No one could say that the books have grown quaint or stale just ask my third graders. The doctor’s centennial has gone unnoticed. I didn’t read Lofting’s books to my son most of you probably didn’t either. Doctor Dolittle’s name might be remembered no better than Walpole’s own. If it weren’t for the movie versions - first starring Rex Harrison, then Eddie Murphy and, this past winter, Robert Downey Jr.
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. “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. 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?” 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. 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. 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 caught up with the doctor again this spring, when school went virtual. 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. 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.
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