The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting ~ 1920. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, 1962. Foreword by Hugh Walpole. Illustrated by Hugh Lofting. Hardcover. 223 pages.
Oh boy.
I don’t think I have the resources (time or energy wise) to do this topic – racism in “beloved” vintage children’s books – justice. But I don’t feel right in just passing it over undiscussed, either. So here I go. Bear with me.
The Story of Doctor Dolittle, based on a series of illustrated letters the author wrote from the Great War trenches to his young sons back home in England, was published in book form in 1920, to immediate popularity.
There’s an awful lot to like in here. Written in simple, frequently staccato sentences, the book introduces us to Doctor Dolittle, M.D., who is a prosperous and well-liked physician in the small town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. The good Doctor has a fondness for animals, and as he progressively fills his home with creatures, a tipping point is reached when the animal residents start causing problems with patients. (An elderly lady sits upon a prickly hedgehog and so on.) Business falls off, until Docotor Dolittle’s only client remaining is the local Cat’s-meat-Man, who visits once a year at Christmas to get a remedy for indigestion.
What’s to be done? Doctor Dolittle is bemused. Then an epiphany occurs, when his pet parrot Polynesia, able to converse in English, initiates the Doctor into the mysteries of animal languages. He becomes a highly successful animal doctor, and all seems well, until the adoption of a crocodile sends all of his clients scurrying. Hard times again!
Then a message arrives from Africa. The monkeys there are all succumbing to some terrible disease. Will Doctor Dolittle come to the rescue? Of course he will! Borrowing a boat from a friendly sailor, off goes the Doctor, accompanied by several of his favourite pets, and also that troublesome crocodile, an ex organ-grinder’s monkey, and Polynesia the parrot, those last three intending to be repatriated to their native land.
As soon as they hit the shores of Africa, the reader’s real dilemma starts.
So far all has been quite good clean fun, but for a few casual era-expected racial slurs here and there easily glossed over by the keen-eyed adult reader-aloud – the usual, “We’ll have to work like n******!” pops up at least once.
The Doctor and his animal entourage crash their ship on the rocky shores of Africa, and head into the jungle, where they arrive at the mud palace of the King and Queen of Jolliginki. The King eyes the Doctor with displeasure.
“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.”
Then the King turned to some of the black men who were standing near and said, “Take away this medicine-man — with all his animals, and lock them up in my strongest prison.”
Fair enough, we’re thinking, though a bit hard on the beneficient Doctor. But he doesn’t need our concern, for he soon escapes, pursued by the soldiers of the King, and makes his way to the part of the jungle inhabited by the monkeys. There he easily cures the sick ones by means of wide scale vaccinating (Lofting doesn’t bother with pesky details such as how the Doctor comes by and/or manufactures this magical vaccine), and sets off to return to England.
The soldiers of Jolliginki soon capture him, and back into the dungeon he goes. This time he is rescued by a clever plot dreamt up by Polynesia (who is still hanging about, though she intends to stay in Africa when the Doctor departs) concerning the King’s son Prince Bumpo, who is enamoured of European fairy tales, and has been emotionally scarred by an episode so related.
Here, I’ll give you the works:
“Listen,” whispered the parrot, when John Dolittle’s face appeared: “Prince Bumpo is coming here to-night to see you. And you’ve got to find some way to turn him white. But be sure to make him promise you first that he will open the prison-door and find a ship for you to cross the sea in.”
“This is all very well,” said the Doctor. “But it isn’t so easy to turn a black man white. You speak as though he were a dress to be re-dyed. It’s not so simple. ‘Shall the leopard change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin,’ you know?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Polynesia impatiently. “But you must turn this coon white. Think of a way—think hard. You’ve got plenty of medicines left in the bag. He’ll do anything for you if you change his color. It is your only chance to get out of prison.”
