use of “shifting points of view” (Poplawski
ix), or “multiple viewpoints” (Lodge 481), a technique that has received praise
when employed in modernist fiction for adults written by James Joyce, William
Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf, should meet with a negative reception when used
in Lofting’s fiction. Viewed in a positive light, these narrative inclusions, largely
because they are not seamless, add to the polyphonic texture of the novels.
Significantly, Bakhtin traces the evolution of the carnivalized genre of the novel
in Western tradition back to such forms as Menippean satire in classical Greek
literature, arguing that “Menippean satire became one of the main carriers and
channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” (113). One important
characteristic of Menippean satire that has played a role in the evolution of the
novel, and one that is clearly evident in the Dolittle books, is “the wide use of
inserted genres” (Bakhtin 118). These first-person autobiographical narratives,
inserted into the action of the novels, disrupt the monologic control exerted
by Lofting through his focalizing character, Doctor Dolittle.
Or do they? Do they even need to? After all, the subversive and liberating
power of carnival is already at work in the world of these novels through the
Doctor himself, who is a figure of misrule, a carnival king who mocks human
authority and works to upend the hierarchy that places animals beneath people.
But the question remains: Is Doctor Dolittle himself ever truly displaced from
the powerful position of respect he holds for the animals and the readers who
love him?
To me, the answer is yes; the title character of this long series is neither as
static nor as exalted as Mary Poppins, for example, to name a character whose
spirit presides over another important children’s fantasy series of this period.
As with Lofting’s books, there are pronounced carnivalesque qualities in
both P. L. Travers’s protagonist and her adventures.9 However, unlike Doctor
Dolittle, who has an unusual aptitude for animal languages but no magical
powers, Mary Poppins is a figure of mythic dimensions, one whose ability to
talk with animals is accounted for by her being “the Great Exception,” the one
human being who continues to understand in adulthood the language spoken
by animals and all humans in infancy.10 Readers of Travers’s series recall that
Mary Poppins, like the Doctor, does on occasion act as translator-mediator
for individual animals, as when she advocates for the dog Andrew’s desire for
a friend in “Miss Lark’s Andrew” and for the lark Caruso’s desire for freedom
in the correspondingly titled “Miss Andrew’s Lark.” She also narrates to her
child charges the adventures of other animals like “The Dancing Cow” and
“The Cat that Looked at a King.” However, Travers’s series is not concerned
with the social justice issues of human cruelty to animals so much as with the

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 331

spiritual exploration of shared human-animal origins, and Travers’s messages
on this subject are unchanging throughout the series. The idea of the intercon-
nectedness of all life that is highlighted in “Full Moon,” a chapter set in the zoo
that occurs during Mary Poppins’s first visit with the Banks family, is equally
emphasized during her last visit in a chapter entitled “High Tide,” a companion
piece set at the bottom of the sea.11
In contrast with our response to Mary Poppins, the reader’s trust in Doctor
Dolittle fluctuates in the course of the series, following a kind of curving trajec-
tory. In The Story of Doctor Dolittle, the figure of John Dolittle “was there only
in relatively thin outline, and certainly lacked many of the subtler qualities he
was later to be given” (22), contends Edward Blishen; similarly, Lofting’s “early
drawings have an elaborate grotesquerie that offers us a John Dolittle of almost
forbidding ugliness” (Blishen 50). The Doctor is “[c]lumsy, ‘round as a bee,’
enormous-booted . . . an overgrown boy in the dress of a Victorian general
practitioner” (Blishen 23). Ludicrous, grotesque—these qualities prepare us
for a carnivalesque hero, but they also keep us just a little leery of Lofting’s
protagonist in the first novel. Then, a shift toward a more serious depiction
begins with the second book, when Lofting introduces a child narrator, Tommy
Stubbins, who serves as the reverential lens through which Doctor Dolittle’s
actions are viewed for most of the rest of the series.12 This oblique narrative
perspective, reminiscent of Nick Carraway’s view of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Marlowe’s of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness, is yet another typically modernist technique that Lofting employs
as the series progresses.
The sea voyages and sensational adventures in Africa and South America
that take up so much of the first three novels evoke the general restlessness
of modern life as well as Lofting’s own early travels to Canada, West Africa,
and Cuba before his permanent expatriation from England to the United
States. (Expatriation is, of course, another great hallmark of modern writers,
giving Lofting membership into the same club of worthies as T. S. Eliot and
James Joyce again, as well as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad,
Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden.) However,
the Doctor’s dashes about the globe also distract attention from his role as a
compassionate healer and crusader for animal rights. The fourth novel, Doc-
tor Dolittle’s Circus, and to a slightly lesser degree, the fifth and sixth books,
Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo and Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, represent the best of the
series. For one thing, there are no adventures with native tribes during which
readers have to close one eye in order not to notice the politically incorrect
handling of human characterization. Safely back in England, the Doctor is free
to focus on his good works with animals. Most of the re-envisioned institu-
tions that put animals in charge of their own lives—his circus, zoo, bank, and
canary opera—appear in these three novels. Also in these books, the Doctor
himself balances perfectly between heroism and buffoonery, especially in the
scene in Circus when he helps Sophie the seal escape by dressing her as his fe-

