Inspiring Young Readers
A(n) (A)bridge(ment) too far?
Where do you stand on the question of abridging classic children’s books for modern day readers? I was prompted to think about this question when I was sitting idly staring at a shelf full of pre-Second World War children’s annuals and, starting to leaf through them, I was struck by just how dense these books were – lots of words, minimum amounts of illustration and extraordinarily complex sentence and vocabulary structures. Children reading this stuff would have really had to concentrate and would certainly have needed both advanced reading skills and a pretty good base of general knowledge. How many children, I wondered, battled their way through these and how many simply gave up on reading because they were just too difficult?
This got me thinking about some of the fiction we now think of as classics of children’s literature and the way these too were often lengthy and potentially difficult to read. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person to have that thought. I have no idea when these classics first started being abridged but as a child of the 1950s who pretty much only read comics I don’t think I ever came across anything that wasn’t an abridgement. This may be in part because a good number of the stories thought to be appropriate for children didn’t start life as children’s books at all – Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels - and were in fact complex adult literature that had been gutted to leave behind an exciting adventure yarn. I can clearly recall avidly reading and rereading a massively Bowdlerised version of Odysseus’s escape from the cave of Polyphemus, the cyclops. The magazine it appeared in was Look & Learn and it was my first, and for many years my only, exposure to Homer – or perhaps it’s really more accurate to say it was an Homeric storyline because whoever had rewritten it, it turns out, had taken a pretty liberal approach to the process of reinterpretation. But I guess you could argue that Look and Learn had done its job, fulfilled its mission so to speak, by making me aware that this greatest of all stories even existed.
So although there are all sorts of issues about who does the abridgement, what gets left in and what gets taken out, whether it inspires the reader to go off in search of the original text etc., when it comes to leading young readers to more complex adult works I can see how a the abridgers art has its merits. What I do wonder about, however, is whether there’s an equally strong case for abridging books that were originally written to be read by children.
I think it’s noteworthy just how many publishers seem to abridge books like Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Pinocchio and a host of other pre-Second World War classics as a matter of course – presumably because they think the originals are ‘dated’ in their use of language or their references will turn off modern young readers. I guess that abridgement has an added attraction for them in that it almost always means a slimmer, cheaper book to print and produce. But in the abridgement is something essential and important being lost in the process of making the book more ‘accessible’ or ‘popular’? Is abridgement just a fancy name for dumbing down?
I can see an argument that the book, having been originally written for children should have its original structure, plot, themes and vocabulary respected. In most cases whoever is doing the abridgement has no permission to do it from the original author and no chance to check with them that they are content to have their work dismantled and reassembled. The richness of the original piece of art has been compromised and in that process something is certainly being lost. After all, how would we feel if someone decided to make Picasso look ‘a bit more realistic’ in order to please the modern day interior designer?
But I’m torn because on the other hand I can also see a strong argument in favour of providing a gateway for young readers who might never pick up the book in its original state either because they find the text difficult or because they think they’ll find it hard going. Giving them the flavour of the original in order to fire their interest in exploring the original has to be a good idea – doesn’t it?
Perhaps in the end it comes down to a couple of key considerations: just how good the abridgement is and whether the young reader is helped to move on to tackle the original. Good abridgement should be like good translation – a skill and art in its own right that preserves the spirit, essence and central truths of the original. Even when that quality is assured it’s about how seriously we take our duty to help steer younger readers towards more complicated and more sustaining reading by using the good abridgement to take them onto the original.
Maybe..?
What do you think?
Terry Potter
August 2017