4 ms·
It 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-offe
by eesmith 4y ago
It 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.