332 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

male traveling companion, and in Caravan when he himself dresses in drag in
order to conduct a daring nighttime raid on a pet shop.13 In scenes like these,
mockery—including self-mockery—is mobilized in the service of a healthful
subversion of hierarchy, which is the very nature of carnival and the modus
operandi of the Doctor in his prime.
Beginning with the seventh novel, Doctor Dolittle’s Garden, Lofting’s pro-
tagonist becomes less a man of action and more a despondent philosopher. In
effect, the Doctor’s growing alienation and despair over finding satisfactory
solutions to social ills exemplifies another topos of modern literature: existential
loneliness and anxiety. Several critics have commented on the series’ darken-
ing tone (Blishen 30; Molson 157; Moorehead 803). Schmidt argues that “it
is hard not to read this melancholy as the tone of a disillusioned author, one
who saw that the world is much as it has always been and is unlikely to change”
(112). No longer satisfied with palliative measures like homes for retired horses
or crossbred dogs, Dolittle begins to ponder the very root of the problem of
animal rights. As he expands his study of languages to include smaller and
smaller species—he takes up insect languages in Garden, even interviewing a
maggot—he becomes mired in species-guilt and almost incapable of taking
practical steps forward. Now, the enemy is no longer fox-hunting gentle-
men or avaricious circus and pet shop owners; it’s not even human beings in
general. The Doctor now sets injustice to animals in the context of biological
determinism, and, significantly, the metaphor he chooses to explain this state
of affairs is warfare:

This eternal war between the species—man against rats, rats against cats; cats
against dogs, etc, etc.—there is no end to it—must lead finally to some sort of
tyranny. Just now Man is on top as the tyrant. He dictates to the animal kingdom.
But many of his lesser brothers suffer in that dictation. . . . By making them our
friends we ought to be able to get together and improve conditions all round,
instead of making war on one another. War gets us nowhere. (Garden 108–9)

At this point in the text, Doctor Dolittle puts forward the idea for helping one
of those “lesser brothers” by establishing a “Country House for House-Flies”
(106). The rather bizarre idea stimulates Gub-Gub the pig’s imagination, giving
rise to ideas for “a boy-swat for swatting boys who came in and disturbed” the
flies and “papers full of sticky goo near the door, in which people would get
tangled up and stuck if they invaded the premises” (108), but the plan provokes
only ire in Dab-Dab the duck: “Can’t you see . . . that this encouragement of
other animal species—without more er—er—discrimination, I think you call
it—will lead to the ruin and destruction of your own kind and mine? Some
creatures just can’t be made friends of. Encourage the houseflies and Man disap-
pears” (107). Both Gub-Gub’s inanity and Dab-Dab’s indignation are weighed
against the Doctor’s idealism, making it seem misguided or even fanatical. The
text becomes truly dialogic here, with the animals arguing against the Doctor’s
hitherto normative views and, ironically, against the rights of other animals.

