Doctor Dolittle in the Moon was published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1928, and it is the most fantastical of the Dolittle adventures — a genuine science fiction novel for children, published before the genre had a name.
The Doctor travels to the Moon carried by a giant lunar moth — one of the creatures with whom he established communication in Doctor Dolittle’s Garden. He finds a world utterly unlike Earth: enormous plants that have evolved intelligence, a landscape shaped by different gravity and atmosphere, and forms of life that challenge everything he thought he knew about biology. The Moon’s ecology is dominated by vegetation rather than animals, and the Doctor must learn entirely new modes of communication to interact with plant intelligences.
Lofting’s Moon is not scientifically accurate (even by 1928 standards), but it is imaginatively coherent — a world governed by its own internal logic, populated by creatures that follow from their environment. The book’s real interest is in the Doctor’s response to the genuinely alien: his openness, his patience, and his refusal to impose Earth categories on Moon realities.
The book ends with the Doctor stranded on the Moon — a cliffhanger that Lofting would not resolve for several years.
Collecting Doctor Dolittle in the Moon
First edition (Frederick A. Stokes, New York, 1928): Cloth binding with Lofting’s illustrations.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$350
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Later editions: $8–$15