Laura Lee Hope
Published in 1904 by Grosset and Dunlap, and currently available as a free ebook from Project Gutenberg
Last night, I finished reading The Bobbsey Twins or Merry Days Indoors and Out, which I had downloaded because, having earned enough to buy a Kindle, the best thing I could think to do with it was to start downloading kids' books from the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't that different from other ones that I've read, since it was mostly a cute book and very episodic, but in this case, it had some passages that were so wildly racist that I couldn't imagine it being sold today. I did like all of the stuff about how holidays were celebrated at the turn of the century, and was pretty entertained by Bert's almost Crime and Punishment-esque dilemma about having witnessed the breaking of a shoe store's window. It was just much harder to enjoy the parts about how sweet little Flossie used a big piece of cardboard to segregate the majority of her doll collection, with fluffy blonde hair and pink dresses, from the black doll in a spiffy red hat and blue suit that the household help, who have their dialogue written in a nearly unreadable dialect, had purchased for her.
What seemed the strangest about all of those parts of The Bobbsey Twins first book was that I was sure I'd read it myself when I was in grade school, but couldn't remember any of that. I know that I probably wasn't thinking too hard about political issues in literature when I was seven, but I'm sure that the book's heroine sorting her dolls with barriers would have left an impression on me. When I looked it up to see what happened, though, I found out that the version I'd read before was a revision from 1961 called The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport. It sounds like a few parts of the story are still the same, but it was completely rewritten as a mystery novel, which partially explains why absolutely none of it seemed familiar to me now. I wish that I could remember if they'd left in the part where a girl passes out while jump roping and Nan and Bert think she's dead, but at the very least, I know that some of the politically incorrect parts of the book were cleaned up for the 60s revision of the book.
If you're curious about revisions of old series books, Jennifer's Series Books has several posts with side by side comparisons of different versions of Nancy Drew novels. I haven't read about anything on her blog that sounds quite as extreme as what happened to the Bobbsey Twins books, but it's still interesting to see what changes were made.
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