Did you keep your favourite children’s books for your kids and then the grandkids? Have you had to quietly put them in the bin or at least in a spot where they won’t be picked up?
I’m thinking books like The Three Golliwogs by Enid Blyton (a favourite author when I was a kid and now soundly criticised) or the Noddy books featuring Big Ears or Little Black Sambo or Little House on the Prairie with its racist attitudes.
Lecturer Dan Dixon says no sensible person would defend Roald Dahl’s character. “He was a professed antisemite. In the 1970s, he was forced by the advocacy of the civil rights organisation NAACP to change Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas, who were originally depicted as pygmies brought from Africa to work in the chocolate factory unpaid.”
Hence, there has been controversy over the rewriting of passages from authors such as Dahl and Blyton to remove potentially offensive material.
Dixon says: “Is rewriting a sentence to expurgate an offensive term a form of vandalism, or is it no different from (or at least comparable to), say, translation?”
Should those books be seen as typical of their time and quietly packed away or rewritten to make them more acceptable?
Do you look back at those books and cringe? Do they make you realise how far we’ve come?
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