Fasten your seat belts: let’s talk about censorship.

In March, the Guardian reported that Agatha Christie’s publisher, Harper Collins, would be scrubbing some of the more problematic language out of her books in future reissues:

“The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers . . . the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’.”

The response, as you might expect, has been vitriolic but also highly complex. We live in a free society. Most of us read Fahrenheit 451 in our 8^th grade English class. Since 1949, millions have read 1984. You don’t burn books! You don’t censor thought! At the same time, though, as we continue battling our way towards a grudging respect for our global diversity, we have to recognize the stinging power words have to offend, to stir up old evils, to scratch behind the literary surface to reveal all sorts of uglies. Our life spans are long enough for us to evolve past the prejudices we learned at home. And books, even light-hearted mystery novels, survive for generations; some of them, like the works of Brian Flynn, rise from the dead!

In the tumultuous political landscape in which we find ourselves, coming to some sort of agreement on this topic is impossible. Having even a civil discourse about it seems beyond our ken. Here, I’m going to take the word “woke” and put it aside. It sprang from African-American Vernacular English and indicates an alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. It was intended as a good thing, but like so many terms, it has become subverted to a political cause and overworked to the point of obnoxiousness. Censorship of one form or another is currently being advocated on both sides of the political spectrum. Perhaps each side believes they are acting for the common good, but . . . I don’t know, some of it seems so disingenuous to me. 

Our arguments reflect the passion people can feel about things. I like passion. But they also reveal how flawed we are in our logic and how blind an eye we have to the arguments on the other side. I listened the other day to a response on YouTube that centered on the Agatha Christie issue. I couldn’t tell you whether the two people arguing against censorship had ever read Christie, but I can safely say they don’t understand context at all. They began with a blanket condemnation of Harper Collins’ actions, then backtracked and said that maybe cutting the n-word was okay, but what’s the big deal about the word “native” or “gypsy” or “Jew?” 

As a Jewish man of Hungarian extraction, whose grandmother looked like she was brimming with Magyar blood, I can offer a few comments on a couple of those words. I’ve read Christie a lot more than this pair, and I know that, at least in the case of Mrs. Raikes and Dr. Bauerstein from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the words “gypsy” and “Jew” amount to more than mere descriptors. 

I also know, from doing a bit of reading, that although many people engaged in argument over this topic may be experiencing this issue for the first time, publishers have been re-editing material for hundreds of years, sometimes at the instigation of the writers themselves. One of the most prestigious examples concerns a favorite author of mine, Charles Dickens.  Back when Dickens was considered a purveyor of popular fiction rather than “Great Literature,” it is an unfortunate fact that he harbored strong anti-Semitic beliefs which suffused his literature. The most famous example is the villainous Fagin in Oliver Twist, who in the original text was referred by name only a few times and as “the Jew” over 250 times in the first thirty-eight chapters alone. 

But Dickens’ negative portrayal of Jews recurred over and over, in Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, (where a pawnbroker hearkens back to Shakespeare’s Shylock by “weigh(ing) out his pound of flesh”), in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times and Great Expectations. In this last title, a money-grubbing lawyer named Abraham Lazarus speaks with a lisp, a common stereotypical aspect of Jews in old dramas. Anti-Jewish sentiment features in many of Dickens’ short stories and travel essays as well. 

And then, late in his life, Dickens showed a capacity for change after he sold his London home to a Jewish banker. The man’s wife, Eliza Davis, wrote a letter to the author asking for a donation to a convalescent home for the Jewish poor. She had some chutzpah, as we Jews would say, for the way she hit him up for money: 

“It has been said that Charles Dickens, the large hearted, whose work pleads so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country, and who may justly claim credit (for), as the fruits of his labor, the many changes for the amelioration of the condition (of the) poor now at work, has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew . . . “

In his response to Mrs. Davis (in which he enclosed a small donation), Dickens explained that his portrayal of Fagin did not denigrate the Jewish religion but the Jewish race! He said: “It unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class a criminal invariably was a Jew.” In other words, as Dickens went on to explain, if he created a villainous Frenchman or Spaniard, he would never use the term “the Roman Catholic” as a descriptor because that would be a “very indecent and unjustifiable thing” to denigrate even an evil character’s faith. 

