Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle Stories: Labyrinthine Spaces, Serialization, and the Impossible Book Project
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This essay examines the representation of Victorianism seen through nostalgic remembrance and idealized retrospection in Hugh Lofting’s children stories, the Doctor Dolittle series (1920). I define Victorianism by the practices of Victorian natural history, which Barbara T. Gates describes as an “overwhelming drive to collect, witness, and catalog nature that occurred during the reign of Queen Victoria.” The transference of exotic curiosities from colonies to the British metropole (the practice of amassing and documenting) elucidates a broader historical context of colonial expansion and imperialist violence. Though Lofting was not intent on critiquing the British Empire and its imperialist dealings, the magically shape-shifting spaces depicted in the fiction, as well as its serialization inadvertently pose a reflective question against the Empire’s colonialist project. Time-efficient Victorian museums offered for those departing for British colonies to be acquainted with the local collections, as an educational prelude to identifying and amassing specimens in foreign countries, transform into labyrinthine, shape-shifting spaces that elude such rigid taxonomies. The serialization—Dolittle’s endless adventures—ironically hinder the doctor from fully accomplishing his book project of documenting every denizen of the natural kingdom. As animistic, amorphous spaces are unavoidably set against unmoving principles and taxonomies, magical fantasy seems to contain at its very core, a potential for political and semantic subversion.
Abstract
This essay examines the representation of Victorianism seen through nostalgic remembrance and idealized retrospection in Hugh Lofting’s children stories, the Doctor Dolittle series (1920). I define Victorianism by the practices of Victorian natural history, which Barbara T. Gates describes as an “overwhelming drive to collect, witness, and catalog nature that occurred during the reign of Queen Victoria.” The transference of exotic curiosities from colonies to the British metropole (the practice of amassing and documenting) elucidates a broader historical context of colonial expansion and imperialist violence. Though Lofting was not intent on critiquing the British Empire and its imperialist dealings, the magically shape-shifting spaces depicted in the fiction, as well as its serialization inadvertently pose a reflective question against the Empire’s colonialist project. Time-efficient Victorian museums offered for those departing for British colonies to be acquainted with the local collections, as an educational prelude to identifying and amassing specimens in foreign countries, transform into labyrinthine, shape-shifting spaces that elude such rigid taxonomies. The serialization—Dolittle’s endless adventures—ironically hinder the doctor from fully accomplishing his book project of documenting every denizen of the natural kingdom. As animistic, amorphous spaces are unavoidably set against unmoving principles and taxonomies, magical fantasy seems to contain at its very core, a potential for political and semantic subversion.
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