- cross-posted to:
- literature@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- literature@beehaw.org
Archived version: https://archive.ph/WYdpt
Jacqueline Wilson has said editing children’s books to remove inappropriate and dated language is sometimes justified because young people do not have “a sense of history”.
However, the bestselling children’s author told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that she was opposed to “meddling with adult classics”.
Children’s books by authors such as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl have been rewritten by publishers to take out words and references that are deemed inappropriate or offensive today.
In February, Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers to review Dahl’s texts to make sure his books could “continue to be enjoyed by all today”.
Hundreds of changes included replacing the word “fat” with “enormous”, and changing “ugly and beastly” to “beastly”. “Old hag” in Dahl’s The Witches was changed to “old crow”.
Blyton’s books, including The Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers, dating back to the 1940s, have also undergone “sensitive text revisions”. Words such as “queer” or “gay” have been replaced because of their contemporary meanings relating to sexuality.
Blyton has also been criticised for racism and xenophobia in her books.
While some have welcomed the changes, others have criticised the rewriting of classics, saying it is a form of censorship.
Wilson said her view on such changes depended on “how it’s done”.
She added: “There are some things I think that would make us a bit worried if we returned to our old children’s favourites and read them with fresh eyes. We might be a little surprised.
“I think with children, they often absorb texts. They still haven’t got the power to sort things out and have a sense of history.”
Wilson has been involved in updating earlier works. Last year, she wrote The Magic Faraway Tree: A New Adventure, a reimagining of a Blyton novel.
Her version is without Blyton’s sexist stereotypes and “unfortunate references that were very ordinary in their times but nowadays don’t fit with the way we think”, she told the Irish News last year.
Wilson has admitted that she would not write one of her books, published in 2005, today.
Love Lessons is about a 14-year-old girl, Prue, who falls in love with an art teacher who partly reciprocates. They kiss and he admits that he loves her, too.
Wilson told the Guardian in a recent interview: “It’s so different now … Nowadays, you’d see Prue as a victim even if she had initiated it and the teacher as a paedophile because he responded to her.”
But she told Good Morning Britain on Monday: “I’m very against meddling with adult classics.
“I was just thinking about Jane Eyre the other day. I mean, with the mad woman in the attic and the way she’s depicted, you’d never find that sort of treatment of people with serious mental health problems.
“And yet, I would be absolutely at the forefront of people saying: ‘No, leave it alone. It’s my favourite book.’”
Wilson also criticised so-called cancel culture, saying that she felt conversations to solve differences would be more constructive.
“I’m of the old school, I think: ‘Why can’t everybody just talk things over? Discuss things.’ You don’t have to agree with someone,” she said.
“But I think it’s more helpful to actually get to the bottom of what’s making people so angry.
“But whether I’d feel that in the midst of a baying crowd or not, I don’t know.
“I mean, life’s changed so much. And I think it’s good that people can make it clear what they feel, but I do think a little bit of discussion [is necessary].
“There’s been a call recently for children to develop their oracy, to become more articulate, to be able to assemble their ideas, and I think that would be a good idea.”
Wilson, a former children’s laureate, has written more than 100 books, which have sold about 40m copies in the UK and been translated into 34 languages.
The Story of Tracy Beaker, about a girl growing up in a care home, was made into a television series. Her books deal with issues such as separation, stepfamilies, sibling rivalry, bullying and falling in love.
Meh, I don’t fetishize ‘classics’, and I don’t hold with the whitewashing argument - imho that’s akin to insisting that statues of confederate generals stay up to ‘preserve the historic record’.
If a publisher has the rights to IP they want to continue monetizing, but it’s gone a bit frowsy in this day and age, they have every right to adapt it to modern audiences. It was damn well edited from the original manuscript before it was published the first time, and this is just more of the same.
Yes, I do think people need to stop clinging to past works as though they still had their original cultural relevance. Culture moves on wholesale, and you can’t just freeze little patches of it in time and expect it to mean the same thing. A huge percentage of what made a work great when it was originally written depends on the specific perspective it was written from, and the specific audience it was written for. Hell, raising a kid teaches you that - you’re so excited to introduce them to books and media that meant so much to you growing up, but when the time comes it just falls flat, and that’s okay.
But if we’re going to let boppity little autotuned idiots cover Queen, for fuck’s sake, without burning down the record label, then I don’t think we have a right to complain about books getting adapted for the market. They’re a commercial product, not some sacred tradition, and why the hell should anyone be obliged to continue to maintain a product in unsaleable form? If your world-famous cookies contain ingredients that turned out to be carcinogenic or environmentally destructive to produce, you change the damn recipe. If you want to memorialise their original form, that’s what museums are for.
This goes doubly when the product in question is for children. Why in hell would they be expected to enjoy some mouldy outdated boomerific chunk of systemic racism or whatever? They don’t care about the book as a historic record of cultural attitudes, they want it as entertainment, and the parents want something they can read to their kid without having to put disclaimers in all over the place. Like I say I think it’s a mistake on the part of the customer to conflate past acclaim with ongoing merit - but if you’re relying on brand recognition and the nostalgia market, then you maintain the brand’s reputation with ongoing updates as needed.
Go out, read modern authors and join in groundbreaking conversations with today’s culture - and as they fade from relevance over time, let them. It’s part of the process, circle of life and all that. But I get it, sometimes you want the old-and-familiar to fall back on, and you want survivor bias to do the work of sifting out most of the crud. That’s fine, but nobody’s obliged to try and sell that to other people.