But you are right about the violence - Long John Silver killing a man by breaking his back with his crutch, for example.
But the book gave me one of my first examples of a gentleman confronting violence - Dr. Livesy when Billy Bones is threatening him, near the beginning of the book.
Brilliant - not least because it made me go and look up what “assizes” were.
My thought on the matter, based only on the English, was “not racist”.
The reason I ask was that my edition had a lengthy disclaimer in the introduction about how racial attitudes have changed and the book doesn’t reflect the racial sensitivities of today etc., which, while true, seemed to me irrelevant - the expectation appeared to be that this story was horribly offensive.
Which is sort of funny, because of all the stories in this book, this one is IMO just about the least offensive. Most of the others have kiddies suffering terribly for trivial offenses (such as in “little suck-a-thumb”). Which I thought funny myself, but then, I’m into the grotesque - not really suitable for the kiddies (but then again, the kiddies probably enjoy the grotesque as much as we! )
Another favourite was “Augustus who would not eat his soup”.
My daughter really loves the Redwall series, but I hadn’t read any of the books. We are currently listening to the audiobook version and I was quite surprised by the level of pretty graphic violence. Those are some bloodthirsty little fuzzies. They also (some of them) like to drink quite a bit.
I also wanted to reassure those who asked that all the original improprieties are present and acounted for in currend editions of Babar.
I know that my friends in elementary school and I enjoyed telling each other grotesque stories. Mostly it was stuff like “Bloody Mary” and the “have you checked on the children” story. I would be shocked if kids had changed so much in the past 25 years that they no longer enjoy that kind of thing.
Eh- Bloody Mary featured mutilation (she was supposed to scratch your face off). I also vaguely recall hearing one from a friend about someone who had a bunch of severed penises nailed to a wall. I doubt any of this stuff is much more grotesque than the stories the kids are telling each other at slumber parties and on the playground.
Now, the racist and “different is bad” themes in some of these old stories- those are probably more likely to shock kids.
I would find it a big hard to get outraged by that. It’s not like CS Lewis deliberately put something risque in there, and now mothers are getting upset and want to protect their pwecious angels from said risque-ness. Rather, a phrase in English has changed in meaning so drastically that the same words mean something entirely different. Now, clearly, you could leave them be and assume that most kids won’t notice anything at all, and those that do will get a little chuckle out of it but figure out what is meant. And I’d certainly vote for not changing it. But I wouldn’t consider it some kind of weak-ass-PC-blasphemy to rephrase the sentence in a way which gave the original intent without the current confusion-of-phrase.
I don’t know about anti-semetic, but they are certainly gory. At the end of Cinderella, in the wedding sequence, her two stepsisters walked on either side of her on the way to church, and two birds sitting on Cinderella’s shoulders ate out the nearer eye of each stepsister. Returning from church, their positions are reversed and the birds eat out their remaining eyes.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. When I first read it (at age 16) I did a double-take, but quickly figured out that the phrase didn’t mean in 1940s England what it did in 1982 USA.
Kind of the reverse of an American comedian I heard talking about his time living in England. He lived in an apartment, and told about a young woman in a neighboring flat stopping by to introduce herself. She invited him to come over and “knock me up” some time
Me too - I’m happy to have contributed to Wikipedia on it. The point about Hawkins is that he’s not a poor little boy who is horribly corrupted by exposure to violence - in an age when a boy might be forced to grow to man’s estate rather abruptly, that is just what he does. Without acting always advisedly (for he quits the stockade after the fight with the pirates, when the honest men are already short-handed, the captain incapacitated and the doctor elsewhere) he manages to turn the tide and help bring about Silver’s downfall. There’s violence in the book for sure, but at that, it’s sanitised compared to a factual account of pirate goings-on or even warfare as it actually was or is - those who die mainly manage it with not too much blood and guts - and the end result is that Jim returns home with the respect of his new peers and ready to begin life as a young gentleman.
I vote for the classic book “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean Craighead George.
A young man who lives with his 11 brothers and sisters in a crowded New York City apartment decides he wants to go live in the wilderness. He reads a couple of books at the library and then runs away to live in a hollow tree in the Catskills. He tames a wild falcon and traps and eats animals etc.
After he has been there for couple of months or so, (including living through the winter) his father eventually comes and visits him, to see how he’s been.
He’s nine years old. Yep, that’s right, nine years old.