Adapting the Classics: Purists, Pirates and Literary Liposuction

Serious writers are apt to do all kinds of things on the side to make money. Some crank out junky potboilers under pseudonyms. (I hear that pornography is especially easy and profitable.) (1) Others secretly serve as ghostwriters for the rich or famous. (2) Some write fundraising appeals for organizations. Dorothy Sayers supported herself for several years by writing advertisements.

Adapting the classics strikes some people as midway between writing pornography and writing advertisements. When ardent booklovers learn that I have been adapting classics for today's readers and trimming the length by one-tenth to one-half, they act embarrassed, as if they had caught me shoplifting or making indecent phone calls. It's such a grubby thing to do. In 1993 Joe Bayly devoted an entire page of ETERNITY magazine to scolding me the first time I published an adapted classic. (3) (Luci Shaw kindly responded in the letters column with a defense of my work.)

It never ends. A few weeks ago a new friend chastised me on the telephone. "Don't you feel bad about tampering with wonderful books by great authors?" She assumed that I commit literary piracy -- ruthlessly desecrating superb stories for personal gain.

I answered: "I'm as much of a purist as you. I absolutely love these authors. That's why I'm hand-polishing them for today's readers and performing what I call literary liposuction -- removing flab and fat. I keep every bit of the original story, the style, and the values -- even restoring parts cut out in other versions. I know my work would make the author happy; otherwise, I wouldn't do it." I don't know if she quite believed me or not, but it's true.

This project started in 1979 when I discovered a copy of George MacDonald's 1879 novel for children and adults, Sir Gibbie. (MacDonald said, "For my part I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether five or fifty or seventy-five.")

Sir Gibbie had been out of print for about thirty years when it was abridged by Elizabeth Yates, (4) and it was her version I gobbled down with delight. She said she had shortened the book by almost half. I knew that the complete Sir Gibbie was a favorite of C.S. Lewis, and so next I managed to get a copy of the full 1914 Everyman edition, which is probably the one he read. To my dismay, I discovered that along with the unreadable old Northern Scots dialect, Yates had cut out much of MacDonald's Christian teaching ("digression from the story") and a key part of the plot. So I immersed myself in the book and adapted it from scratch, faithfully condensing each of the 62 chapters, to make it as readable for today's American children and adults as it was for British children and adults a century ago.

Then I happened to reread Huckleberry Finn and made a peculiar discovery: again and again, specific details in Sir Gibbie appeared in Huckleberry Finn. (The first coincidence I noticed was wild rabbits perching in trees during a flood, within easy reach of boys.) I happened to know that George MacDonald and Mark Twain were acquainted, and so I smelled a mystery. I began corresponding with Professor Thomas Tenney of Charleston, South Carolina, editor of THE MARK TWAIN JOURNAL, and he helped me with my successful detective work. The entire story has many delicious details, but here is the basic outline:

1872 George MacDonald and his wife visited the United States and became friends of Mark Twain and his wife. The two authors discussed the idea of literary collaboration as a way to protect copyrights and combat transatlantic piracy.

1873 Mark Twain and his wife visited the MacDonalds in England.

1876-1883 The two authors sometimes exchanged books.

1880 Mark Twain bought MacDonald's new novel Sir Gibbie for twenty cents in a cheap paper edition.

1883 MacDonald invited Twain to co-author the sequel to Sir Gibbie. but Twain declined.

1885 Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn.

Evidently, Huckleberry Finn was Twain's tart answer to Sir Gibbie. Both Huckleberry Finn and Sir Gibbie include humor, horror, irony, and sorrow; but Sir Gibbie is permeated by the sweetness of George MacDonald's profound trust in God. In contrast, Twain's view of God varied from skeptical to bitter. Gibbie is a moral prodigy and a Mozart of Christian sensibility; in contrast, Huck Finn has keen moral intuition but no sense at all of God's goodness.

Mark Twain was a modern writer in the Victorian age. He liked George MacDonald and loved At the Back of the North Wind, but he privately scorned much of MacDonald's writing as too sweet, sentimental, and preachy. Twain once wrote to a twelve-year-old boy, "I notice that you use plain simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English -- it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; and don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in."

