Do you have books from your childhood that have been loved into reality, like the Velveteen Rabbit? Think twice before trading them for newer editions. The same advice holds for any book you value.
I've already been hanging on for dear life to my copies of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books with the original American text. The modern, modified versions are interesting—I believe they are the British versions—but I still prefer the American versions, which contains Lewis' later revisions. What I really don't like about the currently-available books is the way they are numbered in chronological order, rather than publication order, as I strongly believe that they make much more sense in publication order.
Far more important than these minor changes, however, is what is being done to books now. This Natural Selections essay, "The Age of Censorship," gives some examples of what has been done to the new editions of Roald Dahl's works.
Many of the changes are of a type. For instance, more than a dozen instances of the word “white” were changed. White was changed to pale, frail, agog or sweaty, or else removed entirely. Because, you know, a color can be racist.
In one book alone—The Witches—The Telegraph counted 59 new changes. These run from the banal—”chambermaid” is replaced with “cleaner”—to cleansings that appeal more directly to modern pseudo-liberal sensitivities. The suggestion that a character go on a diet, for instance, is simply disappeared. And this passagage,“Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman,” has been changed to, “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business.”
It’s hard to know what even is believed by the censors who made these changes. Do they mean to suggest that nobody should go on a diet, or that no woman has ever worked as a cashier or a typist? And what, pray tell, is a “top scientist.” I’m guessing that none of the censors could provide a working definition of science, but that when asked to conjure a scientist up, they imagine someone with super science-y accoutrements, like a white lab coat and machines that whirr in the background. Sorry, that would be a pale lab coat.
Dahl's final book, Esio Trot, contained this passage, not in the text but in an author's note: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand, packed in crates, and they came mostly from North Africa." This was replaced by: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand. They came from lots of different countries, packed into crates."
I'm beginning to suspect that the real reason for these changes is to dumb down the language, the quality of the writing, and the readers.
It's not just children's books that are being rewritten. This Guardian article explains how Agatha Christie's books have been subjected to the censors' edits.
Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.
This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”
Really? Is there some sort of requirement that when one dons a censor's hat, one must forget how to write interesting prose?
Back to Natural Selections.
There are many things troubling about the creative work of an author being changed after his death. It interferes with our understanding of our own history. We live downstream of our actual history, which did not change just because censors got ahold of our documents. Having the recorded version of history scrubbed interferes with our ability to make sense of our world.
Post-mortem revisions are also bad for art. These edits raise questions of creative autonomy. Of voice. Of what fiction is for. Fiction is not mere entertainment. Fiction educates and uplifts, informing readers about ourselves and our world, and also about the moment in time that the work was created.
When our children were young, I noticed that the newer version of Mary Poppins had been scrubbed of a chapter that was decidedly inappropriate to more modern sentiments. I didn't think too much about it at the time. But now I'm utterly convinced that even young children deserve to know—need to know—that not all cultures and times have had the same values and priorities that we do now. That while we may find other beliefs and practices horrifying, many other cultures would find our own beliefs and practices equally horrifying. What's more, and most important of all, that people in the future will look at us with the same patronizing disgust with which we see our predecessors. We are not the pinnacle of civilization.
That's an excellent topic of conversation for parents and their children, and what better place to start than with a beloved book?
I sort of understand where they are coming from, I think. They want their kids to enjoy their favorite books without all the messy bits. So they take out the messy bits.
But I’d much prefer if the added a page of annotations or an introductory note or some other way of giving context to what now seems inappropriate than just artlessly trying to make as though it never was there. It’s not a dig on a book if it’s not perfect. And removing messy bits does not guarantee that the result is perfect, far from it! I suspect these versions, this wave, as it were, will get its own name, like Thomas Bowdler‘s works ushered in term “bowdlerize.” And in three decades the originals will be making a comeback, to the great satisfaction of the rights owners and printing presses.
It’s not unlike the back-and-forth over confederate monuments. While I agree that in many cases, it is reasonable to remove them from positions of prominence, disappearing them altogether means we lose an opportunity for a conversation. Often they weren’t put up immediately following the Civil War, but much later. Why? Who, several decades after the Civil War, thought it would be good to commemorate the confederate side? Why was it at that time considered appropriate to put up confederate monuments? What purpose did they serve? What view of history (e.g. Lost Cause) was behind them? If the monuments are gone, it’s hard to ask those questions, so moving them to less conspicuous places and adding documentation for context seems like a useful compromise to me. Like the writer points out, deleting history means we learn nothing from it.