“Well, I suppose it might be possible,” said the Doctor. “Let me see—,” and he went over to his medicine-bag, murmuring something about “liberated chlorine on animal-pigment—perhaps zinc-ointment, as a temporary measure, spread thick—”
Well, that night Prince Bumpo came secretly to the Doctor in prison and said to him,
“White Man, I am an unhappy prince. Years ago I went in search of The Sleeping Beauty, whom I had read of in a book. And having traveled through the world many days, I at last found her and kissed the lady very gently to awaken her—as the book said I should. ’Tis true indeed that she awoke. But when she saw my face she cried out, ‘Oh, he’s black!’ And she ran away and wouldn’t marry me—but went to sleep again somewhere else. So I came back, full of sadness, to my father’s kingdom. Now I hear that you are a wonderful magician and have many powerful potions. So I come to you for help. If you will turn me white, so that I may go back to The Sleeping Beauty, I will give you half my kingdom and anything besides you ask.”
“Prince Bumpo,” said the Doctor, looking thoughtfully at the bottles in his medicine-bag, “supposing I made your hair a nice blonde color—would not that do instead to make you happy?”
“No,” said Bumpo. “Nothing else will satisfy me. I must be a white prince.”
“You know it is very hard to change the color of a prince,” said the Doctor—“one of the hardest things a magician can do. You only want your face white, do you not?”
“Yes, that is all,” said Bumpo. “Because I shall wear shining armor and gauntlets of steel, like the other white princes, and ride on a horse.”
“Must your face be white all over?” asked the Doctor.
“Yes, all over,” said Bumpo—“and I would like my eyes blue too, but I suppose that would be very hard to do.”
“Yes, it would,” said the Doctor quickly. “Well, I will do what I can for you. You will have to be very patient though—you know with some medicines you can never be very sure. I might have to try two or three times. You have a strong skin—yes? Well that’s all right. Now come over here by the light—Oh, but before I do anything, you must first go down to the beach and get a ship ready, with food in it, to take me across the sea. Do not speak a word of this to any one. And when I have done as you ask, you must let me and all my animals out of prison. Promise—by the crown of Jolliginki!”
So the Prince promised and went away to get a ship ready at the seashore.
When he came back and said that it was done, the Doctor asked Dab-Dab to bring a basin. Then he mixed a lot of medicines in the basin and told Bumpo to dip his face in it.
The Prince leaned down and put his face in—right up to the ears.
He held it there a long time—so long that the Doctor seemed to get dreadfully anxious and fidgety, standing first on one leg and then on the other, looking at all the bottles he had used for the mixture, and reading the labels on them again and again. A strong smell filled the prison, like the smell of brown paper burning.
At last the Prince lifted his face up out of the basin, breathing very hard. And all the animals cried out in surprise.
For the Prince’s face had turned as white as snow, and his eyes, which had been mud-colored, were a manly gray!
Need I really say more?
Now in the 1960s, after The Story of Doctor Dolittle and its numerous sequels had been selling steadily for some decades without much comment – though presumably not being embraced by families-of-any-sort-of-colour-other-than-white – people started to say “Hey! This is kinda-sorta-maybe-a-little-bit RACIST!”
Yeah, you think?
And so the troublesome bits were bowdlerized.
And Doctor Dolittle continued on as a steady seller in his now altered form.
And I don’t quite know what to say about all of this, being in general quite firmly against censorship and alterations to text of older books in response to subsequent adjustments to social standards of acceptance.
But I didn’t read this to my own children back-in-the-day when they were little because it made me utterly queasy, and I shelved that whole Dolittle series which someone had given to me as “charming children’s tales!”, packing it away in a box which still sits in storage because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the books.
Does one release something like that back into the world to be acquired by other unsuspecting parents? Destroy them? Which feels wrong too, on a wholly different level, because I think we can get an awful lot out of keeping intact reminders of how we used to think in days gone by, and by being shocked by it (or not, as the case may be) examine our own social consciences.