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 333

The author himself seems in a quandary as to what to believe and seems willing
to allow open discussion on the issue.
Despair over ending interspecies war on Earth causes Doctor Dolittle to
abandon his own planet altogether. All of Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1929)
and half of Doctor Dolittle’s Return (1933) are set on the moon. When he finally
returns home, his zoo, with its Rat and Mouse Club and Home for Crossbred
Dogs, is “all deserted now” (Return 15). The cozy heart of the series, those fire-
side storytelling sessions with all the animals present in the Puddleby kitchen,
has lost its warmth. As Gub-Gub explains, “[W]e don’t see as much of him [the
Doctor] as we used to . . . we miss him awful much at our evening chats over
the kitchen fire” (Return 161). Tellingly, young Tommy Stubbins is left to do
almost all of the hands-on work of healing animal patients. As John Dolittle
withdraws from his family circle and his patients to devote time to scientific
experiments and writing, he ponders his experiences on the moon, trying to
discover an all-embracing solution to the suffering of humans and animals.
The answer he arrives at is surprisingly unsatisfying: “Time! If I’m successful
with my book and my experiments I’m going to make time for everybody—for
all the world!” and “That’s the thing I’m working for—to bring everlasting life
down to the earth. To bring back peace to Mankind, so we shall never have to
worry again—about Time” (Return 165, 166). Time? Everlasting life? Earlier, the
Doctor would have thought mutual respect and compassion were the answers
to the problems of human and animal misery.
Doctor Dolittle’s Return seems poised to be the last book in the series. Its
ending is valedictory in tone. The Doctor’s saintly stature is underscored on
the last page of the novel by the venerative gaze of Tommy and the Doctor’s
friend Matthew Mugg, who observe him framed in his study window. As the
“little reading-lamp with its green glass shade threw a soft light on his serious,
kindly face,” Matthew comments, “There ‘e is . . . workin’ away. Ain’t it like
‘im?—Tryin’ to set the world to rights?” (166). Instead of ending the series
here, Hugh Lofting chose to complete one more book before his death in
1947, no doubt struggling with his own desire for more time as he worked. In
Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, the longest of the books both in number
of pages and period of development (sixteen years after Return), the Doctor
pursues his obsession with everlasting life as a cure for suffering on earth. His
experience with the long-lived creatures on the moon has not proved readily
applicable to Earth, so he hopes to approach the problem from a fresh angle
by interviewing Mudface the turtle, the only creature still living since before
the Great Flood of Noah’s time.
By bringing a mythic perspective to bear on contemporary problems at
this late juncture in the series, Hugh Lofting now approaches the subject of
animal-human relations from that same long view of history that Eliot and
Joyce employ. The “mythical method” (178), as Eliot calls it in his famous re-
view of Joyce’s Ulysses, is “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape
and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is

