In "It", was Derry, Maine said to be named after Derry or Londonderry?

Question

This might seem like a really obscure question, but it's somewhat significant, because whether the city in Northern Ireland is called "Derry" or "Londonderry" is a contentious political issue.

I re-read Stephen King's It recently, and there's a mention of Derry being named after the city of Derry in Ireland. However, I have a memory of reading it the first time, in my teens (over 25 years ago) where the same sentence said it was named after Londonderry. As I said it's an obscure thing to remember, but I noticed it at the time because of the aforementioned political implication.

Is there an old edition of the book which calls it (i.e. the Irish city, not the Maine one) "Londonderry" or is it my faulty memory? And if I'm right, what was the reason behind the change?

Answer 1

The Internet Archive has three editions of It, spanning more than 30 years:

• November 1986, New York: Viking
• September 1987, New York: Signet
• July 2017, New York: Scribner

All three have the same text, namely:

Derry.

My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.

Accordingly, I suggest that you correctly remembered that the name was politically controversial, but mis-remembered the exact text.

Note also that the narrator says that the town in Maine is named after the county in Ireland, not the city, as claimed in the post. This shows how easy it is to make this kind of minor mistake.