I think though this sort of thing has a place in the history to show that it was considered acceptable. The fact that this sort of language was used, by the people who would have been seen at the time as morally right shows how ingrained it was. By removing all aspects of this, then we're denying it happened for our benefit because we don't want to admit to it, like a child who throws the empty wrapper in the bin in the hope that it won't be spotted. The casual racism that was rife caused as much damage because it effects how people think
In order to address the damage it has caused, we need to admit it has happened and face up to it.
I'm not sure a children's book is where to do it, but if children understand how attitudes were wrong in the past, and to stand up to attitudes in the future that still need challenging.
Like you, I would prefer there to be something explaining how this is of its time and how attitudes have changed. Reading things like that have given rise to great conversations with my children over the years.
I'm not sure why Enid Blyton has been tarnished so much when most other authors would have been similar in that era. Think of the objections when Roald Dahl was recently updated. Enid Blyton has had similar, and at times far less sympathetic, updating since the 1990s at least.
I can't think of any non-white characters in Noel Streatfield, for example, except the servant in their Aunt's house in America, in The Painted Garden, and she, again is a bit of a caricature. I've never heard anyone complaining though.
In that era writers did tend to write about the white middle class, because it was regarded that that was who read them, so they wanted to read about people like themselves.
I read these to DS and we talked about this stuff, as we did about Anne in the Famous Five, and George’s desire to be a boy being entirely understandable in a fictional world where girls are supposed to want to make the beds in the cave hideout rather than spy on smugglers. Or why the working-class child in the Five Find Outers ‘naturally’ has tea in the kitchen with the servants while others have it in their playroom, and why his manners are continually ticked off or praised by the others, and his poetry mocked.
I'm going to pull this paragraph out a little. As a rather girlie-girl in the 80s, who liked her dresses, dolls and thought the best bit of Five Run Away together was the making of the cave into a home, I found it very difficult to hear Anne dismissed as a character. It was like saying my interests and what I liked doing was wrong. I felt I was judged for liking those things. By saying it was entirely understandable you are saying that Anne was wrong for liking those things.
And if you read FF like that, you see that Anne is quite a character. Yes, she prefers a quiet trip, without adventures. But she stays with them most of the time, she's brave. She doesn't give up. She stands with the rest of them when it counts, even though she's scared, and on at least one occasion is the one that says they need to keep going. If anything you could say she is braver, because she keeps going when she's scared. Why shouldn't she say she enjoys being a girl if she does?
And the working-class child isn't one of the FFOs. Ern, the policeman's (PC Goon) nephew, comes into a few mysteries and again more than holds his own. He does normally eat with the rest of them in the playroom.
The time I think you're thinking of, is when he runs away from Goon because of mistreatment and Fatty hides him at his house. It's better he eats with the cook (who thinks he's great) because, although Fatty's Mum is sort of aware that he's doing something, he hasn't told her anything beyond "it's a good deed" so he's not going to want his parents to know Ern's there, because they might have felt duty bound to tell Goon.
His poetry is mocked no more than they tease each other, but he does want to keep on reading his "pomes" out to them, so he obviously didn't find it too bad. The only time I remember his manners being commented on particularly was when he meets the Mrs Hilton (Pip and Bet's mum who's known to be very strict on manners) and she tells him off for wearing a hat indoors-but we can guarantee she'd have said the same to any of the boys.
Ern's a very interesting character. Because he's the nephew of their enemy, but wants to go round with them he is very much the outsider pushing his way into an established group, so you'd expect them to be suspicious. As Fatty is in the first book, and I'd say they are far ruder about him trying to join up with them.
But Ern and Fatty both earn their respect by their bravery in their first books, and after that they are delighted to welcome them and very much become one of the group.
There are plenty of good working-class characters in Enid Blyton's books.
Ern is one of them, but there's also Barney in the R-mystery series, who really is the main character. And what about Jimmy and Lotta in the Circus books, Andy in the Adventurous Four and Jack in the Secret series. All of those are really the leaders of the books and written as such.