Dr. Dolittle is the main character in a series of fifteen books published between 1920 and 1952. He is able to speak animal languages and goes on various adventures with his animal companions.

The stories have been adapted into films on a number of occasions. You might be familiar with this one:

However, other than the name and the language skill, there is not a lot in common with Lofting’s original stories.

More recently, Robert Downey Jr. has donned Dr. Dolittle’s top hat in a rendition that captures a bit more of the original book’s adventure feeling.

The character of Dr. John Dolittle first appeared in letters that the author Hugh Lofting illustrated and sent to his children from the trenches of World War I. Dolittle is a physician who feels uncomfortable with humans and prefers his animal companions whose language he learns to speak.

Read: The Story of Doctor Dolittle – chapters 1,2, 5,6, 10,11, and 12

The next book in the series, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle published in 1922 won the second Newberry Award Medal ever given out. In this book, nearly five times as long, a young boy meets the Doctor and goes on an adventure looking for a missing naturalist, Long Arrow, an example of the noble savage stereotype.

The Dolittle stories were out of print for a while but were reissued in 1988, changing the illustrations that you saw in the above and removing some language.

Philip Nel gives a rundown of this and questions it raises here. (please read)

While I have not yet looked through this, it appears that another edited and newly illustrated version was recently released.

How did you feel reading through the first couple of chapters here? What about the next few? What do you think of attempts to ‘fix’ this text? What about the Kipling texts? Do you think that you can separate a text from its author and original context such as with colonialism? (Optional response – you’ll be writing a more sizeable one at the end of the module, these thoughts might help.)