My son and I listen to the audiobooks of Famous Five and they are all prefixed with a warning that they have been edited for "modern audiences" or something like that. So the editing started years ago.
I'd have to go and check, I didn't see any "edited version" statement on the outside, or on the cardboard holder for all the books, but that's not to say there wasn't one.
Blyton and Dahl used to sell about equally well a few decades ago, but Blyton's books fell off a cliff as the racism, anti-gypsy, etc parts of the books meant parents weren't buying them for their kids anymore. Which isn't surprising, considering the many tens of thousands of great books, the vast majority of which don't have these issues, that they could buy for their kids, no decent parent would want to subject their children to these retrogressive ideas presented as absolutely normal.
Avoiding this fate is why the Dahl estate made the decision to edit their books.
Of course, if the people who really think that these capitalistic decisions are a threat to literature and human culture and history, they would challenge the root of the problem, which is copyright protections preventing humanity from enjoying these apparent building blocks of our culture, decades after the authors have passed away and have no say on how they should be treated.
I read these to my son a dozen years or so ago at bedtime. We're American, so the expressions used by the British in the 1940s would absolutely crack us up. "Your mother's a brick, isn't she?" comes immediately to mind. Is that a good thing? It seemed like it was in context, but we had no idea. We'd laugh ourselves silly trying to figure some of them out.
Autres temps, autres mœurs - "Different times, different customs"
This editing policy can be applied to any and all books, even the Bible. Yep, we eat pork today, so we'll throw out all those bits in the Bible that say 'pigs are unclean'. Or the bits that talk about all the other foods that can't be eaten.
Or the books of Dickens, which talk about the child-exploitation of the early 1800s. Do we cut those parts out, no matter that it will completely destroy the whole significance the story? Where do we stop?
So do we keep the books as written, even when our daily attitudes have changed, or do we change the books?
And what happens when the attitudes of the day return to what they were previously? Do we change those books again? How long before the words in the books of the day bear no resemblance at all to those books as their authors originally wrote them?
Books should remain as the original author wrote them. If they clash with today's attitudes, so be it. Nobody is forced to read them. Perhaps our grand-children will rediscover them when our daily attitudes have changed again, like the hemlines of our clothes
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 41.1 ms ] threadAvoiding this fate is why the Dahl estate made the decision to edit their books.
Of course, if the people who really think that these capitalistic decisions are a threat to literature and human culture and history, they would challenge the root of the problem, which is copyright protections preventing humanity from enjoying these apparent building blocks of our culture, decades after the authors have passed away and have no say on how they should be treated.
This editing policy can be applied to any and all books, even the Bible. Yep, we eat pork today, so we'll throw out all those bits in the Bible that say 'pigs are unclean'. Or the bits that talk about all the other foods that can't be eaten.
Or the books of Dickens, which talk about the child-exploitation of the early 1800s. Do we cut those parts out, no matter that it will completely destroy the whole significance the story? Where do we stop?
So do we keep the books as written, even when our daily attitudes have changed, or do we change the books?
And what happens when the attitudes of the day return to what they were previously? Do we change those books again? How long before the words in the books of the day bear no resemblance at all to those books as their authors originally wrote them?
Books should remain as the original author wrote them. If they clash with today's attitudes, so be it. Nobody is forced to read them. Perhaps our grand-children will rediscover them when our daily attitudes have changed again, like the hemlines of our clothes