few books written or rewritten for children. In her 1999 memoir Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall proposes a direct link between the influence of this meme in her own childhood reading and the development of her later career, which has included both science and storytelling: “As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds. My very favorite books at the time were The Story of Doctor Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books.”2 Goodall herself contributed copy for the back cover of The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which was first published in 1920 and reissued in 1988: “Any child who is not given the opportunity to make the acquaintance of this rotund, kindly, and enthusiastic doctor/naturalist and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important. Start with the first in the series, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and you will not be content until the others are lined up on your bookshelves. If only there were more.” (There are, in fact, fifteen.) It is telling that, in the acknowledgments for her monumental 1986 study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall again mentions Hugh Lofting’s stories, which she says inspired her at the age of eight to go to Africa to be with the apes and monkeys.
Goodall and the children’s literature that shaped her can be conceptualized as carriers of a very old and powerful meme complex. In addition to her important discoveries, it is perhaps Goodall’s participation in the quest romance memeplex that seems to strike such a powerful chord in contemporary culture. Nonhuman animals need a hero, and in this time of awful environmental challenges, so do the rest of us. Goodall is not simply an adventurous scientist but also a model of kindness to and respect for individual animals. That interest in individuals and belief in individuality in nonhuman species determined Goodall’s deliberate reinvention of primatological field protocol and has remained a key component of her thinking during the second part of her long career, as she has shifted from science and natural history to environmental activism and animal advocacy.
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a naturalist, teacher, and leader who saves humans and animals from disease, ignorance, and natural disasters. In this fictional character, the figure of Darwin as a hero of science intersects with the tradition of the questing hero of romance. And it is not surprising that Lofting’s stories prefigure the present-day cultural phenomenon of Jane Goodall, not only as she presents herself in her writing but also as she has appeared in various media representations: a tall, blond, youthful woman with a ponytail, dressed in khaki and sturdy shoes, making her way through the forest and touching, following, or exchanging glances with the animals she studies and serves (or more recently, in a lab coat, comforting caged primates used for biomedical research). So powerful is this new recombinant meme (recombinant partly because the hero of primatology is a woman) that, in popular primatology and sometimes even the scholarly literature, many scientists who have come along since Goodall have had to position themselves as followers and imitators, or to deliberately and explicitly distance themselves from this model.
To reconstruct the Darwin-Dolittle-Goodall hero genealogy, it is useful to glance back briefly at the history of the quest romance, one of the oldest literary forms in Western culture. The best-known quest romances are those of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, characters who came into cultural prominence a little before 1200, when their exploits were described in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. These characters and others like them dominated the popular imagination in Western Europe for about four centuries. In her history of the English quest romance, Helen Cooper argues that after the romance plays of Shakespeare, such as The Tempest (1610), the meme of the lonely questing hero dropped out of mainstream literature for a while, but it did not die out. It was simply transferred into a different alembic—folk culture and stories for children. It also appeared in an occasional religious allegory quest on the model of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and, in the last century or a little more, science fiction.3
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