Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary

Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary was published in 1950, three years after Lofting’s death, as the final book in the sequence. It is built around the back story of Pippinella, the remarkable canary who first appears in Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan and whose long autobiography is told in fragments across the earlier books. This volume gathers and expands those fragments into a continuous narrative.

Pippinella’s story covers her life across multiple owners in nineteenth-century England, including a coal miner, a windmill keeper’s wife, a duchess, a country vicar, and a long stretch as a windmill window-sill bird with an excellent view of a small village. The doctor functions mostly as listener here, with Tommy Stubbins taking down the canary’s account. The book is more episodic than the earlier ones and reads in places more like a Victorian narrative-frame novel than a Doctor Dolittle adventure. For completists it closes out the cycle. For new readers it is probably the least essential entry in the series.