The news that Penguin Books has censored some of the best loved P.G. Wodehouse stories comes as something of a shock.
As Bertie Wooster might say, although the revelation didn’t entirely disgruntle us, we certainly were far from gruntled.
Penguin has rewritten several of the Wooster books to remove “outdated” and “unacceptable” language. It has also included a “trigger warning” for unsuspecting readers.
Thus in its 2023 edition of Thank You, Jeeves, the publishing house leads off with this cautionary note: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterizations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”
If Penguin Books and similarly minded publishers now believe it is their duty to sanitize such light-hearted and uncontroversial books as the Wooster stories — surely among the mildest ever penned in the English language — they have their work cut out for them.
If they feel the need to shield readers from the horrors of Aunt Dahlia, she of the Pytchley/Quorn fox hunts, and her French cook Anatole, reputedly as cool as two cucumbers, where does this end?
Nowhere soon, appears to be the answer. Censors are already at work purging the James Bond books.
And Roald Dahl’s children’s tales have been hacked by “sensitivity readers” to remove such incorrect language as “Cloud-Men,” now rendered as “Cloud People.” While for the sake of gender balance (though who really knows), Dahl’s shoutout to the poet Rudyard Kipling has been replaced with a tribute to Jane Austen.
Yet silly as much of this is, we’ve seen plenty of it before. An 18th century English pest named George Bowdler gained fame for his efforts to remove language he considered improper from Shakespeare’s plays.
Thus in his version of Hamlet, he changed Ophelia’s death from a suicide to an accidental drowning. The exclamation “God!” is rewritten as “Heavens!”
But even Bowdler was an amateur at the game. The 18th century Irish Poet Laureate Nahum Tate rewrote The Tragedy of King Lear to give it a happy ending.
The real issue here is where does this end? If the Jeeves books are too much for modern sensitivities, how about Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales?
Of the 24 stories involved, many are bawdy in the extreme. Let sensitivity readers loose on this collection, and we might well end up with a solitary Canterbury Tale.
The Merchant of Venice is obviously out (anti-semitic from start to finish). Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, replete with lust and promiscuity, is definitely a non-starter.
And how long can Gone with the Wind, stigmatized as “harmful and racist” by its reluctant new publishers Pan Macmillan, survive?
For the concern is not just where on earth these sensitivity readers gain the entitlement to redact classical works of literature.
There is also the reality that in doing so, they deprive readers of much of the knowledge they would otherwise have of earlier times and events.
For the importance of historical tracts lies in more than their capacity to entertain. It lies also in their capacity to inform.
A distinction is needed here. Written material made deliberately offensive for no other reason than to be offensive is perhaps questionable.
Though even here satirists like Jonathan Swift, who had little good to say about anyone (he suggested the Irish should resort to cannibalism), may perhaps be forgiven.
However, writers who merely reflected the views and idioms of the time, deserve their freedom of expression.
The world will be a more humdrum, colourless place if modern-day purity enforcers take up where George Bowdler left off.
