Enid Blyton - what changes are/are not OK?

[VictoriaOKeefe]

My example:
Jo-Jo in the Island of Adventure - i think Jo-Jo should have been kept as a black villain but with the "rolling eyes" and "nigra" speech removed. Changing him to a white man sends the dangerous message to children that a member of a marginalised group cannot be a nasty, small-minded jerk (as TPratchett put it). Women are marginalised but i wouldn't pee on my cruel abrasive mother if she was on fire.

Lily: Exactly. dresses and perfume and flowers can be just as strong as torn jeans and Doc Martens.

Honest to god, considering I spent hours and hours and hours reading EB I did not turn out a racist or a bigot. Children are perfectly capable to putting things in context, even at an early age. Political correctness just stamps the life out of so much these days.

"Political correctness just stamps the life out of so much these days."

What sort of things do you mean?

Enyd Blyton's books are incredibly sexist and racist (if I realised this as a kid almost 30 years ago, well...) is not about political correctness or changing anything. They had a moment in time. Move on to better ones.

Enid even

Honest to god, considering I spent hours and hours and hours reading EB I did not turn out a racist or a bigot. Children are perfectly capable to putting things in context, even at an early age. Political correctness just stamps the life out of so much these days.

I find people who swear to God that they're honest are invariably liars.

Funnily enough, even though I read the books DM acquired from my Aunt, DM was always a tad sniffy about EB. She much preferred Elinor Brent-Dyer (sp ?).

If people are picking holes in kids books, doesn't Roald Dahl come in for some stick ?

Is Lewis Carroll still OK ?

Of course it's ironic that "ShumpaLumpa" is lecturing us, given that's a play on the Oompa Loompas from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", who are widely viewed as racist.

I recently re-read all the school books and then moved on to the Famous Five. I got to this one and roared with laughter (at myself) when the first thing I picked up was that it was a massive breach of Safeguarding to allow Mr Luffy to go camping with the Five and the second thing I picked up was that the trains that rumbled under the moor were not 'modern steam trains', but instead 'old-fashioned trains from last century'.

My two youngest, now 13 and 19 showed no interest whatsoever in EB, despite me having almost all of the ff and school books. whereas me and dd1, now in her late 20s, still reread as a guilty pleasure. I think the younger ones had a much more accessibly wider choice

I liked reading Enyd Blyton. I do remember that there were some passages that I didn't agree with (like a fat girl should lose weight so she would be nicer as a friend). It's fine. We don't all have to be offended the second we read a sentence that we don't agree with. It might even make people realise that you shouldn't believe everything you read...

Condemning people from the past for not sharing the views of 2018 is cheap shot and like Rose in "Doctor Who" ignores all regard for their different circumstances,

Blyton was a Victorian who had an Edwardian upbringing.

There's an unfortunate prurient desire to believe the worst of beloved children's book authors - witness the desperation to believe Caroll and Barrie were pedophiles.

Of course it's ironic that "ShumpaLumpa" is lecturing us, given that's a play on the Oompa Loompas from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", who are widely viewed as racist.

No it isn't actually. Shumpa Lumpa is an African dish, nothing to do with Charlie and the Choolate Factory.

Your posts are getting twattier. Feeling inadequate OP?

I think it's vital we keep access to all kinds of books. Also children know what is right in its time and how things were. It is part of the GCSE history syllabus to study sources and part of what most families talk about at home - how things change, what we tihnk is wonderful now in 2018 but next week will be seen as very backward and the like.

Now for Elinor Brent Dyer - I liked her books too - again a bit sexist in their time but all these books bring something to us - it is one reason I studied 2 languages at school as I wanted to be tri-lingual as they were in those books in French, German and English. A lot of all these books have a strong sometimes Victorial message of helping the less fortunate which is good. EBD was also very anti Nazi which comes out in the book's themes too albeit like the sacred JK Rowling's books set in a boarding school for all the connotations there are from that - that parents abandon children there. Some think Harry Potter should be banned due to the witch craft elements.

I would instead let publishers decide (whiilst copyright is still in place for author life plus 70 years) what is published and let parents read what they like to their children.

one thing to watch out for if you censor your children too much is they will lose cultural references and not appear quite as on the ball as their peers including in interviews for jobs and the like so by all means isolate them according to your own cultural norms but don't assume that will always help rather than hinder them. Sometimes we need to know what we are up against which is why I never like sexist men to be censored on line for example.

I think eb would be fine to be looked at as part of the gcse history syllabus it would raise some interesting questions that children that age would be able to talk about.
I think that as an everyday story book for primary age children they are not so good.

How old they were supposed to be by book 21 isn’t eluded to as surely Julian would be about 20!

I always assumed (and in fact I half think it's sometimes specifically mentioned) that they're not all set in the summer holidays. Taking into account Easter and half-terms (I can't remember if there are any that explicitly take place around Christmas), if they had an adventure every time they got together, that's not quite so many years.

Blyton was a Victorian who had an Edwardian upbringing.

With a touch of the Bohemian, if the nude tennis is anything to go by ...

I always assumed (and in fact I half think it's sometimes specifically mentioned) that they're not all set in thesummerholidays. Taking into account Easter and half-terms (I can't remember if there are any that explicitly take place around Christmas), if they had an adventure every time they got together, that's not quite so many years.

And you could probably get at least two or three adventures into a long summer holiday. It's still pushing it to get 21 adventures in over a 6 or 7 year period, though.

I don't think any of us mind inconsistencies. Plenty of teachers used to be against the Enid B books but if they got children reading then that is much better than children not reading at all and once they learn reading is fun by whatever books takes their fancy (for a long time I just read non fiction books for example) then they move on to other books too.

Re. the ageless Famous Five and the series carrying on for so long, from what I read (I think www.enidblyton.net) she only intended there to be six books; the series would have finished with "Five on Kirrin Island again", so that the series would start and finish with the island.

And anyway- the ageless thing is quite common in series- think of the number of murders in Midsomer, for example. And Poirot ages but Miss Marple didn't-it's just a conceit.

My EB's are almost all seventies reprints bought when i was a child.

They'd been edited in the '70s - not just decimalising the money, but changing things such as Arabella's swan's feathers trimmed slippers in the Naughtiest Girl.

In the sixties The Three Golliwogs were renamed Wiggie,' 'Waggie,' and 'Wollie.

In the fifties, the new Elizabethans of the atomic age changed a reference in Blyton's Adventure series from "the King" to "the Queen".

To pretend that the goblins instead of gollies in the eighties and the drinking cola instead of tea in the nineties edits were the earliest is ridiculous.

the ageless thing is quite common in series

Yes - I recently re-read my Biggles books. He starts off at 18 in WW1, but by the time he's flying jet planes in the '50s and '60s, he's not a boy any more, but equally, he doesn't seem to be contemplating retirement as he should have been, for someone born in the late 1890s.

I think Johns was contemplating a Biggles retiring book a la Holmes or Poirot when he died. But he certainly doesn't seem to age much between 1939 and 1960!

William Brown stayed 11 year’s old from the 1920s all the way through WWII and into the late 60s.

They didn’t edit much, because they’re brilliant books and the period charm is key, but the late 30s story where he thinks that Hitler seems like a good role model and tries to organise a pogrom against a Jewish shopkeeper is not included in modern reprints. Because he’s a nice boy really, just easily led, he ends up making friends with the shopkeeper and helpfully chasing away a thief from the shop. But seriously, would you want your ten year old to read a book as light entertainment in which the sympathetic hero carries out racial abuse because it’s informative for them to know that things were like that in those days.