It is perhaps worth remembering that it is not just children's literature that is subject to these sorts of revisions. Both Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming have recently had offensive references removed. Nor is it a new practice. Charles Dickens was so stung by the hurt reproaches of a Jewish reader over his depiction of the villainous Fagin that he halted a reprinting of Oliver Twist mid-run and removed many of the references to Fagin as "the Jew". The kindly Jewish character of Mr Riah in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last completed novel, seems to have been intended as an atonement.
It's one thing if the author does it. But for activists to do it is revisionist history.
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