So there it is, and here I sit, looking at what I’ve written, and at the clock (because I need to be somewhere else very shortly) and wondering if I should just hit “post” and see if this inspires any sort of engagement, or if you, like me, are still wondering how best to deal with this particular issue.
Your thoughts are, as always, exceedingly welcome!
I read this book when I was about 10 or 11 and must have missed the racial references.
Honestly, most of the book is very charming, and I don’t think the “racist” bits were meant to be in any way offensive. The entire series was revised in the early 1970s (with permission of the writer’s family) to take out the potentially offensive passages, so most of the books found on library and bookstore shelves since then are the “cleaned up” ones. You might have read one of these, perhaps? Or possibly just took in the Prince Bumpo incident as it was obviously meant, an amusing anecdote.
The copy I have is the original version, and it really stopped me in my tracks, as I read it with a nowadays set of expectations.
I think it was the sanitised version that I read.
The quoted passage is absolutely horrible. It does basically ruin the whole book. Even if it were not race-based, the message of wanting to turn into a different person in order to conform to some random princess’s idea of who you should be is already awful. It’s a pity this is the first in the series; as far as I recall the other books are not so bad.
Yes, there are issues beyond the race-based nature of this episode! The whole series was gone over and revised to eliminate the problematic terms and incidents in the early 1970s, so most of those on the shelves today will be missing this aspect, which is probably a Very Good Thing in this particular case. Most of the story is cheerful and charming – and you can even see some humour in the Prince Bumpo tale, as the Doctor anxiously waits to see the results of his experiment – but it crosses the line into offensiveness over and over, too – how about that last bit where the obviously inferior “muddy” brown eyes of the African prince turn to a “manly” (and presumably Handsome White Man-style) grey? Argh.
In total agreement with you. Do you leave the book as written? Throw it away? Bowdlerise it? One of the worst racist bits I ever read was in an Angela Brazil. The girl was very ill. The only doctor available was…shudder…black! Naturally, the girl refused to let him touch her. The doctor’s point of view is never mentioned but it hurts so much to think about it.
Oh, that’s absolutely dreadful. (The Angela Brazil episode.)
In the case of children’s books, if we insist on keeping them available (and nostalgia demands that we sometimes do) I think that bowdlerization is a reasonable compromise. Original editions might be best kept in the scholar’s section of the library; I don’t at all think we should destroy them. The discussion points they raise, and the snapshots provided of “acceptibility” in the past are very valuable.
But the potential for harm done to young readers – by implication as much as anything else – should be taken into consideration. In particular with “beloved” books which might be recommended without previewing. If one only saw the “Doctor Dolittle” title and knew that these were “classic” children’s stories, would one necessarily review the contents? There are lots of older editions still out there, and I don’t think most people are aware of the differences between the originals and the revised versions to check edition dates and such.
For now my “originals” will remain boxed up. I’m still not quite sure what to do with them. Perhaps turn them over to a vintage book seller at some point, with notes prominently inserted to point out the racist elements and recommend review before sharing with younger children? For with older children these well could be very useful learning tools, if they were prepped with info as to what they were about to encounter, and the history behind it.
Libraries often collect unexpected things. It might be worth checking that out.
‘A manly grey’? Intriguing. Reminds me of how Alfred Douglas used to tease Wilde about how one of his characters leaves the room in a ‘marked manner’ in ‘Portrait of Dorian Gray’, as Douglas wasn’t sure how this was done.
Re racism in children’s books: there’ve been a few purges down through the years – the sudden, instantaneous removal of all gollywogs from Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, for example. ‘The Once & Future King’ also got tweaked a while back. In terms of your own predicament, I reckon the originals should be kept as objects of historical curiosity rather than thrown out, but that children shouldn’t be exposed to them (pretty much what you’ve done).
