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Censorship, politics, sex, gender, economy, ignorance, visibility, invisibility and fidelity
Having finished an initial draft of this Preface, I sent it to Christopher Mulvey, editor at WUP, who sends me the following note:
“You are using the modern Americanized version of the book. That has the names Franny and Rick rather than Fanny and Dick of the original. Is it worth looking at the changes? You make no mention of Rick/Dick. Is that deliberate?” (Mulvey, 2015)
Despite having ordered my copy of Faraway Tree from a British website (book depository. co.uk), it seems that in 2015 the accepted version is the sanitised, Americanised one. I feel strangely ashamed. I’d FORGOTTEN that there was a character in the The Faraway Tree named Dick, when I read it as a child. I accepted ‘Franny’ over ‘Fanny’ without question. Suddenly, any discussion in this preface of The Faraway Tree brings up issues of censorship, politics, sex, gender, economy, ignorance, visibility, invisibility and fidelity to Blyton’s characters and time. So I am wondering how I might write this preface in a way that simultaneously cites new and old versions of the The Faraway Tree in order to make evident the tampering of editors over time, the often invisible censorship present in our reading lives, with the aim to enable readers to experience the different meanings and affects of both original and revised versions of a classic text. The references up to this point refer to Joe and Franny, but from here on in, we’ll refer to the older publication – and use Dick and Fanny.
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