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val70 I can't think of a better word than "censoring"!
All I know it's what was reported, which is that the copyright owners and publishers altered the stories to avoid possibly causing offence; but it seems now that Penguin Books will be issuing original-text "archive" editions.
Even worse, I understand some UK authors are among many to be kept out of some states' school libraries and courses until passed as suitable by .... well by whom exactly?
There does seem a fashion in some circles to deride figures of the past no matter how great their achievements, for having opinions that are seen as wrong now but were commonplace at the time; and this leads to a total distortion of both creator and created.
Not just children's authors either, as we see with people trying to link Richard Wagner with the Nazis, simply because he was anti-Semitic and held political-revolutionary views. Not pleasant attitudes, no, of course they were not; but we should be able to accept his views were widespread in his 19C time, and concentrate on enjoying his music.
Similarly, the English scientist Dr. Marie Stopes is sometimes attacked for supporting "eugenics". She did do that, as did very many academics of the late-19 - early-20C. Whilst later events showed how that social philosophy, which was never a science, would be used evilly; its early proponents genuinely thought it a positive idea. What though concentrating on Dr. Stopes' views there does from our own time 100 years later, is deflect attention from her extremely positive life as both a palaeontologist with a special interest in the Coal Measures botany; and her tireless campaigning for women's health.
It's as if past do-ers must be rejected as bad, for having ideas of their time we now see as bad, and I am not sure how much of that is really just jealousy in critics who have yet to "do" anything notable themselves. It wants yesterday's heroes to be super-human, but they were not, they were human and made mistakes, were flawed; yet also did good work. Are their modern-day critics super-human?
For commercial reasons? You might be right, and I think for negative rather than positive reasons: fearing lost sales if a few readers become too noisy about supposed slights to this-or-that "community". Though no-one (i hope) wants gratuitous offence-giving even by accident, the fear forgets we are all of one "community".
"Labels" indeed, but it is odd that an era marked by a desire for overwhelming "equality" and "inclusivity" in our manifold differences, has created a desire to label everyone as if we are all standard items in some sort of rigid database menu. Database menus of course, have the characteristic of inflexibility, so if something does not match the menu, it creates problems. All very impersonal, even dehumanising.
Ending yesterday was an interesting 5-part series, just over an hour altogether, on BBC Radio Four, on the history of the word 'woke'; from its original meaning and intention to its often unpleasant, very different version now. It started in the 1930s as African-American slang meaning
stay [a]woken - to injustice - but in the last couple of years became a poisonous term of political abuse.
