4 Famous Books That Got Stealth-Edited Years Later

4 Mary Poppins

Before becoming a movie, Mary Poppins was a book series, comprising eight books that P.L. Travers wrote across 54 years. The world changed quite a bit over those decades. And so, the following passage she wrote in 1934 contains some racial depictions that were soon no longer considered quite appropriate.

In 1967, with the original book reviving in popularity thanks to the Disney movie, Travers received word about just how gross people found that part. She revised that chapter for all future printings. “If even one Black child were troubled,” she said, “then I would have to alter it.”

More years passed, and in 1980, the San Francisco Public Library system removed Mary Poppins from its shelves for that same chapter. This confused Travers, because hadn’t she already taken steps to fix the issue? 

She’d thought she had. But the world had moved on, and now, this revised version raised objections as well.

Travers now edited the chapter again, this time more reluctantly. “I have done so not as an apology for anything I have written,” she explained. “The reason is much more simple: I do not wish to see Mary Poppins tucked away in a closet.” Unsure now how to inoffensively depict the people of this island (or the Arctic people from earlier in the chapter, or the Chinese people who came next), she redid the chapter so the children now instead met animals from around the world. 

This also greatly shortened the chapter, because she clearly wasn’t very enthusiastic this time around. And if she was predicting that even stuff considered fine in 1980 could be criticized by later generations, she was entirely correct, as we’ll get into in a moment.

3 The Entire Works of Roald Dahl

In 2023, Puffin Books released new versions of Roald Dahl books, all written without the author’s involvement, as he’d been dead for nearly three decades. Puffin had spent three years hiring “sensitivity readers” to review the books and identify anything they consider offensive. Sensitivity readers are standard with children’s fiction today. Unlike traditional editors, who do consider whether something’s offensive but also edit with other considerations in mind, a sensitivity reader’s only job is to mark stuff as offensive, so they err in only one direction. 

A few of the edits might remind of you of what happened to Mary Poppins, as these, too, addressed comedic race stuff in British fantasy books. 1982’s The BFG originally had the title character explain that giants don’t eat people from Greece because they’re too greasy. The new version of that book omits this bit of trivia. It similarly omits that giants snack on “Hottentots” to warm up — the editors had to remove that now-offensive term and also figured it was best to strike the whole sentence. However, they left in the joke about eating people from Wellington for the “booty flavor.”

The sultan of Baghdad in that book (now retitled the “Mayor of Baghdad”) no longer says, “We are chopping off people’s heads like you are chopping off parsley.” Less clear is why the censors felt the need to remove the name of that character’s uncle, Haroun al Rashid, leaving him nameless. It’s a normal name, and it hearkens back to the name of a previous famous leader, much like the name of Queen Elizabeth, who’s the other character in this scene.

Many of the edits, across several books, relate to overweight people. Aunt Sponge, from James and the Giant Peach, was originally “enormously fat.” This feature of hers is now gone. Augustus Gloop is still as big as ever, but he is now described simply as “enormous,” without using the word “fat.” This new policy leads to the occasional odd consequence, however. The Twits had a passage about how you can have “a double chin and stick-out teeth” and always be lovely, but the new version leaves out the “double chin” part. Unintentionally, the editors created a new message: You can’t now have a double chin and always be lovely. 

Some of the original wording had to be changed due to how evolution has given the old words new meaning. A “horny finger” from George’s Marvellous Medicine has been changed to “bony finger.” Similarly, in James and the Giant Peach, James originally fell into Old-Green-Grasshopper’s “horny lap.” The word “horny” is now gone from there, as it would imply something the story never intended. “Your fanny” has been changed to “your backside,” because in England, fanny now refers to a different part of a woman’s body. 

The new versions also update a lot of language to be gender-neutral (the Cloud-Men are now “Cloud-People”), which honestly sounds more like the 1990s version of political correctness than anything the current generation demands. But these revisions also go from changing language to changing ideas. 1983’s The Witches said a witch will be thinking about murder “even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.” The revised version changes this to: “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business.” 

The editor’s goal here is to clarify that women can have prestigious jobs, but this sentence wasn’t about women in general. It was about witches, who take on perfunctory cover jobs while secretly receiving all the money they need from a cabal of counterfeiters. 

Over in the original version of Matilda, young Matilda's reading habit figuratively took her to “India with Rudyard Kipling.” Now, that sentence has been changed to “California with John Steinbeck.” An editor must have figured Kipling is now a problematic figure, but a girl delighting in jungle adventures isn’t the same thing as reading about the Great Depression or about a bunch of people at a bus station.

All of these Dahl edits received a lot of media attention, so Puffin announced they would go on selling the original books in addition to the expurgated ones. But before we move on from this topic, we want to focus on some characters who got edited especially harshly: the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Loompas already had a history of being edited. In the original 1964 book, they were a Black tribe from Africa (in the earliest version of the story, never published, Charlie was Black as well). Ahead of the 1971 movie adaptation, Dahl ordered a new edition of the novel, changing them to pink-skinned and from an unknown part of the world. He now realized and regretted that the book had made it look like Wonka owned a bunch of slaves. But if moving a tribe to England and making them work unpaid is slavery, that’s still slavery when you change the look of the slaves. Sure enough, generations still grew up mocking Wonka for what he had done. 

The 2023 version of the book goes further in its quest to make us stop thinking too hard about the Loompas. Now, when a Loompa shows up, the description of his skin, hair, teeth and height are gone — and are replaced with nothing. The book doesn’t describe him at all. Wonka’s lines describing the details of their dress are also gone. And a separate earlier line, where he says, “They still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle, they insist upon that,” has been bafflingly replaced with him just saying, “They do like jokes.”

In the 1964 version (and the 1970 version), Wonka explains the process of transporting the Loompas: “So I shipped them all over here, every man, woman and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe. It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely. They are wonderful workers. They all speak English now.” For the 2023 version, that was all removed and was replaced with this single line: “They’ve told me they love it here.”

This is now sounding less like simple bowdlerization and has entered the realm of a sinister cover-up. Willy Wonka did what he did — we all know it. Should we let his heirs now whitewash his legacy?

2 A Pickle for the Knowing Ones

There’s an expression, “taking coals to Newcastle,” which refers to doing something pointless. It goes back at least as far as the 17th century, when Newcastle in England had a whole lot of coal mines. But at the end of the 18th century, a Massachusetts man named Timothy Dexter actually did take coal to Newcastle — and he made a big profit, because the coal miners were striking and the city was running short on fuel. 

Dexter made money through a bunch of other ventures as well, and then in 1802, he published a book. He called it A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, and it was a vanity project, praising himself. You might have some trouble figuring out what it was about at all because it went something like this:

That’s right. He didn’t use punctuation. The spelling and grammar had plenty wrong with it even aside from that, but the most obvious issue was that he didn’t use any punctuation. 

At least, he didn’t use any in the first printing. After that, he released another version, which also used no punctuation, until an addendum at the end. “The Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops,” he wrote here. “I put in A Nuf here and they may peper and solt in as they please.” And after that, he included the following string of punctuation, uninterrupted:

1 I Know What You Did Last Summer

The movie I Know What You Did Last Summer adapted a book, which might surprise people who assume it was just inspired by existing slasher stories. The book differs a fair bit from the movie. For starters, it isn’t a slasher story. The mysterious stalker attacks one of the kids, with a gun, but no series of gory murders pops up to thrill us. It also ends with a twist that the movie didn’t try translating to screen, because it’s one of those special book twists that are impossible to pull off in the visual medium.

Lois Duncan wrote the book in 1973. In 2010 (by which time the movie was as old as the book had been when the movie came out), publisher Little Brown rereleased a bunch of its older books, modernizing the text to set them in the present day. Duncan, now 76 years old, updated the text herself, and she discovered she didn’t need to change very much, other than to edit a few anachronisms. 

In the original book, the Sarah Michelle Gellar character has a TV job that involves putting “records on the player.” The 2010 version instead gives her a “webcast.” Her eye candy job was originally referred to as a “Golden Girl,” but this now changed, because that term means something else in the post-Golden Girls era. A joke about a guy’s car being able to navigate on its own is sadly neutered by saying it has GPS. Chickenpox was mentioned as something normal for a teen in the original, while the revised book calls it rare. 

One of the few changes beyond mere word substitutions was the introduction of cell phones, which Duncan said posed a challenge. In the original, the kids accidentally hit someone with their car and drive off to find a phone to call an ambulance. Only once they’re in the middle of that call do they decide to withhold their names and keep their involvement a secret. 

In the revised version, they have phones on them, but they still immediately leave the scene — this time to cover their tracks. Later, police are unable to identify who made the call, which made sense in the original, when the call came from a phone booth, but makes less sense from a personal cell phone. 

Later still, someone in a college dorm leaves their room and goes to the hallway to receive a call on the shared line. This apparently proved too hard to update, so it stayed unchanged, though it doesn’t suit 2010. Not that we’re insisting it should have changed. Rather, that scene was an example of how this was a story born from the 1970s, and the whole story should have been allowed to stay that way. 

When the college in the book features students demonstrating against the Vietnam War, that’s a part of the world the author was in when they wrote it, and having those same demonstrators there in 2010 protesting nothing in particular cuts you off from that. Same deal when a character speaks of serving in Vietnam and seeing children getting blown up. The new book keeps that same conversation, word-for-word, but just changes “’Nam” to “Iraq.” Despite all the comparisons people have made, those were two very different wars. 

This book’s revision might seem forgivable enough, since the author handled it and no one labeled the original as bad. But we should reject this idea that we need to modernize books to get kids to read them. If children can read a book about a situation they’ve never experienced (e.g., receiving a revenge note about someone you killed), they can read a book about a setting they’ve never experienced. They have imagination. And if they don’t have imagination, they’ll get imagination, through reading books. Matilda — both the original and the revised version — was very clear about this.

Reading books set in decades past can also be more fun than being stuck in the same old reality you deal with every day. And let’s not forget that treasured childhood game, Guess the Year. You’d grab a book from the library, knowing nothing about it in advance, and after you finished reading it, you’d try to guess when it was written. Then you’d turn to the copyright page to see how close you were.

What’s that — you didn’t all play that game? Okay, but some of us did. Not all of us were good at sports, so we made our own fun. 

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