The Story of Doctor Dolittle; The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle; Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office; When We Were Very Young; Winniethe-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner
IT’S EXTRAORDINARY TO THINK THAT THE IRREPRESSIBLY sunny Doctor Dolittle series, about an animal-loving country doctor whose pet parrot teaches him the language of animals, came directly out of the mud and despair of the Western Front. Berkshire-born Hugh Lofting (1886–1947) had lived overseas from the age of eighteen (he studied civil engineering at MIT and traveled for work), but dutifully returned home to enlist in the Irish Guards for the Great War. The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920),* was written in serial form in the letters Lofting sent home from the trenches to his children.
“My children at home wanted letters from me – and they wanted them with illustrations rather than without,” he later recalled. “There seemed very little of interest to write to youngsters from the Front; the news was either too horrible or too dull. And it was all censored. One thing, however, that kept forcing itself on my attention was the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists.”
The war, in Lofting’s view of it, changed what children’s literature should be. In a 1924 article for The Nation, he wrote:
The boy may not have heard his father boasting of the glories of a crack regiment, but he has read a whole heap of so-called Children’s Classics in which highly painted heroes galloped, glorious and victorious, across bloody battlefields. That kind of battlefield has gone for good – it is still bloody, but you don’t gallop. And since that kind of battlefield has gone, that kind of book – for children – should go too.
It’s as if, surrounded by death and the abuse of power on an international scale, Lofting set out to create a bounded space in his imagination on which none of that could possibly impinge. He succeeded. From this hellish early-twentieth-century landscape Lofting invented a collection of idyllic stories set in the early nineteenth century. Doctor Dolittle’s character, and the world he inhabits, is one of shining benignity.
The language of the books is simple and direct and full of warm humor, and there’s a pleasing childishness in the reduplicative names of his animal friends – Dab-Dab the duck, Too-Too the owl, Chee-Chee the monkey, Gub-Gub the pig, as well as Polynesia the parrot, Jip the dog and of course the courteous but shy PushmiPullyu, an exotic creature with a head and a set of front legs at either end of its body. Here’s a delightful and slightly surreal world in which porpoises can be dispatched to fetch a cargo of onions, a monarch uses a lollipop for a lorgnette, and Gub-Gub – feeling left out because he isn’t getting any post – will send himself a whole series of letters full of banana skins.
The only note of sharpness in the books is a disappointment in humanity itself. As Polynesia the parrot remarks early on: “I was thinking about people. People make me sick. They think they are so wonderful.” There’s no human achievement – be it reading the seas, predicting the weather, or carrying the post – that an animal can’t do better, and do better without boasting about it either. Social prestige and worldly goods are nothing to the Doctor. In the third book, he fastidiously returns some priceless pearls to a spoonbill whose children are fond of using them as playthings. As he tells his sister, with childlike ingenuousness, when she complains that “none of the best people will have you for a doctor” if he insists on keeping so many animals (there has been an unfortunate incident with a patient sitting on a hedgehog): “But I like the animals better than the “best people”.”
John Dolittle himself – “this funny little man with the kind smiling face,” equipped always with a shabby high hat and a black doctor’s bag – is a sainted innocent. Such is his love for animals that, when we meet him in the first book, having started out as a universally respected doctor in the idyllic provincial town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, he is on the verge of destitution. He has filled the house with more and more pets and his patients have deserted him. He sells his piano (forcing the white mice who lived inside it to move to a bureau-drawer), then sells his good brown suit.
And now, when he walked down the street in his high hat, people would say to one another: ‘There goes John Dolittle, MD! There was a time when he was the best known doctor in the West Country – Look at him now – He hasn’t any money and his stockings are full of holes!’
But the dogs and the cats and the children still ran up and followed him through the town – the same as they had done when he was rich.
Migratory birds carry reports of his kindness worldwide. After Polynesia the parrot has taught our hero to speak to animals, the plot of the first book follows the Doctor’s adventures as he crosses the seas in a borrowed boat to save the monkeys of Africa from a deadly pandemic. He puts in place a vaccination program and all the animals, including the initially reluctant lion, muck in to help. Here is an account of the animal world from which even predation is almost wholly absent, or only very briefly mentioned. The lion really does lie down with the lamb.
