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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.
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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: “It’s so different now …"
😐 That was no more appropriate in 2005 than it is now you moron! We aren’t talking 150 years ago… that was 18 years ago!
In other words, it was eight years AFTER Mary Kay LeTourneau pled guilty to that shit…
So I think there are ways that you can do it to kill the flavor of books, but the core premise that some of those books are no longer appropriate for children as written is absolutely real. They’re not capable of reading critically and recognizing that some of the characterizations aren’t appropriate. They just absorb. And if you did want them to engage with “this isn’t right”, you need to be more direct with it and deliberately make it part of the story.
Adult books IDK. I’m not really a big classics reader generally, because while historical relevance is important, I just don’t think a lot of the themes translate to modern culture. I’m kind of torn on reading them in literature class for the same reasons. They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn’t really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don’t really apply today also don’t get through anyways. If you read more modern stuff you might actually engage people with reading, but updating curriculums is a slog and a half.
They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn’t really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don’t really apply today also don’t get through anyways.
As an old English major, I agree that the “canon” is probably larger than it needs to be, and educators generally do a piss poor job of accepting that excellent works of literature continue to be written while the length of a school year does not change. I’ll stick up for a heavy dose of the classics though. Even more than the techniques, which absolutely are present in modern literature, Shakespeare and Dickens and Melville provide a shared set of norms and expectations and feed into references and provide a vocabulary for conversation and even subconscious engagement with newer works of lit and drama.
In a lot of ways they ARE the historical context of English literature, and to that extent, yes, you should cram some of them into the brains of teenagers. Not so many as we do now, and the point is well taken that newer works can engage more readily, but school is the right time to have people read these works and to discuss why some parts are relevant, and to take a moment to explain why other parts were relevant. I’d love to see a curriculum that includes some “family tree” type stuff for themes and techniques and shows how writers have more- or less-consciously adapted and built on the DNA of previous works. Kind of a “Huck Finn begets Holden Caulfield begets Harry Potter” kind of thing. Nothing could be worse for engagement than a pure chronological lesson plan for the year.
For kid lit, absolutely. Maintain “scholarly editions” for academics and curious adults, and maybe even indicate somewhere on the copyright or title page that the edition people are reading differs from the original, but if a book is both important and problematic, then yeah, there’s no reason to take the hurtful, insensitive themes and images in them and say, “here, junior, this is what the adults in your life think you need to internalize.”
In general, I’m more for retiring dated children’s literature than revising it, authorial intent and all, but some of the great touchstones would have more value in revised form than as relics. As a parent, discussions about problematic media eventually become unavoidable if you want to responsibly engage with the world, but I don’t want to give a younger kid of bunch of mixed messages.
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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.
Blyton’s books, including The Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers, dating back to the 1940s, have also undergone “sensitive text revisions”.
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 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.”