"When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them -- then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart." Elsewhere, he advised, "A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

Ironically, following Twain's guidance and removing the verbosity from Sir Gibbie is what led me to discover how Twain had secretly made use of this devoutly Christian novel when he created what has became America's favorite (nonChristian) novel.(5) Among other things, Huck Finn is a kind of intentional mirror image to Gibbie. If George MacDonald read Huckleberry Finn, he must have realized that his friend Twain appeared to be twitting him; but it would be like MacDonald to leave no record of that discovery.

The story of children's literature is full of surprising ironies such as the MacDonald/Twain connection. For a starter, few people realize that the first stories ever published for children were Puritan preachments in the 1600s. One of them was James Janeway's A TOKEN FOR CHILDREN: BEING AN EXACT ACCOUNT OF THE CONVERSION, HOLY AND EXEMPLARY LIVES, AND JOYFUL DEATHS OF SEVERAL YOUNG CHILDREN. He urged children to live godly lives before dying joyfully with Christ's name on their lips. Godly living consisted of not doing bad things such as playing with Satan's favorite toy, the spinning top.

Robinson Crusoe burst into this bleak book world in 1719 -- an adult Christian novel destined to become the world's favorite adventure story for readers of all ages. It is the story of a young fool who ran away from wealth, security, and family love for a rough life at sea -- and came to his senses too late, stranded alone on a tropical island. Alone except for God and, eventually, cannibals.

From the day Crusoe ran away to sea until the day that he was rescued from his island, author Daniel Defoe recorded thirty-five years of suspense, surprises, and setbacks. Thus the book is so long -- 472 pages of fine print in my 1885 edition -- that few people are aware of the second half anymore, in which Crusoe returns to his island, travels clear around the world, and returns to England in old age to peacefully await "a longer journey than all these." Abridged editions of the first half tend to leave out Crusoe's long struggle with God and his slow transformation into a faith-filled Christian. My 185-page version retains every bit of the story and its Christian message.

Few people realize that author Daniel Defoe was almost as extraordinary as his fictitious Robinson Crusoe. He was a Presbyterian jack of all trades, a part-time political spy, and a full-time journalist. To support his wife and six children he wrote over 560 books and other publications, and on a couple of occasions his peppery prose landed him in prison. He was almost sixty when he finally turned to fiction, and he was so pleased by Robinson Crusoe that he spent his last ten years producing seven more novels (along with some other books, of course).

Twenty-five years after Robinson Crusoe became an instant bestseller, an energetic entrepreneur named John Newbery got the unheard-of idea of publishing books for children to enjoy. He became a publisher, bookstore owner, author, and employer of ghostwriters. (His two great secret ghostwriters were Dr. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.) He published over thirty children's books "intended for instruction and amusement" (mainly amusement), including Goody-Two-Shoes. In 1751 Newbery brought out the first children's periodical of all time, THE LILLIPUTIAN MAGAZINE, which pretended to be produced by the Lilliputian Society and its secretary R. Goodwill. Four years later he published the first children's Bible, THE NEW TESTAMENT ADAPTED TO THE CAPACITIES OF CHILDREN. The Puritans hadn't done that.

One century after John Newbery invented the delightful children's-book business, the first golden age of children's books began, lasting from about 1850 to 1900. (The second golden age began in 1950, and we are still in it.) Aside from Robinson Crusoe, the books that I adapted for the Young Reader's Library series are all from the heart of the first golden age of children's books.

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is the story of a poverty-stricken brother and sister in the beautiful land of windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes. It is a story of championship skating, hunger and hardship, adventure and buried gold, a brain-damaged father and a long-lost son, and prayers come true. When I adopted a baby boy with Dutch ancestry 25 years ago, I named him Peter Lindskoog because I loved the Dutch boy named Peter in Hans Brinker. A few months ago I learned that the mother of a dear Dutch-ancestry friend of mine had named her first son Peter for the same reason.

In 1992 I got a wild hunch that Fuller Seminary's Lewis Smedes might know and love Hans Brinker, and so I wrote and asked him. He answered, "Hans Brinker was my best boyhood dream. Could I, if I tried terribly hard, become somebody like him? What a shame that hardly anybody knows Hans Brinker anymore! I am delighted that he is being brought back to life." (I brought him back to life mainly by eliminating outdated encyclopedia-style information about Holland.)

