Another aspect is that the morality of stories would often seem questionable nowadays. I have a collection of fairy tales from around the world, and I remember trying reading some of it to my son. Randomly choosing some Indian story about husband pressured into deceiving a bear to work for free and then stealing some pears from the neighbor's garden. The bear was later serendipitously scared away by the the couple and received no reward for doing the chores (the bear didn't do anything bad to them). That whole story just got weirder at every turn. I was waiting until the end, I was hoping the author would make a sharp turn and rectify all the injustice, but it just ended with the perpetrators celebrating their ill-gained profits.
Well, this story is from a different culture, different time... but, I also have Beatrix Potter's collection of short stories for children (which is only some 50 years old and is definitely from the Anglo world), and uhm... I do struggle to explain some "turns of the tongue" used in these stories to my son. And it's not because I don't know what the author meant. It just makes me feel uncomfortable that the author thought that describing someone as fat was clearly intended to portray them as stupid. Or how whipping mischievous children was seen as a virtue, and that the character suggesting this be done to Ms. Muppets' kittens was the virtuous one, whereas Ms. Muppets was a lousy parent (for failing to do so) in author's opinion.
I'm still against editing the old books, but I'm also against using them in the same capacity as they were originally intended. I'd rather have them as historical artefact presented with modern commentary.
> the perpetrators celebrating their ill-gained profits
is it possible that some authors intended to teach children what reality is?
Some have no axiology evident around them, and call for teaching them that e.g. "there can exist good behavior";
some live in a world faithful to its crudeness, and call for teaching them that it is something they should digest soon.
This is a much more reasonable position than justifying censorship. This also helps meet the copyright test for corporate book publishers.
Transparency is almost always better than censorship
If so, it wasn't apparent to me. If you compare the original story of Ariel (the little mermaid) to how it's presented today, you absolutely can make out a very coherent, but unpleasant moral there. The original story (that didn't have a happy ending) was saying "know your place", if you chase something attractive that is out of your usual circle of things, you'll spend the rest of your short and miserable life in agony, and will die misunderstood and abandoned. And the story made an emphasis on this being especially relevant to young women who might get this crazy idea about marrying a prince.
We, today, don't feel comfortable with that moral, so we replaced "know your place" with "follow your heart" and "anything is possible if you try hard enough".
That Indian story didn't have enough of a dramatic effect. The bear was taken for a fool... but I don't even know if the author thought that maybe bears, in general, deserve such harsh treatment, or was it because the author thought that the kind of low-key scam that the couple turned on a bear was witty (kind of like Hodja Nasruddin's stories, which are another can of worms for what is socially acceptable today, but is, at least understandable). And even if it was the later, well, we still have the genre of heist movies, or pirate books, where the reader is expected to admire the robbers for their ingenuity and dedication to the cause. But this couple, literally got a pot of rice and a handful of pears for their efforts... also, throughout the story they weren't characterized with any abilities to outsmart anyone.
Well, that story is just outright weird to me. I'd need to find someone who grew up in India in the province the story came from to figure out why the story is the way it is. I bet there must be something lost in translation there.
Anyways, I wouldn't be able to go into details in this answer as there are many, and many to explain. I found this summary which you may find interesting: https://www.abebooks.com/books/the-gruesome-origins-of-class...
One that particularly stroke me as exceptionally sadistic is the Bluebeard by Charles Perrault (a contemporary of H. C. Andersen and with similar acclaim).
I read perrault too, including bluebeard, and enjoyed it. The only book I can remember being really scared of was an illustrated version of 'the spider and the fly', which is not a fairy tale at all (though it is rather lovely). Movies tended to be scarier ('wallace and gromit' comes to mind), likely on account of the more vivid imagery. And we see now how dangerous video can be, especially for small children, in the form of youtube and tiktok; worrying about how scary a story is seems like trifling nonsense when the real danger and harm take a completely different form.
That said, my little sister seems to have been much more sensitive to scary things than I, at a given age. At ~10, she gave up partway through both the lord of the rings and harry potter, despite being rather taken with both (whereas, I read lord of the rings at ~5 and harry potter at ~12 with no problem). So I don't know; maybe I was unique. n=2; draw your own conclusions :)
They were sold 'raw" (uncoloured), enameled, or hand painted.
These are classic examples of you can't trust the name.