This differentiation was lost on Mrs. Davis, who wrote back to explain that the Jewish race and religion were inseparable and that there had been just as many people of the time who had proclaimed themselves “good Christians” who had victimized the weak for profit. She pointed out that Dickens himself had included such characters in his work, and yet there were plenty of decent Christian characters to balance out the picture. Poor Fagin had no such counterpoint. Dickens must have had a sort of epiphany because he included in his last full-length novel, Our Mutual Friend, a saintly Jewish character named Riah, who is forced to be the public face of the moneylending business owned by a “good Christian.” Riah’s story became an object lesson for Dickens’ readers on how to resist prejudice against a people based on race or religion. In addition, the author stopped the re-publication of Oliver Twist and insisted that future editions replace references to Fagin as “The Jew” with his actual name. 

As some people will be quick to point out to you, these edits were made with the insistence and approval of the author himself. But none other than Agatha Christie herself had a similar epiphany in confronting her own prejudices. One of her biographers, Gillian Gill devotes some time to this issue in Agatha Christie, The Woman and Her Mysteries:

“Just like everyone else, Christie was the product of a specific time and place, and she was certainly no revolutionary thinker. Nonetheless, Christie was significantly less enslaved by the ideology and structural prejudices of her culture, time, and class than (many of her) contemporaries. The racism, the classism, the sexism that make the huge majority of popular novels written in the thirties and forties unreadable today are relatively unimportant in Christie.” 

That’s nice, but . . . 

“There is, however, one kind of popular prejudice to which Christie did, unfortunately subscribe. A kind of jingoistic, knee-jerk, antisemitism colors the presentation of Jewish characters in many of her early novels, and Christie reveals herself to be as unreflective and conventional as the majority of her compatriots.”

Let’s be aware of the facts: anti-Semitism has existed for as long as the Jews themselves, and it was prevalent in Great Britain for centuries. Jews were expelled from England in 1260 and not allowed to return until 1656. When Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, he probably hadn’t met any Jews and had to rely on the many apocryphal stories about what they were like in order to fashion his portrayal of the moneylender Shylock. Gill describes Christie’s anti-Semitism as “stupidly unthinking rather than the deliberately vicious kind.” I suppose Jewish fans should be grateful for this, as we read about folks like Dr. Bauerstein in The Mysterious Affair at Styles . . . 

John Cavendish: I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.       Mary Cavendish: A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.

. . . or Oliver Manders in Three-Act Tragedy . . . 

“Egg Lytton-Gore’s voice rang out, ‘Oliver, you slippery Shylock – ‘                                                 “’Of course,’ thought Mr. Satterthwaite, ‘not foreign – Jew.’”

. . . or poor Herman Isaacstein in The Secret of Chimneys, as Gillian Gill describes: 
“What is more damaging, Lord Caterham – who, as we have seen, speaks very much for the author in matters political in this novel – is exaggeratedly, unable to recall the financier’s name, refers to him unpleasantly as ‘Mr. Ikey Hermanstein’ and ‘Noseystein,’ and makes an offhand crack to the effect that no one with a name like Isaacstein can be British.”

Let’s pass by how reading passages like this make me feel and move to the fact that Christie evolved on this issue. As an inveterate world traveler and lover of the Middle East, she got to know more Jews personally. She also met Nazi sympathizers, like the German antiques director Dr. Jordan, “a charming, cultured, considerate, gentle man” whose manner changed completely at the mention of the Jewish people. His eyes shining with fanaticism, he declared to Agatha and Max that the Jews must be exterminated. 

Such experiences helped transform Christie’s own attitudes, as did her awareness of just how evil the Final Solution of the Nazis turned out to be. In 1947, she responded to complaints by the Anti-Defamation League by giving permission to her U.S. publishers to remove anti-Semitic language from her books, much like she had responded positively in 1939 to requests to change the original name of what would come to be called And Then There Were None. Thus, in my 1965 copy of Ten Little Indians, the character of Isaac Morris is no longer referred to as “Jewboy” or having “thick Semitic lips.” 

To be honest, Jewish characters are few and far between in Christie’s fiction. Oliver Manders is probably the most prominent, and to be fair, Christie uses his “otherness” as a red herring and gives him the girl at the end. People of color occur even more rarely in her work, yet they receive similarly poor treatment. One of the last Christie titles I read was Death in the Clouds (1935), which I found in the British Fontana edition (the one with the wasp on the cover) at a downtown San Francisco bookstore sometime around 1970. Halfway through this Poirot novel about a mysterious murder on board a plane, fellow passengers Jane Grey and Norman Gale act upon their attraction to each other and go on a date:

“It was one of those enchanting evenings, when every word and confidence exchanged seems to reveal a bond of sympathy and shared tastes. They liked dogs and disliked cats. They both hated oysters and loved smoked salmon. They liked Greta Garbo and disliked Katharine Hepburn. They didn’t like fat women and admired really jet-black hair. They disliked very red nails. They disliked loud noises, noisy restaurants, and Negroes –  “

This passage is rendered all the uglier by being couched in the “cute” aura of a romantic comedy. I read it in my twenties and was a sophisticated enough reader to reappraise it in light of the times in which it was written. True, Christie here is listing the beliefs of two of her characters, and yet these were two young people that the author intended us to like and root for; there had to be some expectation that contemporary readers would peruse this list, nod and smile.

