3 ms·
P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ Books Changed for ‘Unacceptable Prose’
- ofalkaed 4y agoNext month, special restored editions and the cash rolls in.
- ggm 4y agoI'd personally rather we put content warnings on books than we did this. But most of all I'd rather we just accepted the past is another country. Maybe footnotes or side notes? That would be in the spirit of contextualising panels beside historical works which need some 'yea but' added.
- eesmith 4y agoIt took a bit of hunting, but I found an example of one of the changes. https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/jeeves-and-wooster-stories-censored-to-avoid-offending-modern-readers/ar-AA19TIam https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/jeeves-and-wooster-sto... mentions: "In the 1934 novel Right Ho, Jeeves, newly reissued by Penguin, a racial term used to describe a “minstrel of the old school” has been removed." https://archive.org/details/p-g-wodehouse_right-ho-jeeves/page/n177/mode/2up?q=minstrel https://archive.org/details/p-g-wodehouse_right-ho-jeeves/pa... shows it's the n-word - something that even 90 years ago was seen as a "racially loaded ethnic slur or insult" in the US, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None . From a financial perspective, it seems likely that changing that word will help long-term sales. I suspect new readers/buyers of a comedy series don't want to suspend their disbelief that much. It's not like they have the historical and literary impact as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - another story with a contentious use of the n-word. FWIW, expurgated versions of Huckleberry Finn have been around for years.