The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
by Illustrated by the author. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1922. 12mo. xiv+364 pp. $2.50
NOT since Lewis Carroll continued Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through the LookingGlass, has an author responded to an encore more successfully than Hugh Lofting in his second volume of the biography of Doctor Dolittle. The sterling qualities of the Kindly One, as the good doctor is dubbed by the discriminating Popsipetels, shine undimmed through the adventurous pages of the Voyages. The fresh and the familiar invest this happy sequel with a blended charm. Polynesia the parrot is here, with all her old flair for leadership; faithful Jip, with his gold collar and his capacity for meeting an emergency; Dab Dab, the perfect duck of a housekeeper, and the African prince, Bumpo, now matriculated at Oxford where he likes Cicero — ‘ Yes, I think Cicero’s fine — so simultaneous. By the way, they tell me his son is rowing for our college next year — charming fellow.’
In the earlier book, the doctor’s humanitarian impulses are in the ascendant — the vaccination of monkeys may surely be called humanitarian by courtesy. In the Voyages, his preoccupations are linguistic and philological, and we follow his methods of passionate research into the sources of the shellfish language through the hybrid soliloquies of the Silver Fidgit who learned his English during an enforced sojourn in a public aquarium.
But the adventures of this twentieth-century descendant of Sir John Mandeville and Baron Munchausen are not all in research. If Darwin, on the Voyage of the Beagle, had discovered Spidermonkey Island and played the Promethean rôle to the fireless Popsipetels, who can say what the effect might have been upon his scientific temperament? For the central adventure, toward which the others mount, occurs, modern fashion, in the heart of Doctor Dolittle, where the scholar and the utopist-administrator come to grips, and he makes his great decision, laying the wooden crown of the Popsipetels upon the beach of Spidermonkey Island, to ‘tiptoe incognito’ back to the seclusion of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh.
FLORENCE CONVERSE.
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