Unfortunately, the Christie canon is littered with brief references like this one that indicate a negative viewpoint about people of color, rendering them as “exotic,” “other,” and not to be trusted. The question we must ask ourselves is: does the excising of passages and words like these amount to a good thing or a bad thing? The Christie estate and, through them, Harper Collins has the legal right to make these changes, but are they exercising sound moral judgment? Are they missing an opportunity to instruct present generations about the past? Or is this a responsibility they see no reason to assume?

One wonders if popular fiction like Christie’s, which often captures the day-to-day minutiae, both good and bad, of contemporary life more completely than what we might deem “classic literature,” was meant to have a shelf life past a certain number of generations. I mean, we no longer read Nigel Morland, who between 1935 and 1961 produced more mystery novels than Christie, and the one novel I reviewed by that guy included a “miraculous murder” on a nighttime street by an invisible killer who simply couldn’t be seen because he was Black. Ellery Queen began his career with a murderer who killed to hide the “taint” of Black blood running through him, and John Dickson Carr . . . well, not too long ago I wrote a review about a problematic novel of his and managed to start one of those conversation wars on Facebook that I had been trying to avoid.

On the surface, one has to imagine some greater good being attempted here by Harper Collins to acknowledge the feelings of modern readers. It sure feels different in purpose to the fervent censorship movement by American conservatives to rewrite history by wiping all evidence of racism from texts and libraries across the Southern American states and render invisible any positive depictions of people who differentiate from a conservative vision of the cultural “norm”. They couch this movement in terms of “moving forward” from the feelings of guilt and animosity they believe arise when white children learn of the stark difference between their histories of those of their Black classmates. 

The danger here is in peddling the belief that the feelings that impelled these horrific events no longer exist. Recent history has sadly proven these assumptions false. And the concept of hiding these facts flies in the face of Jewish intellectual thought, which insists that we must never forget the past in order to avoid repeating it. According to Aish.com, the largest Jewish learning site on the Internet, the recent decided-upon changes by Harper Collins may be fine:

“If Agatha Christie were alive today, perhaps she would welcome the changes her publishers are making in her work. Since she had listened to criticism and decided to temper her offensive wording, it’s likely she would embrace the help her publishers are giving to her books today. These changes honor the decisions she made in her lifetime.”

At the same time, the site acknowledges,

“. . . when it comes to some of the other authors whose work is being altered, perhaps we’d be better served by leaving their offensive remarks alone. These works help us understand the anti-Semitism of the past and give us a better sense of where anti-Jewish feelings that flourish today have come from. 

Take Roald Dahl. Whereas Agatha Christie seemed to move away from antisemitism throughout her life, Dahl increasingly embraced it. By 1990, just months before he died, he bashed Jews in an interview and told a journalist, “I’ve become anti-Semitic.” Dahl expressed no remorse. Let readers see for themselves his odious anti-Jewish statements as he wrote them, and how he helped promote animosity to Jews that we are battling today.”

Even though we all probably want to protect children from the uglier aspects of life – although progressives and conservatives disagree about what constitutes this “ugliness,” and both sides can be accused of playing politics here – I agree with Aish that we would better protect children from the uglier aspects of life by training them to read critically, especially as popular literature from the past seeks to reinvent itself in order to survive. An excellent illustration can be made here with The Hardy Boys, a series I read before I discovered Agatha Christie. 

I own eighteen Hardy Boys titles, fourteen of which were written between 1927 and 1959. Only two of these books are first editions or original texts; in fact, they differ from the others in pretty remarkable ways. You see, in 1959, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the organization which created the Hardy Boys mysteries, decided, under the direction of Harriet Adams, Edward Stratemeyer’s daughter, to revise the first 38 books in the series.  (Adams did the same thing with the Nancy Drew books, which they also created.) The project, which took fourteen years to complete, was undertaken in order to make the books both more relevant and more “acceptable” to modern audiences. This included excising material that demeaned other races and cultures. 

