New censorship target for "sensitivity readers"
Enid Blyton is known around the world, across all generations, as the author behind the children’s classics The Magic Faraway Tree, The Adventures of the Wishing Tree, Noddy, and The Famous Five.
And now, the late Blyton is also known as the latest author to face edits and rewrites at the hands of her publisher, Hodder Children’s Books. They have confirmed that they will be carrying out the work to remove “offensive terms” as part of their “ongoing process”.
Such changes have made the news already in 2023 - people had a lot to say about proposed edits to Roald Dahl’s books. Edits like those to Dahl’s work, dubbed by critics as “woke”, see publishers rewriting older texts after feedback from sensitivity readers, and removing certain terms that are deemed to be offensive to modern audiences.
According to a report by The Australian, an audiobook version of one of The Famous Five books, a collection of short stories, has undergone edits to remove the words “idiot”, “a**”, and “shut up”.
One story sees cousins Julian, Dick, George, Anne, and their canine companion Timmy, investigate lights on the island - Kirrin Island - by George’s home. In a bid to get their adventure started, George wakes her cousin Anne, and Anne tells her “oh George, don’t be an a**.”
In the new edition, Anne simply says “oh George.”
Meanwhile, in the original text, Anne’s big brother - and George’s cousin - Julian, at one point tells George to “shut up” and “be sensible”. Now, Julian only tells her “George, be sensible.”
Additionally, two other instances of characters being told “don’t be an idiot” have been removed.
Those particular phrases still feature in a Hodder Children’s Books e-book version of the text, though “a**” remains unseen, substituted in this case with “idiot”.
The publishing house previously faced backlash in 2010 when they put out “contemporary” adaptations of Blyton’s books, replacing the likes of “headmistress” with “teacher”.
These revisions were seemingly put to rest when Hodder Children’s Books declared that they weren’t working.
“The feedback we have had six years on shows that the love for The Famous Five remains intact, and changing mother to mummy, pullover to jumper, was not required,” Anne McNeil, their publishing director, explained to The Guardian in 2016. “We want Enid Blyton’s legacy to go on. Millions of readers have learned to read with her.”
However, as a 2023 statement reads, the publisher’s parent company - Hachette UK - consider the edit of Blyton’s books to be an “ongoing process”, as part of their “intention to keep Enid Blyton’s books and stories at the heart of every childhood, as they have been for generations.”
“To do so, we work to ensure that there are no offensive terms in the books - changing words where the definition is unclear in context and therefore the usage is confusing, and where words have been used in an inappropriate or offensive sense - while retaining the original language as far as is possible,” a spokesperson for the company said. “This enables a very wide international audience of children to enjoy the books, while also understanding that they were written and set in the past.
“In new editions, we do not change language for the sake of modernising it. We retain old-fashioned terms such as ‘bathing-suit’ and references to pre-decimal currency. The books’ period setting is part of their charm and is enjoyed by readers of all ages.
“Any historic changes previously made to new editions, which come under the category of ‘modernisation’ in this context, have been or are being restored to the original text at the point of reprint.”
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