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From: Chris Buckley <alan@sabir.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: _The Hundred and One Dalmatians_ racist?
Date: 8 Oct 2024 19:35:30 GMT
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On 2024-10-07, Joel Polowin <jpolowin@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> I recently ran across a review (https://youtu.be/1GxzNj8HO-k?t=788) 
> which compared the original Dodie Smith book _The Hundred and One 
> Dalmations_ with the 1961 Disney animated adaptation, _One Hundred and 
> One Dalmatians_.  It noted that the original book had some extremely 
> racist comments, referring to "sneaky awful black-eyed gipsies".  (This 
> is in chapter 14 of the book.)
>
> But my copy of the book _One Hundred and One Dalmatians_ (with the 
> altered title, and an image from the Disney movie on the cover) doesn't 
> have that.  The worst comment that my book makes is that "gipsies 
> sometimes stole valuable dogs"  And the gipsies do indeed try to capture 
> the dogs.
>
> My guess is that the book was tweaked a bit for the post-Disney 
> publication.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of the 
> book that was published pre-1961.  (It's also possible that the changes 
> were due to the book's North American publication, vs. the original U.K. 
> release.) The copies at archive.org are no longer available; the 
> passages available in Google Books don't include that chapter. 
> Interlibrary loan was unsuccessful — although I found a library that had 
> it, relatively close to where I live, the library then removed the book 
> from their catalogue.  I guess they discovered that the book was missing 
> from their collection when they tried to find it for me.
>
> Do any of you have a pre-Disney (i.e. pre-1961) copy of the book?  I'm 
> interested in comparing the two book versions, or at least that section 
> of them.
>
> Thanks,
> Joel

From Goodreads, it originally was serialized in _Woman's Day_ as "The
Great Dog Robbery".  There are full digital archives of this magazine,
but I didn't investigate how freely they are accessible (eg ProQuest).

I did see one 1957 copy on sale for $66, but that's going to extremes
for the sake of curiousity!

Good luck!
Chris