Doctor Dolittle’s Circus was published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1924, and it is the most explicitly activist of the Dolittle books — a novel that uses the circus setting to address the treatment of performing animals. The Doctor, perpetually short of money, agrees to exhibit the pushmi-pullyu (a two-headed creature from Africa) in a traveling circus. Once inside the circus world, he discovers the cruelty that underlies the entertainment: animals confined in small cages, beaten to perform tricks, underfed, and worked to exhaustion.
The Doctor’s response is characteristically gentle but implacable: he reforms the circus from within, improving conditions for the animals, protecting them from their handlers, and eventually establishing a new model of circus entertainment in which the animals participate willingly rather than under compulsion. The fantasy element (the Doctor can ask the animals what they want) makes the ethical argument simple and irresistible: if we could hear what performing animals feel, we would not treat them as we do.
The book is also notable for its introduction of Sophie, a seal who has escaped from a circus and whose story — told in her own words to the Doctor — is one of the most moving passages in the series.
Collecting Doctor Dolittle’s Circus
First edition (Frederick A. Stokes, New York, 1924): Cloth binding with Lofting’s illustrations.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $8–$20