page_title: Use of nigger in the arts
section_title: British literary usage
hierarchical_section_title: Use of nigger in the arts / Literature / British literary usage
caption_attribution_description: Illustration from a collection of short stories Just so stories (c1912) Garden City, N.Y.&#160;: Doubleday &amp; Co., Inc.
context_section_description: Several late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary usages suggest neutral usage. The popular Victorian era entertainment, the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado (1885), twice uses the word nigger. In the song As some day it may happen, the executioner, Ko-ko, sings of executing the "nigger serenader and the others of his race", referring to white singers with their faces blacked singing minstrel songs. In the song A more humane Mikado, the Mikado sings of the punishment for older women who dye their hair or wear corsets, to be "Blacked like a nigger/With permanent walnut juice." Both lyrics are usually changed for modern performances.
  The word "nigger" appears in children's literature. "How the Leopard Got His Spots", in the Just So Stories (1902) by Rudyard Kipling, tells of an Ethiopian man and a leopard, both originally sand-colored, deciding to camouflage themselves with painted spots, for hunting in tropical forest. The story originally included a scene wherein the leopard (now spotted) asks the Ethiopian man why he does not want spots. In contemporary editions of "How the Leopard Got His Spots", the Ethiopian's original reply ("Oh, plain black's best for a nigger") has been edited to, "Oh, plain black's best for me." The counting rhyme known as "Eenie Meenie Mainee, Mo" has been attested from 1820, with many variants; when Kipling included it as "A Counting-Out Song" in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923), he gave as its second line, "Catch a nigger by the toe!" This version became widely used for much of the twentieth century; the rhyme is still in use, but the second line now uses "tiger" instead.
  The word "nigger" is used innocently and without malice by the child characters in some of the Swallows and Amazons series, written in the 1930s by Arthur Ransome, e.g. in referring to how the (white) characters appear in photographic negatives ("Look like niggers to me") in The Big Six, and as a synonym for black pearls in Peter Duck. Editions published by Puffin after Ransome's death changed the word to 'negroes'.
  The first Jeeves novel, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), features a minstrel show as a significant plot point. Bertie Wooster, who is trying to learn to play the banjo, is in admiration of their artistry and music. Tellingly, P.G. Wodehouse has the repeated phrase "nigger minstrels" only on the lips of Wooster and his peers; the manservant Jeeves uses the more genteel "Negroes".
  In short story "The Basement Room" (1935), by Graham Greene, the (sympathetic) servant character, Baines, tells the admiring boy, son of his employer, of his African British colony service, "You wouldn't believe it now, but I've had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to". Replying to the boy's question: "Did you ever shoot a nigger?" Bains answers: "I never had any call to shoot. Of course I carried a gun. But you didn't need to treat them bad, that just made them stupid. Why, I loved some of those dammed niggers." The cinematic version, The Fallen Idol (1948), directed by Carol Reed, replaced this usage with "natives".
  Virginia Woolf, in her 1941 posthumously-published novel Between the Acts, wrote "Down amongst the bushes she worked like a nigger." The phrase is not dialogue from one of the characters, nor is it in the context of expressing a point of view of one of the characters. Woolf's usage of racist slurs has been examined in various academic writings.
  The Reverend W. V. Awdry's The Railway Series (1945–72) story Henry's Sneeze, originally described soot-covered boys with the phrase "as black as niggers". In 1972, after complaints, the description was edited to "as black as soot", in the subsequent editions. Rev. Awdry is known for Thomas the Tank Engine (1946).
caption: "How the Leopard Got His Spots"
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