Pick up a first edition from 1964 and you’ll find that the Oompa-Loompas are pygmies from “the deepest heart of Africa”, depicted in illustrations as coal-black people with broad grins. As Andrea Ruggirello wrote of Nancy Drew on Electric Lit: “River Heights became less overtly racist but also more white.”Īnyone who read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after 1973 knows the Oompa-Loompas as “rosy-white” and hailing from the fictitious Loompaland. As a result, the books became more homogeneous. In the case of The Hidden Harbor Mystery, the entire plot was rewritten, as the cartoonish Luke Jones was so inextricably tied to it. Gone are the dialects and the people who spoke them, as the characters were changed to white, or eliminated altogether. Publishers Grosset & Dunlap did more than just change “chums” to “friends” and give Nancy Drew a convertible and Joe Hardy an electric guitar when they updated the books in 1959.

In The Hardy Boys’ Hidden Harbor Mystery, the criminal exploits are executed by Luke Jones, a Black man who wears stolen diamond rings, speaks in a heavy dialect and refers to himself in the third person: “Luke Jones don’t stand for no nonsense from white folks! Ah pays mah fare, an’ Ah puts mah shoes where Ah please.” Meanwhile, Nancy Drew solved The Mystery at Lilac Inn by means of racial profiling: spotting a “dark-complexioned” girl at an upscale dress shop, Nancy notes: “Surely a girl in her circumstances cannot afford to buy dresses at such a place as this.” The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, which debuted in 19 respectively, were originally packed with unflattering portraits of ethnic villains, who were “swarthy”, “hook-nosed”, or “dark, and rather stupid looking”. But over the decades, many beloved children’s books have been quietly updated to remove racist content: some people will have never read their childhood favourites in their original form, because they were updated long before modern audiences saw them. I n the week after the Dr Seuss estate announced it would cease publication of six of his titles due to racist tropes, some conservative talking heads have been quick to label Seuss as the latest victim of “cancel culture”.

Dr dolittle the book