Enid Blyton's Famous Five get 21st-century makeover

No more 'jolly japes' and 'lashings of pop' as dated language is revamped for new generation of readers


Farewell to the awful swotters, dirty tinkers and jolly japes: Enid Blyton's language is being dragged out of the 1940s by her publisher in an attempt to give her books greater appeal for today's children.

Starting next month with 10 Famous Five novels, Hodder is "sensitively and carefully" revising Blyton's text after research with children and parents showed that the author's old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as "mercy me!" have been changed to "oh no!", "fellow" to "old man" and "it's all very peculiar" to "it's all very strange".

The intention, said Hodder, is to make the text "timeless" rather than 21st century, with no modern slang – or references to mobile phones – introduced.

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Have to say I never read them - W E Johns was more my style. And I was going to say it'd be a shame to bastardise the original text.
But... I suppose a good story's only a good story if it gets read. www.cavalrytales.co.uk

'The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief'

Bland rules!
You have to pay extra for tomatoes with taste.
We wouldn't want an old story to evoke a feeling of a time gone by.
It should be fairly easy to write a computer programme that you could feed in different books and they all come out the same.

Children as a rule love anything that has enough sugar in it, as a parent, one tries to educate their taste buds, an aquired taste takes time to aquire, but when aquired, it's a taste you'll love for ever.

My children struggled a little with the language of the famous five to start with, but now they love the 'old-fashioned' style and often quote 'lashings of ginger-beer'. It adds a further dimension to the story, rather than detracts from it.
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I think this is an appalling idea by Hodder. Blyton is now ‘outdated’ enough to give children a slice of social history along with stories that they still enjoy as much as ever. The dialogue, the clothing, the ginger beer…it’s all part of the pleasure of reading those stories. If it’s tinkered with all that will be lost. Why draw the line at Blyton? The same could be done with E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Hugh Lofting, C.S. Lewis, Richmal Crompton, etc., etc.. The same could even be done with adult classic writers to make them accessible to a wider audience, i.e. to try and sell more. The implications of this are horrifying.

Enid Blyton was not a great writer – her vocabulary is repetitious (in all her stories she had only two descriptions for the blue of the sky: blue as forget-me-nots, or blue as cornflowers) and she had some very unpalatable ideas about class, but she could tell a story. As long as children are reading widely there is no harm in Enid Blyton stories exactly as they are.
nil desperandum

Sadly, this 'updating' of classics has been going on for some time. I teach a course in children's literature and several years ago I had put John Masefield's The Box of Delights on the list. I still own a hardback edition from my childhood, but my students bought a paperback edition. As I enthused about the beauty of the writing, I sensed I was not getting much response, so I read out a passage. My students looked at each other in bewilderment, and started to thumb through the pages. They couldn't find the passage anywhere. Then we found that great chunks of the text were in the wrong order, sometimes leading to nonsense.

We discovered that the paperback was 'abridged' - more correctly, 'savaged'. The following week one of my students, a librarian, brought in a librarian's journal containing an interview with the abridger. She said merrily that she had initially abridged too much, so she had had to put excised passages back into the text. It had all been a wonderful experience and she couldn't wait to start on more abridgements.

I nearly wrote a very angry letter to the publisher, but I'm afraid I never got around to it. Nowadays, however, I always check classics very carefully, to make sure it is the original text.

Ann