Books That Didn’t Age Well
In this post, we look at books that didn’t age well. We give examples and options on how to respond.
Books That Didn’t Age Well
A thunderstorm, a comfy armchair, some soft jazz playing, a hot cup of coffee, the cat curled up on your lap, and a great book – the ingredients for a great rainy afternoon or evening. As you turn a page, you’re suddenly thrown right out of the story by a cringey line your favourite author has written. A line that today is not ‘p.c.’. Has that ever happened to you?
If you are reading a book written a long time ago, the chances of this happening are quite high. After all, attitudes change all the time. What was once seen as acceptable, ‘understandable’, and ‘just the way things were’ are not acceptable today.
The question to navigate is whether it was the actual author’s attitude or the attitude of the characters in the book.
Take Agatha Christie for example. It many cases it seems to have been both. There are rather disturbing instances of xenophobia, anti-Semiticism, and anti-non whites. And Then There Were None was originally called Ten Little Indians. It was later called Ten Little N…… Neither of which related to the story and was offensive even then. Even Hercule Poroit, her famous Belgian detective, who should have known better as he suffered from xenophobia by other characters in the books, made anti-Semitic comments.
Charles Dickens’ Fagin was a horrid parodying and attack on Oriental men. Dickens depicted what he believed was a Middle Eastern-type including Arabs, Armenians, Circassians, Jews, and Turks. It was also a dig at Benjamin Disraeli. It could be said that Dickens’ character was a commentary that Disraeli-esque traits – as displayed in Fagin – were foreign and could hide a tendency to criminal behaviour.
Ian Fleming’s description of a Harlem nightclub is racism at its worst.
Roald Dhal was another racist. Even in his children’s books, he had very little restraint when it came to misogyny, racism, and body shaming – especially women. Old, or bald, or fat women, were all shamed as old hags, or worse, witches in his children’s books.
Dr Seuss’s racism may very well not have been actual racism and rather just not thinking it through carefully enough. His book, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street was packed with insulting stereotypes.
Enid Blyton was a dreadful racist, and described any non-British character was considered a ‘spy’. Granted that some of the books were written during and just after WWII, but that didn’t stop her from assuming characters were ‘bad people’.
Even Laura Ingalls Wilder had her father dressing up in black-face in one chapter.
Georgette Heyer glossed over the fact that some characters in her books had slaves. Even the names she gave these walk-on characters were thoughtless and racist. Sambo springs to mind.
Yet, despite these instances by these authors, many remain firm favourites of generations of readers, including the new generations.
4 Options For Modern Readers
How does a concerned reader navigate this morass of unacceptable characterisations?
- Ignore it. Just enjoy the rest of the book.
- Realise that attitudes or understanding of how those attitudes affected people were widespread in the era the books were written, and work at being more accepting of other people in their own lives.
- Buy editions that have had troublesome language or illustrations removed.
- Don’t read books by that author again.
Instances where an author is displaying unacceptable attitudes can lead to interesting discussions. It really does depend on how individual readers feel. Some can simply ignore it. Some realise not everyone is perfect and many of these authors are dead. Some are so disappointed that they move on to other authors. What would / do you do?
The Last Word
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by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter, Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.
More Posts From Elaine
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3 thoughts on “Books That Didn’t Age Well”
Dear Ms. Dodge,
Thank you for your thoughtful piece, Books That Didn’t Age Well. It raises an important and nuanced discussion that every serious reader—and writer—must eventually face: how to reconcile the brilliance of storytelling with the moral blind spots of past eras.
While I appreciate the care with which you approached the topic and the multiple options you offered to modern readers, I’d like to gently offer another perspective.
There’s a very human impulse, especially in our current age, to erase, rewrite, or sanitize the past—to cleanse it of anything that now makes us uncomfortable. But literature, like history, is not meant to be tidy. It’s a reflection of its time, its culture, and its author’s lived experience—flaws, biases, and all.
These stories are, in a sense, our collective heritage. Like old letters or crumbling photographs, they carry the voices and values of their eras, even when those values clash with our own. To erase or rewrite them risks distorting the very context that makes them valuable. After all, how can we measure how far we’ve come if we erase the places we began?
And we must consider that even the stories written today—however enlightened we believe ourselves to be—may one day be judged harshly by future generations. Tastes, taboos, and societal norms evolve. What offends tomorrow may be something we cannot yet foresee.
This is not to excuse prejudice or silence critique—on the contrary, I believe in engaging with literature critically and honestly. But part of that honesty includes preserving the author’s original voice, however uncomfortable, so that we may better understand, question, and learn from it.
Thank you again for opening this dialogue. These conversations are as essential to our evolution as storytellers as they are to our humanity.
Warm regards,
Laurie
Dear Laurie,
I completely agree with you – it is an important discussion for readers and writers to have. Which is why I offered no opinion on whether we should scrub books, and rather merely pointing out famous authors who had written text that in today’s world is offensive.
Having said that, I do think that changing the title of the Agatha Christie book was a good idea. There’s no need to offend people deliberately, especially as the race of the people in the original poem had absolutely no bearing on the book at all. In fact, aeroplanes, soldier boys or even teddy bears had been used instead at various times.
I’ll be writing a blog in the near future on the same topic from a writer’s perspective. I would love to hear your thoughts once it is up on the website.
Many thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Kind regards
Elaine
I agree with points one and two about what to do about reading problematic books. Three and four, not so much, though, if it makes you sleep well at night (I prefer melatonin and white noise for that), then you can do three and four. I just prefer one and two because I try to keep an open mind.
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