"[T]he Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising."
-- George Orwell, 1984.
Keep on editing the past, lest someone be offended or see reality as viewed by those who lived then.
It was always funny to me how people seem to focus so much on the 24/7 surveillance in 1984 while I always found the rewriting of the past and the shrinking of language so much more terrifying. Admittedly, the constant surveillance is what enables everything else.
> Though this is the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last used in 1977.
A little confusingly worded. They mean that the title was last used in 1977, and not, unfortunately, the term (for a few seconds I was trying to think of what racist term was so archaic and/or offensive that no-one had used it since 1977, but then I remembered that book's rather unfortunate original title...)
In the UK, in the US it always had the more modern title from the time it released there in 1940. Not sure about content differences in the US version though.
> In the new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, the newspaper added.
This is absurd, if the reason was to avoid using the term white.
Oh I see, I didn’t realise the character in question was Black. I any case, I think it’s still absurd to change. It’s the character’s observation at the time.
Whether or not someone finds them to be 'contentious, arbitrary, or destructive' really shouldn't matter, as the author was the one that chose the words that they put to paper at the time that it was written.
Society changes, but changing a work to conform to new and/or different societal norms should be frowned upon.
This isn't a translation. It's a change based on malleable societal norms.
Instead of saying that changes were made in a forward, perhaps it should have a forward that discusses how societal norms have changed since the book was written.
Changing the author's original text is not modernization, it is not clarification, it's destructive.
The meaning of words change over time. Sometimes this means words that weren't too derogatory in the past become known as heinous insults in the modern day.
I don't think these authors meant to be insulting and evoke bitter feelings in their readers. So this change better aligns the story with it's original intent so the mere
mention of a word doesn't obscure everything else.
> The meaning of words change over time. Sometimes this means words that weren't too derogatory in the past become known as heinous insults in the modern day.
That doesn't give anyone the right to change someone else's writings without their approval.
People need to be capable of understanding the context of the situation/time when something was written. They don't need to be pampered to because something might hurt their feelings.
> That doesn't give anyone the right to change someone else's writings without their approval.
You keep saying this, but it's not a realistic view of how publishing has ever worked. Entire books get posthumously published based on a few scenes or character sketches or even mutually contradictory drafts.
> They don't need to be pampered
Right, so this is just moralizing about what you assume readers need, not some real full-throated defense of authorial moral rights.
Post publication re-editing isn’t all that unusual; virtually certain to have happened for anything more than a couple of centuries old, if only for legibility, but also with more recent stuff.
Fun fact; versions of Sam Pepys’ Diary with the naughty stuff were not available to the general public until the 70s.
Surely even if you think both are "very" destructive you can see the case of Dahl is far more extreme? Both his general style and as children's literature the prose often relies on lyrical or metrical effects which weren't preserved in the changes. And some of the changes (e.g. the infamous wigs line) were totally inexplicable. Neither is the case for Christie's work and the edits - some of which were so subtle they were apparently done in 2020 but not worthy of comment until the Telegraph decided to weaponize them in the culture war in 2023.
Reading the comments have made me wonder: how much editing can one do and keep the author's association?
How does reusing the author's name, changing their work, work? Are groups able to republish under an author's name because the author sold their name rights? Or is it something else?
If so, how much can the owner change and still attribute to the author? Could they write a whole new book and put Agatha Christie as the author? What if they just "edit" the current book with 100% new contents? Or 50%? Where does editing end and writing begin?
> Reading the comments have made me wonder: how much editing can one do and keep the author's association?
> What if they just "edit" the current book with 100% new contents? Or 50%? Where does editing end and writing begin?
What percentage are they suggesting changing here? Do you think it's 0.1% — 60 words out of 60,000? 0.5%, that would be 300. 1% would be 600 words, that seems unlikely.
I agree you weren't asking anything specific about this change, but I wanted to make that fact clear. The publishers are talking about a change, the discussion here inspired you to ask where the threshold is, and you floated numbers like 50% or 100%, and I wanted to make clear that in the situation at hand, the change is closer to 1% or (most likely significantly) below.
Though this is the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last used in 1977.
This is false; the 1940 US printing and 1985 UK printing edited similar contents of the book, and probably several other times because when I read it it was "Indians" and today it's apparently "soldier boys".
Worth noting that both Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl accepted some editorial changes to their own works when they were alive, and in the latter case I think he was involved personally. The Oompa-Lompas were changed from being dark-skinned ("He's made people out of chocolate!") to being orange-skinned, and the original title of Agatha Christie's "And then there were none" was considered too offensive in the US even in 1939.