334 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

contemporary history” (177). The mythic framework of Ulysses concomitantly
ennobles and trivializes Joyce’s characters. Likewise, setting human injustice
to animals in a mythic context underscores both the antiquity of the problem
and the impotence of the individual trying to address it.
Several interesting ideas emerge from Mudface’s tale. For example, we learn
that Noah, not John Dolittle, was the first human to understand animal lan-
guages, and we infer that not only his long life of six hundred years but also
his slave status (a Lofting embellishment of the flood myth) encouraged his
communication with other creatures who were powerless. More importantly,
we are told that, in a temporary reversal of master-slave relationship typical of
carnival, the animals from the ark wrest control from humans for a while after
the waters subside. They threaten to eat Eber and Gaza, two young humans
saved by Mudface and his wife Belinda, as humans have always eaten animals,
or to cage and work them as beasts of burden. In the chapter tellingly entitled
“Man Becomes a Slave to the Animals,” Eber and Gaza are forced by the ani-
mals to work the fields, while carnival laughter rings out at their subjection.
The final twist to this retelling of the ancient tale is that it is the compassion
of the animals for the suffering humans that propels a further reversal of the
power structure, making it possible for humans to repopulate the earth and for
animals to be enslaved once more. Ironically, at this crucial juncture in history,
when animals could have ended human hegemony, the very kindheartedness
that Doctor Dolittle himself espouses holds them back.
But the ending is not so surprising after all. Not only could Hugh Lofting not
have rewritten the outcome of the Biblical myth, but, hating war as he does, he
would never have championed violence, even to achieve autonomy for animals.
Having been inspired to create Doctor Dolittle as a result of his experiences
during the First World War and having struggled to write this last novel as he
watched the world endure a Second World War, Lofting, like his protagonist,
holds out scant hope that men will ever give up waging war. Mudface wishes
the Doctor to record his story “for all the peoples of today to read” and so
that “maybe war may stop altogether” (Secret Lake 360). The Doctor’s reply is
characteristically—at least, at this point in the series—dispirited:

“Indeed I hope so,” he sighed at last. “At least I promise you the book shall be
written and I will do my best to write it well. How many will take any notice
of it: that is another matter. For men are deaf, mind you, Mudface—deaf when
they do not wish to hear and to remember—and deafest of all when their close
danger is ended with a short peace, and they want to believe that war will not
come back.” (Secret Lake 360)

Lofting may be alluding to the “short peace” between the two world wars and
his own frustration as he raced to make a case against warfare and other forms
of cruelty in the face of a second war. Lofting finishes the series he devoted
a lifetime to writing with nothing less than a revaluation of the grand sweep
of Earth’s history, and yet adopting this long view only gives rise to despair.

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 335

If disputes between nations or between people and animals are fought on
ideological grounds, they result in wars and the swinging pendulum of first
one side then the other triumphing over and oppressing its opponent. Such
despair is a typically modern response, for, as Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane comment, the “crisis” of modernism “often involves an unhappy
view of history” (26).
Although the series is enriched philosophically by the mythic overtones
of this last book, Hugh Lofting finally returns to the position he espoused at
the beginning of the series and especially in those most successful books at
its heart. The only satisfactory answer to the problem of cruelty to animals is
carnivalesque acts of kindness that temporarily offset the imbalance of power
rather than fundamentally reverse it through violent revolutionary means. In
a series in which travel to exotic locales figures prominently, it is still home and
what it represents that ground the novels’ values. Five of the novels end with the
characters comfortably ensconced in the Puddleby-on-the-Marsh household
and three others with them turning homeward in anticipation of its comforts.
Taking tea together, sharing stories, and engaging in lively discussions around
the family hearth are the greatest pleasures. By listening to the varied voices
of animals and creating a new cross-species conception of family in his home,
Doctor Dolittle transforms menagerie into ménage and models a new way of
living that radiates out from Puddleby to the rest of the world.

***

Notes
1. Following Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake (1948), which saw publication a year after
Lofting’s death, two more Dolittle books were issued posthumously: Doctor Dolittle and
the Green Canary (1950) and Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures (1952). Because the
structure of these books was not overseen by Lofting—they were crafted by his sister-
in-law, Olga Fricker, from material published earlier in serial form—I do not consider
them part of the organic progression of the series.
2. Doctor Dolittle’s adventures are hard to place precisely in time. Edward Blishen notes
the vagueness and inconsistency of the dates alluded to in the text of the novels. For
instance, Jip the dog is friends with the portrait painter George Morland, who died
in 1804, but reference is also made to the Crimean War, which occurred 1853–56. As
Blishen argues, the fluidity of the references to time “is part of the magic of the Dolittle
world, and seems unlikely to have been due to carelessness. The sense of the Doctor as
an immortal is established by the typical device of being at once precise and improbable
in this matter of dates” (20).
3. Modern writers are scathingly critical of their Victorian predecessors. The Norton
Anthology of English Literature notes that “the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked
by the publication in 1918 of that classic of ironic debunking, Eminent Victorians by

