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Doctor Huguet
The book has no illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from the publisher's website (GeneralBooksClub.com). You can also preview excerpts of the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Chicago, F. J. Schulte
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1891
About the author
Ignatius L. Donnelly
50 books37 followersU.S. Congressman, populist writer and science writer.
His most known theories are on Atlantis, Shakespearean authorship and Catastrophism.
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly ran in multiple elections for governor of Minnesota and was Republican congressman from 1863–1868.
In 1892, Donnelly wrote the preamble of the People's Party's Omaha Platform for the presidential campaign of that year. He was nominated for Vice President of the United States in 1900 by the People's Party.
His most known theories are on Atlantis, Shakespearean authorship and Catastrophism.
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly ran in multiple elections for governor of Minnesota and was Republican congressman from 1863–1868.
In 1892, Donnelly wrote the preamble of the People's Party's Omaha Platform for the presidential campaign of that year. He was nominated for Vice President of the United States in 1900 by the People's Party.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 19, 2018
"Tis place,
Not blood, discerns the noble and the base."
Francis Bacon
"On my God!" I cried, "I am lost. I am a negro! I am a negro!"
Doctor Huguet
Why in the name of Booker T. Washington has this rather extraordinary novel been forgotten by history, overlooked to such a degree that even somebody as interested in 19th century literature as myself only discovered it by mere chance, and since reading can find virtually no other references to online?
Why, indeed, am I even asking such a question?
Well, when I tell you that Doctor Huguet, despite it's innocuous title, is a truly bizarre cross between <>Black Like Me<>, Howard John Griffith's landmark work of journalism, and the Dan Ackroyd / Eddie Murphy comedy movie Trading Places you might understand why.
Not that the protagonist in Doctor Huguet merely pretends to be black, as Griffith's did, or swaps social position, as with Ackroyd and Murphy, he actually becomes black, swapping bodies with a black man named Samuel Johnsing.
Nor does Donnelly milk the exchange for comic purposes, as director John Landis did in his film. No, this was intended as a serious work with a noble purpose, however misguided it turned out to be, as we shall see. Surely it should be regarded as a seminal book today?
But then again, maybe not.
The trouble, I think, is twofold.
Firstly, there is the figure of Donnelly himself. On the one hand he was a successful politician as well as writer, considered generally liberal-minded for his times, which the purpose of this book attests, as did his support of women's suffrage.
But on the other hand he was a renowned crank of the fruitiest flavour, one of that barmy brigade who thought that Francis Bacon was William Shakespeare, and the guy who single-handedly rekindled the late 19th century obsession with Atlantis as an actual place.
Just before the protagonist's switch of bodies - which comes about after a visitation from no less than Jesus Christ himself - Doctor Huguet offers an extended argument for racial harmony which can't help but appear offensively wrong-headed by contemporary standards, regardless of his heart being in the right place.
He tries to convince a hostile audience of Southern gentleman that black and white are essentially equal, but for a confluence of historical and sociological disadvantages. His argument is such a mixture of the (relatively) sane and the entirely doolally that I thought it would be worth summarizing here:
The Compos Mentis
- that "all men are men ... and the rights of a man should not depend upon the shade of his complexion".
- the certainty that it is only through lack of education that black people were intellectually inferior.
- the Christian teachings of Jesus Christ.
The Non Compos Mentis
- black people have evolved in "malarial and unhealthy lands", which alongside insufficient nutrition has led to the "physical degradation" of their "black skins, their swollen faces, their depressed noses".
- black peoples' skulls have been by necessity hardened to "protect the brain from the intense rays of the tropical sun", restricting the expansion of the brain.
- all told, "when you refine the mind, you refine the features. Take brutality out of the brain, and it leaves the lips. Raise the heart and soul of man, and the bridge of his nose rises."
See? Bonkers.
And yet elsewhere, when pointing out that the black slaves left behind to work the plantations when the Confederate soldiers went to fight the Civil War were entirely peaceable and did not take advantage of the white women and children left behind, Doctor Huguet calls them "the most patent and forbearing and gentle people in the world."
And yet still, the "white superiority of brain and beauty of body" is never doubted throughout, which is an impossible argument for a (sane) contemporary reader to accept, just as his argument for racial tolerance and equal rights would have been impossible for the majority of his readership to accept back in the 1890s.
Confused? I was. I can only conclude that even the liberal view of racial equality was contradictorily crazy back then.
In terms of the story itself, Donnelly doesn't help himself by making Samuel Johnsing such a despicable black man for Huguet to change places with, a drunken, whoring chicken-thief who duly disgraces himself in the white man's body.
As for Huguet, he is arrested, abused and almost lynched, all of which happens to him before he even comes to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan! Yet he sees that he has a unique opportunity to change some minds, to "preach courage to one race and charity to another."
He does just that, but the subsequent flightiness of Donnelly's prose, though admirable, doesn't distinguish him as much of a writer.
For all its many and atrocious faults, when published this must have been a brave book. I read lots of fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries, where the racial superiority of the white race (according to an almost exclusively white authorship) is never doubted, and rarely before could someone have been so provocative about questioning it, even if he seemed to agree at the same time.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone whom I felt could do with a lesson in racial equality, but surely it deserves a place in the history of such literature? I would dearly love to know what the black readership of America made of it at the time.
