Dogger

Story

Have you ever lost a favourite toy and thought you’d never get it back? That’s what happened to Dave and he cried and cried. Where was Dogger, with his soft brown fur and his one pointy ear and one floppy ear …and would he ever be found?

Why we chose it

Described by Philip Pullman as ‘a national treasure’, Shirley Hughes has a rare talent for observing the world in ways that young children recognise. She combines gentle humour with delightful ink and watercolour illustrations to explore familiar situations from everyday family life. Many of her picture books have won awards and become much-loved classics. Hughes appeared as Lady Bracknell in the Story Museum’s 26 Characters exhibition in 2014.

Where it came from

Shirley Hughes (1927-2022) was born and brought up in Cheshire. From childhood, she was inspired by the illustrators Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson. She loved visiting art galleries and going to the cinema. When she was a child, her family didn’t have a television and so there was plenty of free time to read, draw and mooch about. She says this was part of the reason she became an author and illustrator. Shirley has always loved to sketch the people around her and then go back to her drawing board to make up the stories. Her characters are a mixture of different people, including her own children. Her son was the original owner of the real toy dog called Dogger, which was once put in a glass box and displayed in an exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In fact, Dogger still exists although he’s now over 50 years old!

Where it went next

Dogger won the ‘Greenaway of Greenaways’ in June 2007 having first been voted one of the top ten winning works in the 50^th anniversary of the Kate Greenaway Medal (1995-2005).

Associated stories

Shirley Hughes has written and illustrated a sequel to Dogger. Dogger’s Christmas will be published by Penguin Radom House in autumn 2020. Shirley Hughes has written well over 50 stories. Her first, Lucy & Tom’s Day, developed into a series of books. Alfie (1977) was another well-loved series of stories about a little boy called Alfie and in 1993, she wrote the Olly and Me series. Shirley Hughes has sold over 11.5 million copies of her stories.