Hugh Lofting

Artist Info

Hugh LoftingMaidenhead, England, 1886 - 1947, Topanga, California

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50039523

Lofting, Hugh John (1886–1947), children's writer, was born on 14 January 1886 in Norfolk Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire, the fourth son in the family of five sons and one daughter of an Irishman, John Brien Lofting, clerk of works, and Elizabeth Agnes Cannon, his English wife. From the age of eight Lofting was a pupil at Mount St Mary's College, a Jesuit school in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Despite an early passion for natural history (he had used his mother's linen cupboard as a combined zoo and museum) his first impulse was to train as a civil engineer, since he hoped thereby for opportunities to travel. In 1904 he began his studies in the USA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he returned to England a year later and completed the course at the London Polytechnic. He was in Canada in 1908–9 prospecting and surveying; he worked on the Lagos Railway in west Africa from 1910 to 1911, and in 1912 was employed as an engineer in Cuba by the United Railways of Havana. He gave up engineering that year and went to the United States, where, also in 1912, he married Flora Small of New York and settled to writing. He worked for the British Ministry of Information in New York during 1915, returning to England in 1916 to enlist with the Irish Guards, but was wounded and invalided out in 1917.

The family settled in Madison, Connecticut, in 1919, and Lofting began writing again. His first book appeared in New York in 1920, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, an account of the gently eccentric John Dolittle who gives up his medical practice in order to devote himself to treating animals, learning all their various languages with the help of Polynesia, his sage and authoritative parrot. The saga, which was illustrated with his own naïve pen-and-ink drawings, had its origins in the compassion he had felt for the sufferings of the animals in the past war—‘If we made [them] take the same chances as we did ourselves, why did we not give them similar attention when wounded?’ (Blishen, 12)—and in the letters about an imaginary horse surgery that he had written home from the front to his two children, Elizabeth and Colin (the latter of whom habitually called himself Dr Dolittle). It was an instant success and its sequel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, received the American Library Association Newbery medal in 1923. The exploits of the doctor and his household of animals were to be recorded in twelve books, always set in England at some unspecified time in the middle of the nineteenth century. (None of his books indicated that he had spent so much of his life in America.)

At first Lofting took an exuberant delight in the books. The first book had been aimed at young children, and included much slapstick comedy (the tone of which was to become unacceptable to later readers) about the African court of the Jolliginki where the black Prince Bumpo yearns to be white. Its successors were increasingly sophisticated and inventive, embellished with fantastic quasi-scientific detail. But he became weary of his creation and with Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928) he hoped that he had seen the end of his hero. It was a time of great personal sadness; his first wife had died in 1927; he had married Katherine Harrower-Peters in the following year, but she too had died a few months later in an influenza epidemic. He was to marry in 1935 Josephine Fricker (d. 1966), of Toronto, with whom he had a son, Christopher.

Lofting brought the doctor back to earth in Doctor Dolittle's Return (1933), and there was to be one last book, Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, built round the story of the flood with Dr Dolittle as a latter-day Noah and written when he was in poor health. It was published posthumously in 1948. Both these last books reflect his increasing pessimism about international affairs; as Edward Blishen says, ‘the positive and determined John Dolittle has been replaced by an unhappy dreamer’ (Blishen, 30). The two other posthumous Dolittle books are collections of short stories.

The unworldly, peace-loving doctor, oblivious of both material comfort and public opinion, is in some respects a self-portrait of the shy and gentle author. Lofting had expressed in articles in The Nation in 1923 and 1924 his strong feelings about the glorification of war and violence ‘which seems as yet to be part of every child's metamorphosis’ (Blishen, 30), and horror of war is the theme of the poem Victory for the Slain (1942), his only published work for adult readers. He wrote a handful of other books for children, which were mostly picture-books, but included a full-length fantasy, The Twilight of Magic (1930). Lofting died on 26 September 1947 at his home in Topanga, California, USA.

Gillian Avery

Sources

The Times (30 Sept 1947) · E. Blishen, Hugh Lofting (1968) · Wilton Bulletin (6 Dec 1967) · b. cert.

Gillian Avery, ‘Lofting, Hugh John (1886–1947)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/37685, accessed 20 Oct 2017]

Hugh John Lofting (1886–1947): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37685