{"id":10311,"date":"2026-06-18T16:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T22:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/?p=10311"},"modified":"2026-06-18T16:00:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T22:00:19","slug":"memory-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/memory-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have been sorting and separating out furniture and personal items which made up my daughter\u2019s household, now that she has a place of her own, instead of having everything of hers crammed in, higgledy-piggledy to my house with mine. This last week we emptied the final shelf of the closet in what had been her bedroom and now is my office and work-space. We discovered a copy of a book which I had long searched for in the jumble of my household books \u2013 an edition of Robert Lewis Stephensons\u2019\u00a0A Child\u2019s Garden of Verses<\/em>, a version illustrated most charmingly almost fifty years ago by Gyo Fujikawa. This was an edition of the version which my mother had for us when we were small, a book which we practically read to pieces, and which poems have been set in my own memory ever since. We all, Mom included, could recite stanzas and whole poems from it from memory.
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In many ways, RLS\u2019s little poems are very dated. How long has it been since one saw an organ-grinder with a tame monkey, playing in the street and the monkey begging for coins? I saw one in some European tourist venue or other decades ago but never since. I do remember reading that there are still a few antique street gaslights in an especially historic part of London, still lit by hand every night \u2013 but how many children are there around who would know a Leery, the lamp-lighter with his ladder, coming around at twilight to light the street lamp before their house door? An aunt with long skirts trailing on the ground and trundling after her out the door likely has not been seen (other than at a very elaborate wedding<\/em>) since about 1905. But many of the other poems are timeless, resonating with the wonderous experience of a gentle childhood; swing high enough to see forever, to dig holes in the sand at the seashore and see the water coming up in them, the enduring mystery of having to wake up in the dark in winter \u2026 and go to bed in summer when it is still daylight outside! Being sick and staying in bed for a time\u2026 That, and the absolute self-centeredness of a child assuming that their way of life is utterly normal and everyone else is to be pitied;\u00a0\u201cYou have curious things to eat, but I am fed on proper meat. You must dwell beyond the foam \u2013 but I am safe and live at home!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The version of the book which we unearthed from the closet was the one that I bought for my daughter when she was small, and we were living in Greece. Possibly I ordered from Hatchards, or maybe Mom found it for us at Vromans\u2019 and mailed it from the US \u2026 anyway, when Jamie was born, I couldn\u2019t find it. Of course I wanted to read it to him, as Mom had read it to us, and as I had read it to my daughter. When Jamie came of an age to be read to, I found it easily on\u00a0Amazon<\/a>, naturally \u2013 the same edition, as I thought, with the same familiar illustrations. When it arrived, I sat down one afternoon to read as much of it to Jamie as he would hold still for \u2026 but to my bafflement \u2013 my favorite verse in\u00a0Garden of Verses<\/em>\u00a0wasn\u2019t anywhere to be found. That is the poem titled \u201cTravel\u201d and begins\u00a0\u201cI should like to rise and go, where the golden apples grow! Where below another sky, parrot islands anchored lie! And watched by cockatoos and goats, lonely Crusoe\u2019s building boats\u2026\u201d<\/em>\u00a0The lure of adventure, far places, interesting places like China with a great wall, ancient Egyptian cities deserted by time \u2013 I flipped through the pages of the edition looking for the illustrations that went with that poem so I could read it to Jamie and fire up something of the sense of wonderful possibilities for him.<\/p>\n

The poem itself was long enough to fill three pages \u2026 and I couldn\u2019t find it in the new book. Nothing. I went to the table of contents \u2026 nothing there, either. My favorite poem in the whole\u00a0Garden<\/em>\u00a0\u2026 and not there. Not in that edition, anyway, and I searched page by page. Was I imagining it? No, I knew that book too well to have hallucinated a whole poem and the series of illustrations that went with it. I did go online, though \u2013 and verified the existence of \u201cTravel\u201d in the original edition. It\u2019s listed on the Poetry Lovers website\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and clearly noted that it was part of the Garden of Verses. But it had been deliberately omitted from the most recent edition. I assume because of these lines from about the middle of the poem:\u00a0\u201cFull of apes and cocoa-nuts, And the negro hunters\u2019 huts\u2026\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Yes, indeed \u2013 two lines and a single word, an apparently forbidden word \u2013 and a whole poem coldly and deliberately omitted from the middle of a classic, much-loved and long-circulated children\u2019s book. Of course, this book has fallen into public domain \u2013 and a publisher can apparently do whatever they want to do when it comes to omitting bits of text. Now and again one reads of how classic texts have been \u2026 tampered with in recent editions, tampered by omission and commission, because of original content now considered problematic, or even hazardous \u2013 but I was personally horrified to find that this extends to established and well-known classics like this.<\/p>\n

Has anyone else ever found such a blatant editing of a book in a recent edition? Discuss as you wish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have been sorting and separating out furniture and personal items which made up my daughter\u2019s household, now that she has a place of her own, instead of having everything of hers crammed in, higgledy-piggledy to my house with mine. This last week we emptied the final shelf of the closet in what had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,85,30,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-domestic","category-geekery","category-history","category-literary-good-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10312,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10311\/revisions\/10312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}