Penguin has rewritten several of the Wooster books to remove “outdated” and “unacceptable” language.
The news that Penguin Books has censored some of the best loved P.G. Wodehouse stories comes as something of a shock.
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?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 , Dahl’s shoutout to the poet Rudyard Kipling has been replaced with a tribute to Jane Austen.
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. Dickens’ The Merchant of Venice is obviously out . Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, replete with lust and promiscuity, is definitely a non-starter.
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.
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