When she was a teenage girl, Mary Mapes Dodge had written unsigned articles for her father's agriculture magazine, letting readers assume she was a man. Later, as an adult widow with two young sons, she decided to write a book about Holland in spite of the fact that editors told her it would never sell. Hans Brinker made her famous overnight. When she was almost fifty, she finally went with one of her sons to see Holland for herself, and she loved it.

In the meantime she had been editing ST. NICHOLAS MAGAZINE FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, which was read every month by hundreds of thousands of people, including adults. (Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote one of the magazine stories and later expanded it into her beloved book A Little Princess.)

Dodge became famous because she ignored bad editorial advice she didn't like, and Louisa May Alcott became famous because she followed good editorial advice she didn't like. Her editor urged her to give up on fantasies and write a girls' story based on real life. Thus it was that three years after Hans Brinker caused a sensation, Louisa May Alcott published Part I of the first and best of all children's stories about family life:Little Women. A year later, she published Part II.

These books tell about the remarkable March family, where everyone tries hard to be good and to do what's right, and they sometimes succeed. The chapters are full of laughter and tears and surprises; and they make us cherish the very idea of home. I have subtitled Part I "Four Funny Sisters," and Part II "The Sisters Grow Up." In them I clarified the importance of Pilgrim's Progress in the story, a theme that is often left out or misunderstood today.

Less than ten years later, another runaway bestseller burst on the scene and became the world's favorite animal story. Black Beauty has been translated into over a dozen languages and has sold over forty million copies.

Anna Sewell did not consider herself an author; she was a spunky Quaker, a great animal-lover, an artist with unusual science talent, and a practical helper of people in need. Unfortunately, she was increasingly crippled by symptoms that match those of multiple sclerosis. When she was fifty and totally bedfast, she decided to write a story that would help to end the mistreatment of horses. In the months when she couldn't even hold a pencil, she dictated to her mother. In seven years the story was finished, a lucky publisher bought it for only 30 pounds sterling, and it was published. Anna Sewell died content three months later.

Within a year, George MacDonald published Sir Gibbie.

Ten years later, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who had met George MacDonald in 1872 and was evidently much influenced by him, published Sarah Crewe, later expanded into A Little Princess. It is the story of a girl in a London boarding school run by the cruel Miss Minchen. When tragedy strikes, Sarah finds the strength to survive and conducts herself like true royalty. Christian author Ranelda Mack Hunsicker says that A Little Princess was the formative book of her childhood.

The seven books in this series for readers from ten to one-hundred are like ice-cream; every generation loves them. And it is never too late to read the great children's classics.

As C. S. Lewis said, "I now enjoy fairy tales better than I did in childhood: being able to put more in, of course I get more out." J.R.R. Tolkien said, "Books written entirely for children are poor even as children's books." And Mark Twain said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

This is a round that we used to sing by the campfire in Scouts:

Make new friends, but keep the old;
One is silver, and the other is gold.

I offer a second verse:

Read new books, and read the old;
One is silver and the other is gold.

1. In a reverse kind of literary prostitution, a violent white Klansman named Asa Carter published a tender, heartwarming autobiography titled THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE under the name Forest Carter -- with all profits allegedly going to the Cherokee. In it he portrayed himself as a Cherokee orphan who endured cruel white bigotry with prodigious generosity of spirit. LITTLE TREE eventually became so popular that in 1991 it was voted book of the year by members of the American Booksellers Association. Then the news broke: Asa Carter had cynically written the sentimental anti-racist fiction to fund his own virulently racist political agenda.   Return to text


2. In 1993 the disinguished Christian author and film producer Mel White revealed publicly that he had ghostwritten books for Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham. He simultaneously revealed that he is a homosexual.  Return to text


3. A Child's Garden of Christian Verses (Regal, 1983).  Return to text


4. Sir Gibbie, edited by Elizabeth Yates (E.P. Dutton, 1963; Schocken Books, 1979).  Return to text


5. A detailed account can be found in "Mark Twain and George MacDonald: The Salty and the Sweet," THE MARK TWAIN JOURNAL (Volume 30, Number 1), found online at The Golden Key.