There’s so much terrific children’s fiction coming out all the time that I don’t feel super motivated to hang on to books from the past whose authors wrote nonsense like this. I think you’re fine to donate the box of books, truly. Whatever happens, happens — they’ll be out of your life! I got rid of mine a while ago.
Oops, now I’ve read the book, I’ve changed my mind. Hugh Lofting is no more racist than you are. Prince Bumpo doesn’t want to be a white man, he only wants his face to be white, almost in the way someone else might want to be pretty, or taller. Lofting actually gives a bit of a serve to a 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.”
This in 1920.
The times… they are a changing.
[…] Das liegt nicht unbedingt daran, dass der Rassismus hier besonders eklatant ist, sondern vielmehr daran, dass ich Ritter Rost noch nie leiden konnte. Aber die Bücher, Geschichten und Autor*innen, die mir etwas bedeuten, die verteidige ich instinktiv gegen Anwürfe und versehe diese in meinem Kopf mit dem Label “Unterstellung”. Dabei ist die Faktenlage fast immer eindeutig und wird doch von mir und vielen anderen immer wieder relativiert, verharmlost oder abgetan. Die Frage, ob Pippi Langstrumpf rassistisch ist, ist bei genauerer Betrachtung einfach nur lächerlich. Selbstverständlich ist das Buch in diesem und anderen Punkten rassistisch. Wir wollen es nur nicht aus der Hand legen und weiter ungestört daraus vorlesen können, ohne dass wir ständig daran erinnert werden, was uns längst klar sein sollte. Es war auch schon immer rassistisch und nicht erst in heutigen vorgeblich politisch korrekten Zeiten. Die Kriterien dafür bleiben substanziell gleich. Ebenso wie die zur Verharmlosung von sexualisierter Gewalt. Das hat mich aber kein bisschen daran gehindert, die ziemlich erschütternde Verniedlichung und Normalisierung von sexualisierter Gewalt gegen Jungen und Männer in den “Harry Potter”-Bänden zu überlesen. Weder die Tatsache, dass Voldemorts Vater von dessen Mutter unter Drogen gesetzt und vergewaltigt wird, noch der Umstand, dass Drogen explizit für Mädchen vermarktet und an sie verlauft werden, damit sie Jungen “in sich verliebt machen können”, haben mich vom Vorlesen abgehalten. Das war alles irgendwie okay und sogar liebenswert. Genau wie Jim Knopf und ein gewisser Doktor Dolittle, der nicht nur mit Tieren sprechen kann, sondern auch einem schwarzen Prinzen seinen sehnlichsten Wunsch erfüllt, endlich weiß zu sein. […]
Yes, I get your point, and therein lies the heart of the dilemma. Being “woke” to various problematic elements on literature we enjoy, which in many cases reflects merely the temper of the time it was written in, how do we square those elements with current thinking? Sometimes it is easy – a story is just a story, and we can rollover the “era expected” bits with equanimity. But sometimes a line is crossed, and one must address it, in particular if one is recommending a book to others. I think in this case that line was crossed, hence the subsequent editing out of the troublesome bits in Doctor Dolittle. Great points about Harry Potter, by the way. We can find such scenarios in almost everything, can’t we?!
I read this book as a child and remember the racial slurs. It’s difficult not to find offence at the racism expressed but it should be left in as an example of the way the world was at the time of writing. The world was a bigger place. Most societies were more insulated, travel was less widespread and I’m sure non-white races were just as untrusting or unsure of the white man. Instead of removing all traces of a bad thing surely education and a realisation that times move on would be much more helpful? After all racism isn’t the sole realm of one race.
Doesn’t seem like the sleeping beauty here is one he should be pursuing.
[…] One can write an entire post on this subject. I refer you to the blog posts of Philip Nel and Leaves & Pages for further discussion. The debate between this and other books clearly isn’t […]
So my boy was reading this book in Croatia because his school is officially making it as a must read book … and I am shocked like what is earth is this . He even asked me isn’t this racism mom .