While I’m on a roll with articles on recent bowdlerization, let’s take a look at R. L. Stine. I’d heard that his publisher had made changes to improve supposedly offensive passages in his Goosebumps series but assumed that he had made them himself or at least consented to them. According to Stine, he wasn’t even informed of the changes till after the fact.

Book contracts almost always let the publisher edit the book, and the language is vague on how much they can change. The publisher, Scholastic, was probably within its legal rights, especially since I haven’t seen Stine say otherwise. Past reissues have included minor changes in wording that didn’t affect the meaning. Still, making significant changes to a book by a living author after it’s been in print for a long time, without telling the author, is unusual and arrogant.
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The bowdlerizers won’t stop. The latest is HarperCollins, which has cut words like “black” and “native” out of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels because they offend a mysterious group they call “modern audiences.” The majority of today’s readers aren’t “modern audiences” by that measure.

If it were only a matter of replacing words that have come to be considered offensive with other words, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Old books are sometimes modernized to replace obsolescent words with more understandable ones, and this wouldn’t be much different. But at least part of the goal seems to be to eliminate any nastiness in the characters. HarperCollins has said, “Sections of dialogue uttered by often unsympathetic characters within the mysteries have also been cut.” The article mentions the updating of some lines by Mrs. Allerton in Death on the Nile. In the original, she says, “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children.” In the expurgated edition, she says only, “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.” That’s not a matter of offensive words, but an offensive character.

Are HarperCollins’ sensitivity readers aware that every Agatha Christie mystery novel includes at least one murderer in its characters? Murder mysteries necessarily include nasty characters, and there need to be nasty ones besides the murderer in order to keep the reader guessing. In the first half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t unusual to judge people by their eyes and noses. Pretending otherwise does no good.
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