A crocodile whose toothache the Doctor cures sleeps in the fishpond at the bottom of the garden, having “promised not to eat the fish,” and remains “gentle as a kitten.” When a shark politely volunteers to eat some pirates whom Dr Dolittle and his crew have bested, the Doctor declines. The pirates are instead condemned to live out their days as birdseed-farmers. An island thought to be populated by terrible dragons is, in fact, full of amiable vegetarians who blow mist from their noses to frighten off human visitors. “We are,” confesses one of these beasts, “really more harmless than sheep.”
Not only do the books present a cosy vision of the natural world, they offer a cosy vision of Englishness. For all its implied mild snobbery, Puddleby remains an English idyll no less than Tolkien’s Shire or Kenneth Grahame’s riverbank. The Doctor takes his Englishness, in his high hat, wherever he goes. At the floating post office he establishes for the King of the African microstate of Fantippo (headquarters of an international Swallow Mail, staffed by birds, whose European hub is Puddleby) “tea was served to everybody – the clerks and the customers as well – regularly at four o’clock every afternoon, with cucumber sandwiches on Sundays.”
The swallows pine for “solid English buildings” to build their nests in. When Cheapside the cockney sparrow arrives in Fantippo he reports, like some avian Rupert Brooke, on the state of the garden back home. Puddleby is the secure hearth from which the Doctor and his friends are regularly exiled in their adventures (which take them, eventually, as far as the moon). It was an Englishness seen from abroad for the author, too. After being nearly killed at the front and invalided out of the army, he emigrated with his young family to Connecticut in 1919. He lived the rest of his life in the States, dying in California in 1947.
Doctor Dolittle himself is not a child, but he is childlike (short and round of body, short on hair, oversized of head), and he speaks to children on the level. Tommy Stubbins, the narrator of the second book (The Voyages of Dr Dolittle, 1922), is taken on by the Doctor as an apprentice, and even on first meeting (Stubbins is barely ten) the boy is struck by the way he “called me “Stubbins” instead of “Tommy” or “little lad” (I did so hate to be called “little lad”!) This man seemed to begin right away treating me as though I were a grown-up friend of his.”
Many of the Doctor’s attitudes are progressive for the 1920s, let alone the 1830s when the stories are set. Unsurprisingly, he’s ahead of his time on animal rights. “A bullfight is a stupid, cruel, disgusting business,” he says, before tricking the people of a Spanish town into abolishing the practice altogether. “If I had my way, Stubbins,” he tells his disciple at another point, “there wouldn’t be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They’re never happy […] You can see it in their eyes, dreaming – dreaming always of the great open spaces where they were born.” A fish reporting on his life in an aquarium describes crowds “looking in at us through the glass – with their mouths open, like half-witted flounders. We got so sick of it that we used to open our mouths back at them; and this they seemed to think highly comical.”
Lofting is also hip to the way human greed, in the form of extractive capitalism, ruins the environment. The Doctor discovered the North Pole in 1809 but kept his discovery secret on the request of the polar bears, who “told me there was a great deal of coal there, buried beneath the snow. […] So would I please keep it a secret. Because once people began coming up there to start coal-mines, their beautiful white country would be spoiled.”
When he is, very reluctantly, made the King of Spider-Monkey Island, he essentially invents a bicycling monarchy: “if he must be a king he meant to be a thoroughly democratic one, that is a king who is chummy and friendly with his subjects and doesn’t put on airs. And when he drew up the plans for the city of New Popsipetel he had no palace shown of any kind. A little cottage in a back street was all that he had provided for himself.”
The worldview of the books, then, leans against chauvinism and exploitation. Lofting even seems to have imperialism’s number. The King of the Jolliginki doesn’t lock the Doctor and his companions in his prison because he’s a cannibal or a savage, but because bitter experience has warned him to mistrust the white man:
‘You may not travel through my lands,’ said the King. ‘Many years ago a white man came to these shores; and I was very kind to him. But after he had dug holes in the ground to get the gold, and killed all the elephants to get their ivory tusks, he went away secretly in his ship – without so much as saying “Thank you.” Never again shall a white man travel through the lands of Jolliginki.’
The Doctor avers that “these Indians were ignorant of many of the things that quite small white children know – though it is also true that they knew a lot that white grown-ups never dreamed of.” The greatest naturalist in the world, he says, is not Charles Darwin but the Red Indian Long Arrow, and when he meets Long Arrow he greets him as a peer.
Yet Lofting does include racial stereotypes of a sort that are now problematic. The native characters, in his illustrations, are thicklipped darky caricatures, and phrases of the sort that would have been unremarkable in Lofting’s age and milieu – “We’ll have to work like niggers,” for instance, or allusions to pawning “gew-gaws at that Jew’s shop” – have not aged well. Nor, notoriously, has the Doctor’s second escape from the Jolliginki in the first book.
