Modern audiences
Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.
Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.
To be honest this doesn’t really outrage me all that much. Agatha Christie wasn’t a giant of literature, she was a popular mystery writer.
The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers.
Or, a bid to make it possible to read their books without flinching. Dahl is far more of a literary writer than Christie or Fleming, and I do think that makes a difference. I think I can explain why, too: Christie and Fleming are telling stories; the language is just the medium. Literary writers care about the language as well as the stories.
Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.
This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”
But what if the racist language is there to tell us something about Mrs Allerton?
H/t Nullius in Verba
I’m wondering if they’ll try that on Norman Mailer.
Heh. Where would they begin?
And as for Philip Roth…
Agatha Christie is practically the O.G. in this regard. Her play Ten Little N*****s was renamed (in the Sixties, within her lifetime, so presumably with her assent) to Ten Little Indians (which is what it was called when I was the Cockney butler in my school’s production of it — picture me with my extremely gay teenage Canadian boy voice trying to sound like Michael Caine while saying “Rich folks is queer!”), and more recently (and after her death) has been renamed again to And Then There Were None (presumably because “indian” is going the way of the n-word).
As for Ian Fleming, it seems comical to try and cleanse a James Bond novel of sexism. You’d end up with a blank notebook.
Hahahaha truth.
I lean more towards leaving these things alone; part of the experience of reading older books is getting some insight into how people thought and behaved in the past. Though I’d say the calculation is different for children’s authors like Dahl — I can imagine parents wanting to share a treasured story with a child without having to have a whole discussion about how this language isn’t really acceptable but it’s ok to enjoy the story, which may be nuances that young kids aren’t ready for yet.
Overall, though, I can’t get too agitated about any of this; whoever owns the rights can do what they like as far as I’m concerned. At least for popular books, I doubt it will become too difficult to get a hold of the original versions, at least in electronic form.
That’s a concept they can’t accept. They either think it incoherent on its face (i.e., using racist language can’t tell us anything worth knowing) or misses the point (i.e., using racist language is always evil). To those who cater to the mythical “modern audience”, there’s simply no difference between a racist picture and a picture of racism.
And to think that I read it on Mulberry Street!
Mike H #1: Mailer would come back from the grave to punch their lights out.
Ophelia #2: And Joseph Conrad. And Flannery O’Connor. And…
Arty #3: Hilarious story, thanks!
And to think there are people too dim to see the point of the racist language in “Huckleberry Finn”
Every day seems to bring us closer to that utopian vision of goodthink of which Orwell wrote so fondly. As far as making historical writings more approachable to the modern reader, I suspect it’s mostly about squeezing more book sales out of an old catalog.
I’m rarely an absolutist but I’m against this sort of historical revisionism. Read the book or don’t. They are time capsules of historical attitudes. I don’t trust the Ministry of Truth or some marketing guy to correct them for me.
I’d like to see them have a go at The Flashman Papers… Somehow I don’t think anyone will…
As Screechy says, the rights owner can do what they like. Personally I’m in favour of leaving fiction books alone. They are what they are and if that shocks and affronts (some) modern readers, well, that might also give them pause to contemplate how society has changed. There’s maybe some argument that non-fiction could be edited in some cases where for example the racism, misogyny, etc is just incidental because that’s how people wrote. I’d still make a point of having a forward that described the changes with examples of the before and after. Where a non-fiction text was intentionally offensive though, it should stay as it was for the record. imagine trying to sanitise Mein Kampf?
I believe Thomas Jefferson did that with the Bible. And, although they don’t remove pages a la Jefferson, most Christians do that in their minds as they ignore most of the bad bits and inaccuracies.
The way to ‘tamper’ with these books is not to change them, but to put them in context. Include a forward that goes into the details of what might be considered hideously wrong about the work, about where the attitudes came from, and so forth. Then let the work be experienced through that light.
I read a couple of the original pulp Fu Manchu novels in editions that took this approach–instead of trying to obscure the racist portrayal of the Chinese villain, they simply flat-out called it racism, talked a bit about it, and then went on with their day. Which was good, because the first couple novels, at least, had a surprisingly strong female lead–Kâramanèh has her own agenda, rescues the male leads on a few occasions (particularly when doing so will help her advance that agenda), and generally is remarkably portrayed by comparison to a lot of what pulp would do later. (This isn’t to say this is a feminist novel–she still ends up being very much about appealing to male interest, and is it’s most sexist when it’s also racist, by talking about her ‘exotic’ nature as a mixed-race woman. But it’s still interesting that there was a blueprint for getting it right from that early on, and casts into sharp contrast how inexcusable it is that so many authors still screw it up.)
Also erasing any reportage on the desperate condition of children in Egypt. Chronic ophthalmia, frequently leading to blindness. Endemic respiratory infection, not to mention Bilharzia.