In the first 35 pages of Huckleberry Finn, our child hero is kidnapped by his drunkard of a father, imprisoned in a log cabin where he is left for hours (even days) on end, and frequently beaten. Oh, and his father also chases him around with a knife, threatening to kill him. Even in the more child-friendly prequel, Tom Sawyer, our hero almost starves to death in a cave (and the evil “Injun Joe” actually does starve to death); Tom also witnesses a brutal murder and poisons a cat.

Children’s classics are not only often incredibly violent in comparison to their saccharine modern-day counterparts, the reader must also contend with a good deal of racism, too, as this article explains.

Personally, I would prefer we keep reading the classics and actually have a frank discussion about the discomfiting things we find, rather than simply censoring them because they upset our delicate 21st century sensibilities. Should Dostoevsky be ditched because he was a frothing anti-Semite? Will Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus get yanked from bookshelves because of the dreaded n-word?

Books are social documents that reflect the world in which they were created, and for that, we should allow them to endure.