The king’s son Prince Bumpo, reading a book of fairytales, sighs aloud: “If only I were a white prince!” The Doctor arranges to dye him white in exchange for his freedom: “The Prince’s face had turned as white as snow, and his eyes, which had been mudcoloured, were a manly gray!” As the Dolittle party makes their escape, the Doctor admits: “I feel sorry about Bumpo. I’m afraid the medicine I used will never last. Most likely he will be as black as ever when he wakes up in the morning…” Without any great fuss, and without any great loss to the reader, modern reissues of the books have tended to quietly excise this subplot and other racial slurs. That seems to me a sensible solution.
Lofting, in his writing for children, retreated from and repudiated the world that had shaped his young manhood. So did another veteran of the Great War, Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1956). The youngest son of a provincial schoolmaster, and already a rising literary star when he went to fight, Milne served as a signals officer on the Somme in 1916. Invalided home with what was described as “trench fever,” he wrote in his autobiography: “I should like to put asterisks here, and then write: ‘It was in 1919 that I found myself once again a civilian.’ For it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.”*
Just a few years after Doctor Dolittle set out on his voyages, Milne created, in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), a world even more fantastical and unthreatening, more resistant to modernity, than Puddlebyon-the-Marsh. In literary terms, and in terms of his conception of childhood, Milne is more like a victorian writer than an interwar one.
His first poetry collection for children, When We Were Very Young (1924), privileges sound over sense in the confounding and delighting manner of Edward Lear. Its poems are set in a weightless world of kings and queens, nannies and nurses and dairymaids, top-hatted doctors, and sailing ships, that belong halfway between a fairytale or nursery rhyme and Milne’s own victorian childhood.
It was a colossal hit right away. Two months after publication, there were more than 40,000 copies in print, and more than a quarter of a million copies were sold in the three years that followed. Even Rudyard Kipling – still a towering figure in children’s writing – wrote Milne a fan letter; to which Milne responded: “If you can remember what you once said to Tennyson, you will know what your letter makes me want to say to you. I am proud that you like the verses.” (Kipling had told Tennyson that “When a private is praised by his General he does not presume to thank him, but fights the better afterwards.”)
Writing in the 1950s, the critic Geoffrey Grigson, who deplored its niceness and what he saw as its cosy middle-class milieu, nevertheless touched on an aspect of its appeal to the people who bought it to read to their children:
Children, in my experience, of every generation since and including the Twenties, have found the poems nauseating, and fascinating. In fact, they were poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies – for parents with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover.*
This misses, I think, the observed truth of the children in the poems: they chafe at constraint, they are wilful and whimsical, and they live in the moment. When in “vespers” Christopher Robin is saying his prayers, he’s always getting distracted and getting it wrong. The speaker of “Politeness” dutifully parrots the formulae of good manners but admits how wearisome he finds them. Undoubtedly, though, “a war to forget” and “a childhood to recover” will have been powerful selling-points to the book’s first readers-aloud.
Any peril in these poems – the bears waiting to pounce on children who step on pavement-cracks, for instance – is of the mild variety. And the childhood it idealizes is a space held apart from materialism. In “Puppy And I,” the speaker of the poem meets a series of characters on errands to the village to pick up food and is invited to accompany them. He turns them all down until he meets a puppy headed for the hills on no greater errand than “to roll and play.” In “Market Square,” the speaker finds his pockets filling with money as the stanzas go by, but none of the stalls is selling a rabbit, which is what he actually wants to buy. When finally, pockets empty, he strolls onto the “old-gold common,” he sees rabbits in abundance.
Even if some of the more whimsical poems do cross the line into cutesy, it’s a work of extraordinary technical command. “James, James, Morrison, Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree” survives in part because of the comic way that it inverts the child–adult relationship: the child sternly scolding his mother for going down to the end of the town unaccompanied, the archetypal childish fear of abandonment turned reassuringly on its head. But what really makes it work is its metrical virtuosity. The humbling of Sir Brian Botany – which, pace Grigson, was very much in keeping with Milne’s egalitarian politics – is another extraordinary feat of metrical precision.
Milne himself made no bones about this. A well-established comic writer and assistant editor of Punch even before the war, he was a sophisticated and urbane figure whose acquaintances included H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie, and who locked horns with T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene. When We Were Very Young, he wrote, “is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously, even though he is taking it into the nursery.” Nevertheless, he was to come to regret the way in which the success of his children’s writing overshadowed his other work.
