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Like it or not, such is the power of the public domain.
Books are not merely "free of charge," they are also "free of control." You can protest textual changes until you are blue in the face, and you may even have excellent points for maintaining the integrity of the original (and should continue to express them openly). Unfortunately, if the rewriters do not accept your arguments or respond to your pressure, you can't stop them from issuing it.
Further, this is not always such a straight-forward issue. Some people hate the idea of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Some think it's hilarious. Who's right?
And surely if someone rewrote the book from scratch and set it in the year 2010, you would not require the rewriter to use terms we would now call racist or derogatory?
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