Lofting, Hugh: Doctor Dolittle's Circus (illus). v2. 03 May 2018
 

This book was first published in 1924. The text and illustrations are in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less.


The Doctor needs money to pay back the sailor for the boat he borrowed for his voyage to Africa to cure the monkey epidemic (The Story of Doctor Dolittle). So he and his animal friends, along with the Cat’s-Meat-Man, Matthew Mugg, join a circus to show off the Pushmi-pullyu. They soon become involved in a series of adventures when the Doctor crusades for animal rights on the behalf of the circus animals.

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British author Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) created the character of Doctor Dolittle, one of the classics of children’s literature. The Doctor first appeared in Lofting’s illustrated letters to his children, written from the trenches while he was serving in the British Army during World War I. The stories (a series of twelve books, the final two edited and published posthumously) are set in early Victorian England. The second in the series, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922), won Lofting the prestigious Newbery Medal.

Despite the author’s obviously benign posture, the books became a target of controversy in the 1960’s amid accusations of racism and attitudes of colonialism, and went out of print in the USA for some time. Later editions in the 1980’s were bowdlerized to remove offending content and illustrations. The Doctor and the tales of his adventures are better known today through movie and television adaptations.
(—Extracted and adapted from Wikipedia.)


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This ebook is based on text obtained from Project Gutenberg Australia. Transcription errors were corrected; punctuation, italics and diacritics formatted; illustrations manually cleaned and enhanced. Embedded font for titling. Images of Vintage Cover and End Papers are included. To provide consistency throughout this series of ten books, some punctuation was modernized and spelling standardized.

The text was proofed against a scan of an edition printed in the 1950's. Whether this edition has been bowdlerized is not known.

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Uploaded version 2 with text and format tweaks. Previous downloads 49.


LINKS TO THE DOCTOR DOLITTLE BOOKS:

:)

Thank you very much, as always, for creating these lovely books. They bring back fond memories of my childhood reading.

Uploaded version 2 with some text and format tweaks.