Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan

Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan was published in 1926 and is the sixth book in the original sequence. Picking up where Doctor Dolittle’s Circus left off, the doctor leaves the Blossom outfit and starts his own small animal-only travelling caravan, with himself, Matthew Mugg the cat’s-meat-man, and an assortment of performing animals. The plot focuses around two main storylines.

The first is the doctor’s attempts to give Sophie the seal a proper send-off home and to launch a kind of all-animal theatre as a humane alternative to the standard Victorian circus. The second, larger in scope, is the discovery and education of a remarkable canary named Pippinella, whose long backstory occupies a significant portion of the book and would later become the basis for the posthumous novel Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary. The caravan structure lets Lofting mix episodic short adventures with deeper character work for the animal cast. A solid middle entry in the series, especially for readers who enjoy Pippinella, who returns later.