Treasure Island might not be considered weird but it has levels of violence that might be unacceptable to todays audience. When the mutineers led by Silver attacked the stockade on the island Jim Hawkins, who might have been 12 or 13, went out armed with a cutlass with the intent of killing someone. Later he has occasion to utter my favorite phrase from the book.
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Isn’t that followed by -
And that most chilling line in the book -
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.
[QUOTE=tschild]
My take: neither racist nor progressive.
Not racist, because the nasty taunting boys are not punished by becoming African boys, but by becoming ignominously be-inked German boys. (BTW the English verses are a very free translation. They imply e.g. that it would be desirable for the black boy to be white “For if he tries with all his might,/He cannot change from black to white”; the German text says “How is this Moor to be blamed/for not being white like you?”. Also the descriptive terms esp. “Mohr”, while not PC nowadays (the euphemism treadmill also works in Germany), would be merely descriptive at the time.
Not progressive, because anti-black racism wouldn’t be a social issue at the time, to be fought by progressives. Black people weren’t a minority at the time, but a few isolated individuals. The didactic story doesn’t make a ‘don’t be racist’ point but a ‘don’t be a gratutiously nasty child’ one.
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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.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
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! )
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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.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
That freaked me out also - not the least because Pip was far more interesting as a character.
In a later book a woman’s suffragette army invades Oz. I think a lot of it was actually social satire. I think not being able to bludgeon kids over the head with it made the books better.
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[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
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.
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Oh, I would agree; though I do think that nursery rhymes featuring mutilation may be a bit on the cutting edge, so to speak!
[QUOTE=Malthus]
Oh, I would agree; though I do think that nursery rhymes featuring mutilation may be a bit on the cutting edge, so to speak!
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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.
[QUOTE=Phase42]
How about the part in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (or one of the Narnia books) where Lewis describes little Lucy going around the house “making love to everybody”? Wonder how much longer we’ve got before that gets whitewashed out.
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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.
[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
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.
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Depends on the age. Nursery rhymes cover a lot of ground, age-wise …
[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
Maybe someone braver than I could find out more about that severed-penises story by Googling it, but I am NOT Googling that…
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No way am I gonna google that.
Too much wrongness is likely to be exposed by any possible search terms.
[QUOTE=hekk]
Weren’t the original Brothers Grimm collected stories ridiculously dark and violent and gory? And anti-semitic? And pedophillic by today’s standards?
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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.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
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.
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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
[QUOTE=MGibson]
It is a genuine pleasure to find another who appears to love the book so much!
Marc
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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.
)
