“Dolittle” Opens in Theaters This Friday; Killingworth Author Hugh Lofting and the Great War Origins of Dr. Dolittle

By Philip R. Devlin.

Once upon a time, many years ago when our grandfathers were little children—there was a doctor; and his name was Dolittle—John Dolittle, M.D…He lived in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. All the folks, young and old, knew him well by sight. And whenever he walked down the street in his high hat everyone would say, “There goes the Doctor!–He’s a clever man.” And the dogs and the children would all run up and follow behind him; and even the crows that lived in the church-tower would caw and nod their heads.

So begins The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), the first of twelve books in the Doctor Dolittle series written by onetime Killingworth resident Hugh Lofting, who was born 134 years ago this week on January 14, 1886. Lofting, a transplanted Brit, came to Massachusetts at age 18 to study engineering at MIT.  After World War I broke out in 1914, Lofting, whose mother was Irish (maiden name Gannon), joined the Irish Guards of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) as a lieutenant. As a frontline unit, the Irish Guards participated in many of the fiercest battles of the Great War. Rudyard Kipling’s only son, John, was also a lieutenant with the Irish Guards. John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Hugh Lofting was wounded in the thigh by shrapnel from a hand grenade in 1918 and nearly died. Before being wounded, however, Lofting had written several letters from the trenches in France to his two young children: Elizabeth Mary (b. in 1913) and Colin MacMahon (b. in 1915). As Lofting could not bear to report the daily misery and terror of life in the trenches to his two children, these letters described an imaginary, happy existence of a remarkable man who could talk to all animals in a world of peace and happiness—a kind of “animal whisperer.”

Following his convalescence in England, Lofting and his young family sailed to America—soon bound for Killingworth, CT. Lofting’s wife, Flora (Small), had encouraged him to expand his wartime letters to their children into a book. Lofting agreed and had a fortuitous encounter on the boat to America with Cecil Roberts, a poet and novelist of some renown. Having read the early version of Doctor Dolittle’s story, Roberts recommended the manuscript to his publisher, Frederick Stokes. The result? Stokes published The Story of Doctor Dolittle in 1920. Lofting’s second book—and, I think, his best—was entitled The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle. It was written in Killingworth and published in 1922; in fact, at least eight of the ten books in the series were written in Killingworth.

The John Newbery Award has been given every January to the author who has made the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature in the previous year. Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle won the prestigious Newbery Medal in 1923 in the second year of that award’s existence. In her book called The History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, author Irene Smith says the following:

At the 1923 conference, after Hugh Lofting had accepted the second Newbery medal, Mr. R.R. Bowker asked how Doctor Dolittle had originated. Lofting said that at the front he had been so impressed by the behavior of horses and mules under fire that he invented the little doctor to do for them what was not and could not be done for them in real life.

Clearly, Lofting, an animal lover since childhood, had attempted to turn something bad (the war) into something good (the Doctor Dolittle series).

Though winning one of the most prestigious awards for children’s literature, Lofting admitted later in life to being shocked at being pigeonholed as a “juveniles” writer. He thought that there ought to be “a category of seniles to offset the epithet.”  I think he’s got a point. Personally, I often find clever and profound ideas in Lofting’s writings that can have great appeal to an adult reader as well. Consider, for example, the end of chapter 9 in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. Here, Tommy Stubbins, the narrator, feels the seductive and motivational power of the human capacity of dreams when he visits the Doctor’s garden:

It was the kind of a garden where you could wander and explore for days and days–always coming upon something new, always glad to find the old spots over again. That first time that I saw the Doctor’s garden I was so charmed by it that I felt I would like to live in it–always and always– and never go outside of it again. For it had everything within its walls to give happiness, to make living pleasant–to keep the heart at peace. It was the Garden of Dreams.

You don’t have to be young to feel the appeal here and to remember that adults, too, have a need to dream.

Consider also my favorite passage in the book, a conversation between Polynesia the parrot and Tommy Stubbins in chapter 8. Tommy had just indicated that he would like to grow up and be like Doctor Dolittle. Polynesia speaks:

But listen: are you a good noticer? Do you notice things well?…  “Well that,” said Polynesia, brushing some crumbs off the corner of the table with her left foot–“that is what you call powers of observation–noticing the small things about birds and animals: the way they walk and move their heads and flip their wings; the way they sniff the air and twitch their whiskers and wiggle their tails. You have to notice all those little things if you want to learn animal language. For you see, lots of the animals hardly talk at all with their tongues; they use their breath or their tails or their feet instead. But that is the first thing to remember: being a good noticer is terribly important…

Simply put but,oh, so true: being “a good noticer” is terribly important. l