Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.

I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children's book if it were seen as at all offensive.

Words like "bugger" and "damn" used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they're often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.

It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.

I mean it is from 1951. I've seen a lot worse by people who meant it.

It's 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.

I mean... there's also a famous Agatha Christie's book that used to have the N-word in its title.

We're viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn't have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.

I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.

I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.

Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.

So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.

Black people aren’t charcoal black.

According to old-timey racists, they are.

In the 1950s ... to average white people who might have never seen a black person before ... they would imagine this

If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that's how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I'd seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).

My friend is also charcoal black, so that's definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).