Marrin's Bookshop

Synopsis

Written and illustrated by hugh lofting. fourth impression.

Item Description

8vo. 8 x 5.75 inches. 320 pp. Bound in original grey cloth with red titles, in price clipped pictorial dust wrapper which has a minor edge wear and sunned spine. Extremities a little worn, spine sunned and page edges darkened. Light scattered foxing, including endpapers but otherwise a very good copy. Illustrated by colour frontispiece, pictorial title and by 76 whole page black and white drawings in text. Coloured pictorial endpapers. The third Doctor Dolittle children's novel featuring an English village physician who speaks to animals, set in the period 1820-40. Hugh Lofting (1886-1947) was born in Maidenhead but settled in the USA in 1919. The Doctor Dolittle stories, first developed in the form of letters, had their origins in the compassion he felt for the sufferings of animals that he had witnessed during his war service on the western front, 1916-17, before he was wounded and invalided home. The gently compassionate Doctor Dolittle gives up his medical practice, to treat animals instead and all the twelve books in the series were illustrated with his naive art. First edition published 1924.