Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on December 07, 2010 at 05:12:10 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: SA Theatre Production posted by Mike Field on November 27, 2010 at 21:44:14:
I am very definitely NOT in favour of this nonsense!
I was, and I am, in favour of eliding the words "nigger" and "picanninny", on the three occasions where they appear, because, these days, readers of the books are quite likely to be nice, middle class, sailing minded, black children.
That is a very long way from cutting up and rewriting chunks of text to suit an "inner city audience", which is a modern convention, acceptable to the soggy Left, for indicating that the people concerned are likely to be poor and often not white.
There were inner cities in Ransome's day - much grimmer they were, too, full of back to backs and slums, and his books were held by public libraries in "inner cities" and borrowed by children who lived there - in vast numbers.
Indeed there seems to be a case for saying that Ransome was one of the first writers for children to include child characters from the skilled working class - the Death and Glories - and he does so superbly well.