Overshadow it, though, it did. Edward Bear and Christopher Robin make their first appearances in When We Were Very Young, but they were to reach their most perfect expression in the two books of stories that followed. The world of Winnie-the-Pooh and its sequel is even more remote from our own than that of When We Were Very Young, which at least contains houses and streets and people with jobs. It’s a perfectly sealed-off universe. Only Christopher Robin can ever leave it, and the poignancy is that, in the end, he must.
What actually happens in the stories is the least of them. A bear and a piglet go in search of a woozle and don’t find it. A bear falls into his own heffalump trap. A depressed donkey gets an empty pot and a burst balloon for his birthday. A baby kangaroo falls in the water and is fished out. A donkey falls in the water and is fished out. A wooden lean-to moves from one side of a field to another. A bouncy creature discovers that it likes extract of malt. Pooh, apparently discovering the concept of object-permanence, invents a new game. Tone of voice, dialogue, and the surface play of language are all.
Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner are the most obvious descendants of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and arguably the only direct ones, in the canon. Like Alice, there are layers to the fiction: the telling of the story is inscribed in the story itself. The opening pages of Winnie-the-Pooh introduce Edward Bear, also known as Winnie-the-Pooh (“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what “ther’ means?”), and who inexplicably lives “under the name of Sanders,” coming down the stairs “bump. bump, bump” behind Christopher Robin.
The narrator, at Christopher Robin’s request, starts to tell Pooh a story about himself. A few sentences in, Pooh himself (or, perhaps, Christopher Robin speaking in “a growly voice”), interrupts the narrator. The narrator goes on, embarking on the story of Pooh’s abortive attempt to steal honey from bees by ascending under a balloon disguised as a small cloud.
He crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose, and began to think again. And the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin.
(‘Was that me?’ said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.
‘That was you.’ Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.)
So Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived behind a green door in another part of the forest.
‘Good morning, Christopher Robin,’ he said.
‘Good morning, Winnie-the-Pooh,’ said you.
And we’re off, plunged into an enclosed world that is the figure for an idealized childhood – one in which Pooh and his friends have absolute freedom of action and nothing important to do. Like the world of Wodehouse’s fiction, Milne’s forest is a place of complete safety, shadowed only dimly by the awareness that there’s a larger world outside it. It’s so funny, and so inventive, and so selfcontained, that earnestly applying the tools of literary criticism to it risks, as was said of P.G. Wodehouse, taking a spade to a soufflé.
Inasmuch as it records a response rather than an analysis, then, Dorothy Parker’s famous verdict on The House at Pooh Corner – “Tonstant Weader fwowed up” – avoids this hazard. It’s also a little unfair. The stories are sentimental, but they are not quite saccharine. Eeyore’s sulfurously passive-aggressive outlook, and the characters’ small vanities and self-deceptions, shade the whole thing with irony. The different animals are psychological types (we all know an Eeyore or a Tigger), but they also manage to be winningly and memorably particular.*
The connection to Alice – a spikier and wilder text, but a kindred spirit – can be seen especially in the absurdist wordplay. There’s a lot of thinking that goes on in the Pooh books, but almost none of it results in anything that resembles a thought; and there’s a lot of talking, but almost nothing meaningful is ever said. Words are unmoored from things. Meanings are turned on their heads. Sentences deconstruct themselves on the go: “Everybody said ‘Howdo-you-do’ to Eeyore, and Eeyore said that he didn’t, not to notice, and then they sat down.” “Tigger kept disappearing, and then when you thought he wasn’t there, there he was again, saying, ‘I say, come on,’ and before you could say anything, there he wasn’t.”; “The more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn’t there.”
In the Snark and Jabberwock tradition, searches are undertaken for non-existent creatures: “It is either Two Woozles and one, as it might be, Wizzle, or Two, as it might be, Wizzles and one, if so it is, Woozle.” Traps are laid for Heffalumps and Backsons are at large:
‘Have you seen a Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That’s what I came to ask you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is just a –’
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it’s really more of a–’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the–’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what they’re like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit.
It’s easy enough to see why philosophers of a whimsical cast have found material in the apparently simple adventures of Christopher Robin and his brigade of stuffed animals – most notoriously in Benjamin Hoff’s 1982 The Tao of Pooh. The great divide between doing and being is a constant presence in the books, and Pooh, like a little bodhisattva, has a head blissfully empty of self-consciousness.
