I think it’s driven primarily by ESG scores and hysterical drives for what Gaub would call a “liberal, post-modern,” but it’s eventually going to backfire on proponents.
Know who else was racist? Nancy Drew. They reprinted the original 1930s Nancy Drew, and I was shocked. Nancy wasn’t particularly racist, but it just came out.
The original Tom Swifts were also, in that the Black character had racist Black dialog, but at least he was heroic at times. The Tom Swift Jr. books eliminated the racism problem by eliminating Black people, with the equivalent character becoming Texan.
That’s how I feel, too. For instance, I don’t mind having an expurgated version of Pepys’s diaries for a high school history class or something like that, but I believe there is genuine historical value in reading his accounts of being caught cheating on his wife, or jerking off to a pornographic book.
Han shot first.
I don’t have much of a problem with the editing of children’s books, even though I think some of the edits described in the article upthread are a little over the top….like changing “plump” to “cheerful” and “little men” to “little people”.
I think it’s good practice to not use language or expressions in a children’s book that you would not want your child to use ( with maybe some minor exceptions for villainous characters) and it’s effortful to try to explain why the good kid in the book uses these words or phrases but no, you should never say that.
It’s more complicated for adult books. I don’t think editing should be compelled, I don’t think there should be laws requiring it and I don’t think public and school libraries should refuse to stock the unedited books, even if some readers might find them offensive. But if the author or their estate wants to clean them up, I think that should be their right. And I understand why Agatha Christie’s estate wants to clean up her work, otherwise the overriding message of her works may become “I was written by a horrible person”.
My greater concern with this type of editorial work is mission creep, a scenario where “sensitivity readers” are given stacks of increasingly inoffensive materials and start reaching to find offense in order to justify their work.
Also, I draw the line at making substantial edits to plots and story lines in adult fiction. I read a lot of fiction and I read of lot of progressive literary criticism of those works.
Frequently the criticism of those book is focused on things like “the book is set in country X and I think the author missed an opportunity to highlight the plight of the oppressed people of country X”. Which I don’t find particularly helpful and I think frequently criticism like this comes down to “she didn’t write the book I wanted to read”.
Interesting. I was a huge Nancy Drew fan - getting my new Nancy Drew in the mail was the highlight of my month, but I was probably reading edited versions in the early 70’s.
But even back then, I always wondered if they married off Nancy’s tomboy friend George in order to quell any doubts about her sexual orientation.
As long as all copies of the older versions aren’t being collected and burned, I don’t care.
^^^** This.
Oh, I didn’t know that happened! The ones we read were from the '50s and early '60s, plus the Hardy Boys crossover series which was targeted to an older age range.
One more thing from the '50s versions - they inserted a line or two about Nancy going to church on Sunday just to show she wasn’t a godless Communist. Laughably out of place.
When my daughter was in high school she finished off one by herself that we had been reading, because I was on a business trip and she wanted to find out what happened. When I returned, she confronted me.
“So, Nancy’s housekeeper’s name wasn’t Hannah Gruesome!” (I sometimes riff on the books.)
Just to remind everyone that Mr. Bowdler got there before any of the current censors.
They married off George?
I was reading Nancy Drew in the 1950’s, probably into the early 60’s – she had a boyfriend, but nobody was even talking about getting married. I don’t remember racism – but I’m not sure that I, a clueless white kid living in a mostly-white area, would have particularly noticed it. Maybe I should go hunt out a copy and look; I’m pretty sure I’ve still got a couple around, and there certainly is stuff in some of my old books that makes me wince now that I never noticed at the time, because I thought it was just meant to be individual character traits and didn’t realize it was racist tropes.
Children’s stories get re-written (or orally re-phrased) over and over and over, to suit the sensibilities of the time and of the tale teller. Go read some of the original Grimm stories and then look at what Disney’s doing; but Disney’s hardly the first, it’s been going on all along, probably since shortly after we started telling stories. My parents made a point of getting me full-length versions of whatever I was reading – but the reason they made a point of it was that shortened, simplified versions were very common at the time. Again, 1950’s.
And adult stories get re-written over and over and over. (@Voyager, case in point.) Our attitude towards copyright is quite recent. The point at which somebody else’s name should be put on it can, indeed, be tricky.
Original versions should remain available – how available can reasonably depend on the marketplace, but they shouldn’t be legally banned, nor should attempts be made (except possibly by the original author) to destroy all copies. Re-written versions should say somewhere in them at least something along the lines of “this is the 2017 version, which varies in some details from the first printings.” Versions that are re-written so as to significantly alter the essence of the plot or theme should say something like “by Author X, based in part on a story by Y”.
That, at any rate, is my take on it.
I can’t find confirmation online, but in the later books I read, George was still working with Nancy to solve mysteries but she was a married woman.
I distinctly remember one book that took place at some sort of camp, and Bess and Nancy shared one cabin and George and her husband shared another.
FWIW, I read the versions that were published in the early ‘70’s, I got them through a subscription service my parents paid for.
I read over 30 of the things to my daughter and there wasn’t any explicit racism, except of course that of having a lily-white cast of characters.
What years were your copies published in?
Early ‘70’s, not sure what years exactly but I was 13 in 1970, which was probably around the time I started reading them.
I heartily endorse this sentiment. Literature is art and art reflects the time in which it was created. In other words, the study of art/literature is the study of history. You might as well cut David’s dick off and edit the title of The Rape of Proserpina as edit great literature. Also: where do you draw the line? Editing out mention of the Holocaust?
We have a copy of Nancy #3 from 1960. I suspect it is a reprinting since there are a bunch of later ones listed on the back cover, but not a revision. We also have lots from the '70s with new copyright dates. I can’t confirm that they weren’t edited in some way, but they didn’t seem to be any different in tone from the originals. A lot of those were my wife’s which we reclaimed from her parents house.
I’ll put on my very long list to check into what I’ve got in the house in the way of Nancy Drew, when published, and whether I think it seems to include racism in other than the obliterative fashion (as in, Everybody In This World Is White).
If you were reading Nancy Drew in the 1970s, you undoubtedly were reading one of the revised versions. The rewriting of the early Nancy Drew (and Hardy Boys) books began in 1959, according to wikipedia, and original versions are very difficult to find these days. In addition to getting rid of racial stereotypes and offensive language, the changes also modernized various plot elements, and made certain attitudes closer to what the 50s would have considered “appropriate.” For example, in the original books, police were often portrayed as lazy, foolish, and basically incompetent, much like in a lot of detective novels. In the revisions, Nancy (and Frank and Joe) have respectful relationships with the police, who are invariably honest, hard-working, and true blue.
The Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books were written by a syndicate and published under a pseudonym, so I don’t care nearly as much about artistic integrity and the intent of the author in those cases as in some others.