Archived version: https://archive.ph/WYdpt
Jacqueline Wilson has said editing childrenâs books to remove inappropriate and dated language is sometimes justified because young people do not have âa sense of historyâ.
However, the bestselling childrenâs author told ITVâs Good Morning Britain that she was opposed to âmeddling with adult classicsâ.
Childrenâs 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 Dahlâs texts to make sure his books could âcontinue to be enjoyed by all todayâ.
Hundreds of changes included replacing the word âfatâ with âenormousâ, and changing âugly and beastlyâ to âbeastlyâ. âOld hagâ in Dahlâs The Witches was changed to âold crowâ.
Blytonâs books, including The Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers, dating back to the 1940s, have also undergone âsensitive text revisionsâ. Words such as âqueerâ or âgayâ 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 âhow itâs doneâ.
She added: âThere are some things I think that would make us a bit worried if we returned to our old childrenâs favourites and read them with fresh eyes. We might be a little surprised.
âI think with children, they often absorb texts. They still havenât got the power to sort things out and have a sense of history.â
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 Blytonâs sexist stereotypes and âunfortunate references that were very ordinary in their times but nowadays donât fit with the way we thinkâ, 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: âItâs so different now ⊠Nowadays, youâd see Prue as a victim even if she had initiated it and the teacher as a paedophile because he responded to her.â
But she told Good Morning Britain on Monday: âIâm very against meddling with adult classics.
âI was just thinking about Jane Eyre the other day. I mean, with the mad woman in the attic and the way sheâs depicted, youâd never find that sort of treatment of people with serious mental health problems.
âAnd yet, I would be absolutely at the forefront of people saying: âNo, leave it alone. Itâs my favourite book.ââ
Wilson also criticised so-called cancel culture, saying that she felt conversations to solve differences would be more constructive.
âIâm of the old school, I think: âWhy canât everybody just talk things over? Discuss things.â You donât have to agree with someone,â she said.
âBut I think itâs more helpful to actually get to the bottom of whatâs making people so angry.
âBut whether Iâd feel that in the midst of a baying crowd or not, I donât know.
âI mean, lifeâs changed so much. And I think itâs good that people can make it clear what they feel, but I do think a little bit of discussion [is necessary].
âThereâs 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.â
Wilson, a former childrenâs 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.
FTA:
"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: âItâs so different now âŠ"
đ That was no more appropriate in 2005 than it is now you moron! We arenât talking 150 years ago⊠that was 18 years ago!
In other words, it was eight years AFTER Mary Kay LeTourneau pled guilty to that shitâŠ
This is a really difficult one for me. I do 100% agree that adult classics should remain as they are, and we should view these through the lens of historical context. Keeping those classics as they are allows us to analyse them and see how views have changed - sometimes we need to know how bad things were so we can learn from our mistakes. But I think itâs also important that for young adults, these works should be studied in a classroom so thereâs someone there to explain the uncomfortable parts.
The difficulty comes with books aimed at very young audiences, like Roald Dahl novels. Kids may not always have the necessary support or understanding of the context. So Iâm inclined to agree with Wilson here with regards to kids books, but itâs a bit of a grey area for me.
*Her 2005 novel is pretty worrying though. As the other commenter mentioned, the subject matter was inappropriate even at the time. It doesnât sound like the book tackles the consequences of what happens either.
Kids may not always have the necessary support or understanding of the context.
For the most part, thatâs what parents and teachers are for, though I understand that not every child has good role models in their life. Lots of parents these days donât want to parent, and rather than educating their children, they just want to make everything a safe space and hide anything they consider inappropriate.
I understand that not every child has good role models in their life.
Iâd say most donât. Iâd venture a huge proportion of people with kids are unfit to be parents, but I recognize thatâs a rectally sourced statistic.
sometimes we need to know how bad things were so we can learn from our mistakes
And sometimes we need to know how bad things have become so we can learn from our mistakes. Progress unfortunately isnât linear.
I dunno.
If the author does it, Iâm totally fine with that.
When itâs someone else? Not so much. You donât edit pasties onto a painting of Aphrodite. You shouldnât be hammering dicks off of statues. And you shouldnât edit an authorâs words.
We can, as readers and/or parents, decide what is and isnât something we want to read without the arbitrary intervention of a third party.
If a book was published and edited during the authorâs lifetime, thatâs where it should stay.
No.
The books are valuable as a picture of the time. How many times are they going to be edited to be âacceptableâ? Thereâs value in teaching about what things were like at that time and why the author was okay writing what they did.
And why attempt to draw a line with childrenâs books? If there is something worth preserving in classic literature that was intended for adults, the same can be said for classics intended for children as well.
Re-writing books is an erasure and a white-washing of the past. People want to keep what theyâd had but recognize that itâs not culturally sensitive any longer, and instead of accepting that, theyâd rather pretend that things were fine 50, 80, 100 years ago by slapping a new coat of paint on the text and moving forward.
In the Secret Garden, when Martha tells Mary that she thought Mary was going to be a little native girl, Mary loses her ish and starts calling her âdaughter of a pigâ and other names. Thereâs significance in Maryâs reaction and the words she uses that paints a picture of the time. Removing that to make the story more culturally sensitive, removes the historical elements and also changes Maryâs character.
It would be better to make an entirely new âadaptationâ of books in the public domain without the sensitive elements than to change what these books originally said.
This is right up there with conservatives banning books they donât like, i.e. fucking stupid.
Meh, I donât fetishize âclassicsâ, and I donât hold with the whitewashing argument - imho thatâs akin to insisting that statues of confederate generals stay up to âpreserve the historic recordâ.
If a publisher has the rights to IP they want to continue monetizing, but itâs 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 canât 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 - youâre 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 thatâs okay.
But if weâre going to let boppity little autotuned idiots cover Queen, for fuckâs sake, without burning down the record label, then I donât think we have a right to complain about books getting adapted for the market. Theyâre 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, thatâs 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 donât 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 itâs a mistake on the part of the customer to conflate past acclaim with ongoing merit - but if youâre relying on brand recognition and the nostalgia market, then you maintain the brandâs reputation with ongoing updates as needed.
Go out, read modern authors and join in groundbreaking conversations with todayâs culture - and as they fade from relevance over time, let them. Itâs 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. Thatâs fine, but nobodyâs obliged to try and sell that to other people.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Jacqueline Wilson has said editing childrenâs books to remove inappropriate and dated language is sometimes justified because young people do not have âa sense of historyâ.
However, the bestselling childrenâs author told ITVâs Good Morning Britain that she was opposed to âmeddling with adult classicsâ.
Childrenâs 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.
Blytonâs books, including The Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers, dating back to the 1940s, have also undergone âsensitive text revisionsâ.
Her version is without Blytonâs sexist stereotypes and âunfortunate references that were very ordinary in their times but nowadays donât fit with the way we thinkâ, she told the Irish News last year.
Wilson told the Guardian in a recent interview: âItâs so different now ⊠Nowadays, youâd see Prue as a victim even if she had initiated it and the teacher as a paedophile because he responded to her.â
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