A host of classic books for children and young people, including the first in the Harry Potter series, have been marked with trigger warnings at one of the country’s leading universities.
Students at the University of Glasgow have been cautioned that
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone contains “outdated attitudes, abuse and language”.
The work by JK Rowling appears alongside a number of titles, including
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the dystopian 2001 novel
Noughts & Crosses by Malory Blackman and Edith Nesbit’s 1899 book
The Treasure Seekers, assessed as having the potential to cause offence.
Another book deemed to be problematic was
First Term at Malory Towers, the Enid Blyton novel from 1946 set in a girls’ boarding school, which has spawned a series of sequels as well as a BBC TV adaptation.
The warnings have been issued to all students taking part in a module entitled British Children’s Literature.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the book which introduced the
boy wizard to readers in 1997, has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold more than 120 million copies around the world. The eponymous hero is bullied by his abusive aunt and uncle and forced to sleep in a cupboard under their stairs. Harry goes on to learn that his parents were murdered by Lord Voldemort, a malevolent wizard, and that his own life is in grave danger.
Jeremy Black, the author and former professor of history at the University of Exeter, said the warnings were unnecessary. “Glasgow University’s wish to warn that the values of the past are dangerous and disturbing offers a hilarious commentary on its present mindedness,” he said. “All such trigger warnings do is provide a form of confirmation bias for the follies of the present.”
John Sutherland, emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London, told the Daily Mail: “In the olden days, the British Library used to have a ‘poison cabinet’, for books judged dangerous to readers. It was large cabinet-sized. Nowadays, with the triggering epidemic, the triggered-lit cabinet would be the size of … King’s Cross station [next door].”
Dame Margaret Drabble, the novelist, said: “Poor, poor students! Exposing themselves at their age to Lewis Carroll and Edith Nesbit and all those ghastly outdated stories glorifying public school. How they must suffer. They will need counselling from all the children who have survived these terrible tales and enjoyed them so much.”
A spokeswoman for the
University of Glasgow said: “Content advisories in a university setting help students prepare for critical discussion. Unlike children reading for pleasure, undergraduates analyse these texts in depth, which can highlight outdated attitudes around childhood, race or gender.
“We believe that content advisories have an important role to play in an educational setting, allowing lecturers and students to engage in a positive learning and teaching experience on issues across the whole range of human experience and history. They also ensure we can engage with course content in as sensitive and respectful a way as possible.”