336 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

Lytton Strachey” (Abrams et al. 1898). It may not be coincidental timing that this attack
against Victorian values was written, as Paul Fussell points out, “during the long years of
heartbreaking frontal assaults on the German line” (188) in World War I, circumstances
that doubtless reinforced Strachey’s determination to criticize his cultural forebears.
4. Though never a major character, Sarah becomes “a kind of touchstone of stuffy
respectability” (Blishen 23) in her brief appearances later in the series, registering
disapproval when her brother takes up the circus business or burgles a pet shop dressed
in drag.
5. By my count, Doctor Dolittle is thrown into prison or jail six times during the
series, chased by the police but not arrested on another occasion, and arrested but not
imprisoned on yet another. As a kind of inside joke, Lofting has Doctor Dolittle engineer
his own final imprisonment in Doctor Dolittle’s Return to furnish a quiet place to write
a book. On this one occasion, he has to work hard to be arrested, and then the floor
and foundations of the jail are destroyed by the many burrowing animals who hear of
their hero’s incarceration. We should also remember that one of the Doctor’s closest
human companions, Matthew Mugg, a poacher and occasional burglar, is no stranger
to the inside of jails.
6. He loses, refuses, or gives away great fortunes on several occasions. For example, in
Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office he impulsively wraps valuable pearls in a twist of paper and
sends them by swallow mail to pay a farmer in Lincolnshire for some brussels sprouts.
Dab-Dab the duck comments, “Did anyone ever see a man who could find so many
objections to getting rich?” (188–89). In Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake he refuses
to carry away any of the ancient treasure of King Mashtu with him, saying, “All this
treasure has been stolen, taken from conquered kings and murdered princes. These
gold coins cry out with the voice of suffering—of innocent men, of women and even
children slaughtered in war. Money! Bah, it is the curse of the world!” (356).
7. Although Hugh Lofting was for ten years educated at the Jesuit school Mount St.
Mary’s in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, it is difficult to say exactly how his Roman Catholic
upbringing and schooling affected his writing.
8. Story is the only one of the novels to begin with the oral tradition formula “once upon
a time.” Many critics have dealt in passing with the difference in style represented by the
first book in the series (Blishen 21; Schmidt 27; MacCann 368; Blount 198; Carpenter
and Prichard 154). Wolfgang Schlegelmilch’s essay, “From Fairy Tale to Children’s Novel,”
looks closely at this change in style between the first and second novels of the series.
9. For a discussion of Mary Poppins as carnivalesque, see my article “Animal Carnivals:
A Bakhtinian Reading of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and P. L. Travers’s Mary
Poppins.”
10. The alienation from nature that accompanies human maturation, including the loss
of a language shared with animals, is the subject of “John and Barbara’s Story” (Mary
Poppins) and “The New One” (Mary Poppins Comes Back).
11. The oracular speech of the Hamadryad in “Full Moon” asserts that “We are all made
of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance
composes us—the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star—we
are all one, all moving to the same end” (Mary Poppins 172–73). The equally arcane
Terrapin in “High Tide”—Travers having chosen this reptile as her font of ancient
wisdom several years before Lofting’s Mudface the turtle arrived on the scene—speaks,

Anxieties of an Animal Rights Activist 337

too, of the shared origins of life as well as its source in the sea: “Up from my dark
root, through the waters, the earth rose with its flowers and forests. The man and the
mountain sprang from it. The great beasts, too, and the birds of the air” (Mary Poppins
Opens the Door 169).
12. Six of the Dolittle novels are narrated by Tommy Stubbins: Voyages, Zoo, Garden,
Moon, Return, and Secret Lake.
13. On the burglary of the pet shop, Schmidt writes, “Dolittle is daring and heroic and
comic and awkward all at the same time, an uncommon juxtaposition of attributes that
typifies Dolittle” (83). I would argue that this anarchic mix characterizes the Doctor
here, in the middle of the series, but not later on.

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