When they are perfectly in tune, Christopher Robin shares Pooh’s ability to empty the world of conscious meaning. As the book closes, he’s in an in-between space where he can still access the world of the forest and feel “all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn’t matter a bit, as it didn’t on such a happy afternoon.” The sort of “knowledge” that doesn’t require you to know anything is available to him: “he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell Pooh, who wasn’t quite sure about some of it.”
The world of the forest is that world in which, in its purest form, it’s possible to live without thinking: to exist as yourself is total knowledge. But, of course, Christopher Robin grows up and stuffed toys don’t. He’s going to school, where twice nineteen will matter, and going nowhere and doing nothing will dwindle into memory.
There’s an echo of Carroll’s envoi – the White Knight’s melancholy farewell to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass – in the closing pages of The House at Pooh Corner. Christopher Robin knights Pooh:
Then he began to think of all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back from wherever he was going to, and how muddling it would be for a Bear of very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. ‘So, perhaps,’ he said sadly to himself, ‘Christopher Robin won’t tell me any more,’ and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.
The notoriously tear-jerking pay-off – “So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” – repeats Carroll’s fantasy of capturing childhood, with its irrecoverable set of loving relationships, in a frozen bubble of time. That’s the “golden afternoon,” the space in which Alice will always be “moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.” Here, though, the patient abandoned knight is not the adult helplessly watching a child un-selve as she grows up; it’s the child, or inner child, losing a parent who is also a friend and a peer.
Like the beautiful garden Alice glimpses, Hundred Acre Wood is a metaphor; but, unlike that garden, it’s also a real place. You can stand there. In fact, a commemorative plaque does stand in Ashdown Forest, which inspired the landscape of the Pooh stories; Milne first visited the forest as a child, and he lived and wrote the Pooh books at Cotchford Farm nearby. As he was later to say, it was “Gill’s Lap that inspired Galleon’s Lap, the group of pine trees on the other side of the main road that became the Six Pine Trees, the bridge over the river at Posingford that became Pooh-sticks Bridge.” The bachelor inhabitants of the forest, with the exception of Owl and Rabbit, were based on Christopher’s stuffed animals – Pooh, Eeyore and Piglet were all toys he owned, and Roo, Kanga, and Tigger, as in the books, were latecomers.
With his own happy childhood, Milne was not, unlike so many children’s writers, writing from a wound; but he did, like so many children’s writers, create one. Even though Christopher Robin isn’t the central figure in the Pooh stories – he most often swoops in at the end of an adventure to sort things out with an exclamation of “How I love you, Pooh!” or “Silly old bear!” – Milne’s only child Christopher became a celebrity “original” no less than vivian Burnett. In 1934 an American magazine named him in a list of the most famous children in the world, alongside Yehudi Menuhin, Crown Prince Michael of Romania, and Princess Elizabeth. As Christopher was to recall, he “was beginning to be what he was later to become, a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up.” The fame of his father’s books caused him to be badly bullied at school, and he described the “toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment” that “vespers” – “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” – caused him.
“It seemed to me,” he wrote in his autobiography, “almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.”* It was not just his accidental celebrity that shaped his reaction. Christopher speculated later, looking back on a family holiday after the early death of Alan’s closest brother, Kenneth, that his father, “I now suspect, saw me as a sort of twin brother, perhaps a sort of reincarnation of Ken… He needed me to escape from being fifty.”
Estranged from both his parents as a young adult, Christopher Milne was only able to make peace with his legacy by taking control of his own story in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places, which served “to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin, and to my surprise and pleasure I found myself standing beside them in the sunshine able to look them both in the eye.”* Even in the most effervescently innocent of children’s stories, then, there’s something at stake. An adult, writing toward childhood, is always in some sense serving an adult need, and that can come at a psychic cost. As the literary historian Peter Hunt puts it, the “collision between adult writer and child reader [is] the central conundrum of children’s literature.”†
* Or to give it its full, whimsically eighteenth-century subtitle, The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed.
* A.A. Milne, It’s Too Late Now, [p].
* Quoted in Thwaite, A.A. Milne: His Life, [p].
* The creatures of the forest are a bit of a Rorschach blot. One (anachronistic) theory sees the toys as representing different mental health conditions – Eeyore as a depressive, Piglet as suffering anxiety, Tigger as having ADHD and so on. The writer Nicola Shulman identifies them with Romantic poets.
* Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places, [p].
* Christopher Milne, The Path Through the Trees (McLellan and Stuart, 1979), [p].
† Hunt, op. cit., [p].