David Carmon
Sunday 2nd September 2012 1:55am
Cheshire
2,030 posts
Quote: Kenneth @ August 22 2012, 3:35 AM BST
Please don't tell filthy lies. Blyton's eldest daughter Gillian did NOT want the Golliwogs removed. She lamented their removal but saw it as necessary for the Noddy books to keep being republished in the era of 'political correctness gone mad' rather than being consigned to history. She said there was absolutely nothing racist about them.
You are not the first to lament this butchery:
Stout fellow. I'm afraid that in new printings of Five Go Off in a Caravan, the circus boy Nobby has been renamed Ned.
Dame 'Snap', I believe, the f**ktards at Chorion have renamed her.
Disagree. You seem to assume that children who are sufficiently intelligent to choose to read books are so stupid that they will be easily influenced by language deemed racist. I read Blyton, Twain, Wodehouse et al but didn't start using the word nigger until I started listening to a band named NWA.
As for the Agatha Christie book, several Asian translations have kept the Ten Little Niggers title. Disgracefully, I find these translations rather amusing.
Not really. There's a new Disney cartoon and series of books called Famous 5, in which the main characters (except for the dog) are the offspring of the original four children. George's daughter is of Anglo-Indian descent and might be Hindu but I er, caught part of one episode on the Disney Channel a while back and couldn't bear to watch it. Scooby Doo vastly superior.
You should get Barbara Stoney's biography of Blyton. It's excellent. And look out for a Blyton book called The Six Bad Boys, which was a rare attempt at social realism, poverty, parental neglect and delinquency. All rather tame by today's standards but still an interesting read.
Really? The Noddy books are now being published with the golliwogs restored? Or do you mean "still available via eBay and second-hand/antiquarian bookstores"?
I have read the biography several times, first way back in 1997.
I can understand things like Golliwogs being removed and replaced with bears, but I honestly can't fathom why anyone would find Nobby offensive, or Fanny, though that seems to have survived the change in recent editions.
The word queer being changed for odd I do get, as it isn't commonly used in that context today, though I would prefer it to be left untouched.
Political correctness will eventually eat itself. In 100 years, a typical Famous Five book will read;
"Julian, Dick, George and Anne were home fo the summer holidays at Kirrin Cottage, Timmy was there as usual of course.
Six weeks later all the children returned to school"