For the most part, this was accomplished – although, instead of transforming non-white characters from gross stereotypes into more realistic people, these characters – the black cook, the evil criminal in The Hidden Harbor Mystery, the shambling servant who saves Nancy Drew in The Secret of the Old Clock, the savage Indians who terrorized Frank and Joe in many an adventure – were eliminated, to be replaced by white counterparts. As Brandon Tensley said in his article, “The Knotty Problem of The Hardy Boy Series, “I remember thinking, when I first learned about these changes as a young adult, that it would have been better to simply give the black characters more dimension than attempt to blot them out.” 

Series like these had always fought for respect in libraries, who dismissed the books as hastily manufactured trash. Comparing the original with the revised text, I can see how the modernization might be more appealing to mid-20^thcentury readers (although the plotlines probably would not); after their revisions, the books became much shorter and arguably less objectionable, but they had also been stripped of their “humor, charm, and believability” as well as any value they had once had as historical representations of a time gone by.  Was the trade-off worth it? Tensley makes a point about the original editions that must be considered: 

“The Hardy Boys . . . offer a critical lesson on the importance of reappraisal—on how, with hindsight, it’s possible to see the cultural blind spots in art. In time, as I read more broadly and deeply, I learned to hold the books up to the light and separate out their derisions and elisions, their racist caricatures and sexist tropes (female characters, such as Laura Hardy, the boys’ mother, are often reduced to overly doting, self-effacing bit players). I still sometimes read the stories today, . . . but now I approach the books a little bit more as historical documents, at once valuing and rolling my eyes at the parts that haven’t aged quite like I have.”

I think young people should be taught to read like this. Nobody should take anything they read as gospel; everything we read is a historical document worthy of perusal with a critical eye. Then we can gain perception about where we come from and how we have – and haven’t – evolved. But such skills are impossible if we simply remove the text from consideration and give young people no chance to develop this ability to reappraise historical documents. 

We also need to understand how others use and twist these texts for their own purposes. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was a favorite of the Nazis: between 1933 and 1939, more than fifty productions of the play were mounted, and audiences were trained, through the way the plays were staged and the performances of the actors, to grow incensed whenever Shylock appeared onstage. As I mentioned above, Jews were non-entities in Shakespeare’s time, and his creation of the villainous Shylock – in what was intended, you must remember, to be a comedy – was founded mostly on cultural myths. 

And yet . . . it is Shylock who gets the most humanistic speech in the play: 

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

And while Merchant can be an extremely painful play for Jews to watch, Shakespeare has no special love for the way the other characters treat Shylock. Portia engages in legal trickery to defeat him, and his punishment in the end is not death but religious conversion, a particularly ugly fate for a devout Jew. 

Did the groundlings cheer when this occurred? Probably so. Even a suggestion of sympathy on Shakespeare’s part is possibly wishful thinking. As Professor Michele Osherow, resident Dramaturg of the Folger Theatre in Washington D.C., puts it, “Contemporary audiences only read Shylock sympathetically because reading him any other way, in light of the horrors of the Holocaust, would reflect poorly on the reader.” This may be true – but sympathetic interpretations of Shylock have arisen, and these make even clearer the more implied criticism Shakespeare has for his Christian characters. “Even if you hate Shylock, “ says Osherow, “when he asks these questions, there’s a shift: you have an allegiance with him, and I don’t think you ever really recover from it.” 

The issue is being decided; the editing is going forward. The alternative suggestion of including a warning of some sort at the beginning of the original text is moot. Meanwhile, I have all my original copies of Christie, which means that every time I re-read The Moving Finger, I have to bear the moment late in the novel when Jerry Barton takes Megan Hunter to London for a makeover and heads to a friend’s dress shop: “Mary was being firm with a stout Jewess who was enamored of a skin-tight powder-blue evening dress.” If someone younger than me happens to come upon this passage – or any other in the works of Christie and all too many of her brethren, I will be more than happy to have a conversation with them to fill them in on the history. 

My greater concern is that, without this recorded evidence of historical wrongs to examine and remember, we are setting the stage for those who embrace these evil sentiments today to continue their work. And make no mistake: some of them hold national office, and they have already begun. 

Partial Bibliography

Gill, Gillian, Agatha Christie, The Woman and Her Mysteries, The Free Press, 1990

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/reading-hardy-boys-nostalgia-disappointment-racism/581071/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/26/agatha-christie-novels-reworked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language

https://jewishcurrents.org/charles-dickenss-anti-semitism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058705

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/249332/pdf

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-scholars-still-debate-whether-or-not-shakespeares-merchant-venice-anti-semitic-180958867/

https://stratemeyer.org/def/original-text-vs-revised-text/