Toe in the Water

The Dinosaur Speaks

The Dinosaur Speaks

For some time now I have wanted to write about a book that is disappearing into the mists of time. It’s a children’s book that I read long ago and it was, for a time, quite famous. Lately it has fallen into disfavour, largely because of a few prejudiced statements, common to the time in which the book was written.

These can be numbered on the fingers of one hand, however, and, considering the quality and beauty of the rest of the book, it seems a pity to throw away everything for the sake of a few misguided asides. The book would not suffer from the offending words being expunged, in fact they are so unimportant to the main drive of the tale that it would definitely be improved by such trimming.

But no, our era is so convinced of its superiority in all things moral that even the slight whiff of an earlier age must be expunged from our experience, as though we were not able to take the good from something while leaving the bad. We must obliterate all memory of the past so that our tender minds never be infected by opinions different from our own.

When they start banning such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind, it must surely be obvious that we go too far. What will the world look like when we have trimmed our culture to include only those things seen as politically correct? I should not have to remind us that “those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.”

Perhaps this is merely my “raging against the dying of the light.”* But, if you’re interested in reading something magical before it disappears, it is still possible to get hold of a copy of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies from Amazon on the used thriftbook stand.

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+babies&oq=the+water+babies&aqs=chrome....

*From Dylan Thomas’ poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.


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