> “Right!” cried Mr. Wonka. “Pygmies they are! Imported direct from Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as the Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself—the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.
(BTW, an archive.org search doesn't find the phrase 'people out of chocolate'.)
The movie - and after threats by the NAACP and others to boycott the movie - portrayed them as orange.
> The Oompa-Loompa bowed and smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. His skin was rosy-white, his long hair was golden-brown, and the top of his head came just above the height of Mr. Wonka’s knee.
> (BTW, an archive.org search doesn't find the phrase 'people out of chocolate'.)
I read it in translation as a child, so I guessed it wasn't verbatim. But it's on the same page you linked, that Charlie thought Wonka had made people out of chocolate.
A one-off edit to remove a slur is a lot more justifiable than the drastic PC overhaul that appeared to be happening to Roald Dahl's work - which seems to have included purging every reference to the word 'fat', along with many others such as 'ugly', 'rotting teeth', and even 'female' (while gender-neutralising references to mothers/fathers)
It's like they've done a mass search+replace for a long list of 'bad' (descriptive!) and/or gendered words, and what's left is no longer the writing of Roald Dahl.
Given the progress of the large language models, the news is almost irrelevant now: "Produce me Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but more offensive to everyone". "Make Catch 22 version, but make higher officers less dumb". "Rewrite Winnie the Pooh, but make Eeyore less offensive, in general".
My cynical take is that it's outrage bait to get some old books into the news cycle while having a chance to sell them to people who already own them. They're not removing words for any puritanical reasons, but rather because they know it pisses people off and it's a sure way to get people talking about their books.
I think that's actually a more hopeful take than the reality.
Instead, I think it's just a stuffed shirt bureaucratic box checkers who knows that no one ever got fired for sending a book to a sensitivity reader engaging in some busy work to pad out their annual review accomplishments. The extremely low quality and incoherence of the bowdlerization shows their total indifference to both the book and any conceivable external agenda of the sensitivity edits.
If it was being done to generate controversy at least it would stop when it stopped making them money.
It's almost like a variation of Poe's law, where it's impossible to tell whether they're doing it out of some memetic bureaucratic desire to remove all the entropy from the universe, or if they're just trolling.
Always consider the possibility the "por qué no los dos" principle applies: for the actual implementers it's an opportunity to work towards the glorification of the new faith, for their bosses it's an opportunity to market through controversy.
We can just completely axe the idea of there being "no gatekeepers".
They are moved to the post-publication area, and you no longer get to understand why they changed what they changed, and you won't know if they approve of your work before you release it.
Whoever owns the rights to the book can absolutely change the book. Period. All this talk about "should" or "woke" is completely irrelevant. The owner does what the owner wants.
The publisher is clearly doing this so they can make more money just like any other good capitalist.
There are a lot of calls for this to be "illegal" in the comments. That would be a ludicrous level of government oversight on the publishing process and certainly a violation of the First Amendment in the US.
The owner of the rights to the work is free to change the work in whatever way they want, and they don't have to ask our permission or the government's (thank Christ!). This isn't a case of some sneaky leftist changing the content behind the owner's back. The owner of the content is doing it, actively and knowingly, for bigger profits.
They know a certain demographic doesn't like it, but they've done the math, and know where the best money is.
I don't think that most consumers of these books will know that modern changes have been made. And I think that most of them would be less willing to pay for copies with these changes. So they're being mislead for increased profit.
Even in the US, the First Amendment doesn't protect false advertising. I don't think making these changes without informing the buyer would be illegal under current law, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional to make it illegal, not would it contravene the spirit of free speech.
> I don't think that most consumers of these books will know that modern changes have been made.
Indeed, one never knows what changes have been made without an itemized list, which is rarely provided and certainly not required by law. And I'd argue it shouldn't be.
> And I think that most of them would be less willing to pay for copies with these changes.
The publishers clearly disagree, or at least they disagree they'd make more money without the changes. And maybe they're wrong, but it's entirely their prerogative.
What mechanism do you propose to use to notify a reader of the particular changes in a printing?
Asterisk after the author's name on the cover, leading to some brief explanation of what kind of changes have been made. There doesn't need to be an exact list.
-- George Orwell, 1984.
Keep on editing the past, lest someone be offended or see reality as viewed by those who lived then.