As for myself, I hardly know what to make of it, certainly not in terms of a rating system based on degrees of liking. Somewhere between 'did not like it' and 'it was amazing' I guess?
I was certainly amazed.
Not blood, discerns the noble and the base."
Francis Bacon
"On my God!" I cried, "I am lost. I am a negro! I am a negro!"
Doctor Huguet
Why in the name of Booker T. Washington has this rather extraordinary novel been forgotten by history, overlooked to such a degree that even somebody as interested in 19th century literature as myself only discovered it by mere chance, and since reading can find virtually no other references to online?
Why, indeed, am I even asking such a question?
Well, when I tell you that Doctor Huguet, despite it's innocuous title, is a truly bizarre cross between <>Black Like Me<>, Howard John Griffith's landmark work of journalism, and the Dan Ackroyd / Eddie Murphy comedy movie Trading Places you might understand why.
Not that the protagonist in Doctor Huguet merely pretends to be black, as Griffith's did, or swaps social position, as with Ackroyd and Murphy, he actually becomes black, swapping bodies with a black man named Samuel Johnsing.
Nor does Donnelly milk the exchange for comic purposes, as director John Landis did in his film. No, this was intended as a serious work with a noble purpose, however misguided it turned out to be, as we shall see. Surely it should be regarded as a seminal book today?
But then again, maybe not.
The trouble, I think, is twofold.
Firstly, there is the figure of Donnelly himself. On the one hand he was a successful politician as well as writer, considered generally liberal-minded for his times, which the purpose of this book attests, as did his support of women's suffrage.
But on the other hand he was a renowned crank of the fruitiest flavour, one of that barmy brigade who thought that Francis Bacon was William Shakespeare, and the guy who single-handedly rekindled the late 19th century obsession with Atlantis as an actual place.
Just before the protagonist's switch of bodies - which comes about after a visitation from no less than Jesus Christ himself - Doctor Huguet offers an extended argument for racial harmony which can't help but appear offensively wrong-headed by contemporary standards, regardless of his heart being in the right place.
He tries to convince a hostile audience of Southern gentleman that black and white are essentially equal, but for a confluence of historical and sociological disadvantages. His argument is such a mixture of the (relatively) sane and the entirely doolally that I thought it would be worth summarizing here:
The Compos Mentis
- that "all men are men ... and the rights of a man should not depend upon the shade of his complexion".
- the certainty that it is only through lack of education that black people were intellectually inferior.
- the Christian teachings of Jesus Christ.
The Non Compos Mentis
- black people have evolved in "malarial and unhealthy lands", which alongside insufficient nutrition has led to the "physical degradation" of their "black skins, their swollen faces, their depressed noses".
- black peoples' skulls have been by necessity hardened to "protect the brain from the intense rays of the tropical sun", restricting the expansion of the brain.
- all told, "when you refine the mind, you refine the features. Take brutality out of the brain, and it leaves the lips. Raise the heart and soul of man, and the bridge of his nose rises."
See? Bonkers.
And yet elsewhere, when pointing out that the black slaves left behind to work the plantations when the Confederate soldiers went to fight the Civil War were entirely peaceable and did not take advantage of the white women and children left behind, Doctor Huguet calls them "the most patent and forbearing and gentle people in the world."
And yet still, the "white superiority of brain and beauty of body" is never doubted throughout, which is an impossible argument for a (sane) contemporary reader to accept, just as his argument for racial tolerance and equal rights would have been impossible for the majority of his readership to accept back in the 1890s.
Confused? I was. I can only conclude that even the liberal view of racial equality was contradictorily crazy back then.
In terms of the story itself, Donnelly doesn't help himself by making Samuel Johnsing such a despicable black man for Huguet to change places with, a drunken, whoring chicken-thief who duly disgraces himself in the white man's body.
As for Huguet, he is arrested, abused and almost lynched, all of which happens to him before he even comes to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan! Yet he sees that he has a unique opportunity to change some minds, to "preach courage to one race and charity to another."
He does just that, but the subsequent flightiness of Donnelly's prose, though admirable, doesn't distinguish him as much of a writer.
For all its many and atrocious faults, when published this must have been a brave book. I read lots of fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries, where the racial superiority of the white race (according to an almost exclusively white authorship) is never doubted, and rarely before could someone have been so provocative about questioning it, even if he seemed to agree at the same time.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone whom I felt could do with a lesson in racial equality, but surely it deserves a place in the history of such literature? I would dearly love to know what the black readership of America made of it at the time.
As for myself, I hardly know what to make of it, certainly not in terms of a rating system based on degrees of liking. Somewhere between 'did not like it' and 'it was amazing' I guess?
I was certainly amazed.
December 22, 2022
Fascinating, heartening, and heartbreaking romance in which a Southern white man wakes up one day to find he has exchanged bodies with a black chicken thief. Sentimental melodrama in a 19th century idiom, but full of human understanding and deep commitment to the equality of African Americans, as well as other progressive attitudes (anti-Capitalist, pro-Women) some of which sound as fresh as this morning's most "woke" statements of the obvious. All of Donnelly's books seem to fall in the category of curios by a crank, but he seems to have been a good-hearted and imaginative crank. Too bad there weren't more such cranks in 19th century America.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews