A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple more Newbery Honor books. In Dorothy Rhoads’ The Corn Grows Ripe, a twelve-year-old Mayan boy takes charge of the corn-planting for the year after his father injures his leg. “Child (or adolescent) thrust into a position of responsibility” seems to be a perennial favorite theme in the first few decades of the Newbery award.

Meanwhile, in Robert Lawson’s The Great Wheel, young Conn has just emigrated to the US from Ireland… and finds himself working on the Ferris wheel at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair! Chicago World’s Fair aficionado that I am, I shouted “YESSSSS,” and although the book could have spent a bit more time touring the Fair, I did appreciate this up close and personal look at the process of building the Ferris wheel.

What I’m Reading Now

Because I love suffering, I’ve jumped back on the Mary Renault train with The Persian Boy. So far, young Bagoas has lost his entire family, gotten castrated and sold into slavery, then rented him out as a sex slave until he was bought for the emperor Darius… and that’s just the first two chapters!

What I Plan to Read Next

On Friday I’m off to the Lilly Library (a repository of rare books) to plunder their Newbery collection! I have four books on hold and I’m hoping to finish at least two, possibly three, but we’ll just see… SO exciting to have this chance to enjoy the Reading Room as an honest-to-goodness Reader.

Just finished reading Miss Buncle Married, which is the sequel to Miss Buncle's Book and quite as delightful as the first - and with the added draw of being a book about a house, rather as The Secret Garden is about Misselthwaite Manor or Rebecca about Manderley (although in a much lighter vein than Rebecca).

I'm looking forward to reading as many more of D. E. Stevenson's books as I can track down.

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The most interesting thing about Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill is what is not in it. Pace Wikipedia, when the book was originally published, the cook character was a blazing Aunt-Jemima-ish racial stereotype. This edited out of later versions - as far as I can tell, mostly by removing the cook from the story as much as possible, and definitively cutting any mention that she was meant to be black.

On the one hand it is laudable that the publishers or Newbery committee or whoever didn’t want their award-winning fiction to promote racial stereotypes - and this is a situation that actually comes up a lot in older Newbery books. Both Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (which also has some pretty sexist passages) and Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years have lengthy episodes that are cringe-worthy by modern standards.

But I am not sure about editing books (without even mentioning anywhere on the book that it has been edited!) and then sending them out, award in hand, as if they’d been like that all along.

I can’t decide what would be the best way to deal with this situation. Should they be published as is? For adult books I would say “Yes, do that.” But children are still forming their standards about what is acceptable, so it seems like a bad idea to simply republish award-winning yet racist fiction without at least saying that some parts of it are no longer appropriate.

So what then? Publish the books with an introduction explaining that this sort of thing was socially acceptable in 1940, but standards have changed? Quietly drop them from publication? Or is editing the right way to go? Or edit it - but include an introduction that explains “we edited this part because reasons”?

The Dolittle book I read took this final route. I am not sure that making the addle-pated African chief want to become a lion rather than a white man actually made things all that much better, honestly, but...I guess they tried.