Censoring Roald Dahl, or Ripping Him Off?

 When I was a kid, I stopped reading kids books by Seventh Grade. That was when I read Dracula and The Old Man and the Sea. Even before then, I read mostly non-fiction. I wrote to explain I never Roald Dahl.

I know two things about Roald Dahl: he wrote children's books, and he was married to Patricia Neal. The latter far more impresses me.

Now his books are being bowdlerized, to be made fit for modern children, to be inclusive.

From The Guardian is Let Roald Dahl books go out of print rather than rewrite them, says Philip Pullman

Puffin has been criticised after hiring sensitivity readers to go over Dahl’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”. Some have said derogatory references to people’s physical appearances, as well as other characteristics, in Dahl’s work are not suitable for young readers. But, rather than fan the flames, Pullman encouraged children simply to read “better” authors.

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He said Dahl’s work, if left alone, would neither disappear overnight, nor be substantially changed in the public’s consciousness, because of the vast numbers of existing editions sitting on shelves in homes, school libraries and elsewhere. “What are you going to do about them? All these words are still there, are you going to round up all the books and cross them out with a big black pen?”

Asked about the controversy over the rewrites, he said: “Dahl can look after himself. I hadn’t read his books for very many years and I don’t want to again.” He added: “The point is: these words, these phrases and language uses do change over time. For a young author now coming in, who hasn’t got the clout and the commercial power of someone like Roald Dahl, it’s quite hard to resist the nudging towards saying this or not saying that, which is a pity, I think.”

Hundreds of changes have been made to Dahl’s original texts. For example, in The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. References to people being fat are also among the edits, which were made in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, a “collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”. And the Roald Dahl Story Company has said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.

Charlie Sykes over at The Bulwark wrote An Act of Literary Vandalism provides excerpts from other articles on the subject and more texts for comparison.

The Sykes piece nods at the corporate profits Lincoln Michel put center stage in his The Roald Dahl Edits Aren't About Anything Except Corporate Profits Bowdlerizing his books is more IP shilling than "threat to free speech"

Despite the internet trying to turn this into a big discussion of “wokeness gone amok” or a return to “Victorian-era censorship” or “a threat to free speech,” I think we can chalk this up to a much more powerful force: corporations protecting their IP. That was my first thought when I saw the news on Saturday morning. I have never seen anyone on the left, right, or center urge edits to Roald Dahl’s books. And once this leaked, the responses was pretty overwhelmingly negative from across the political spectrum. As with the news from 2021 that the Dr. Seuss estate was pulling some of his offensive yet—and this is key—poorly selling books, this isn’t so much about censorship as it is about corporate branding.

I go with that. Most of this awoke talk seems to me to be crying over what businesses do to get more profits without criticizing profit-making.

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And with today's Brisbane Times books newsletter came links to two articles.

Erasing history or keeping up with the times? The great Roald Dahl debate: Captures the range of opinion, but my own is in this paragraph:

Where The Wild Things Are was also a touchpoint, Chapman says, as people were concerned the character of Max was disobeying his parents.

“We are always going to have books that upset people, that contain ideas that people don’t like or don’t agree with, that we all agree are absolutely wrong, but if we hide these books it doesn’t make it go away. In fact, it prevents us from preparing children to engage with this idea that we agree is wrong and that they will eventually face,” she says.

 Dahl is not a writer for me, never was, nor do I have any children who might be affected by this, but on general principles I find myself with Roald Dahl’s monsters should be left to their deliciously wicked ways.

There’s a much smaller change that has just swept through Northcote High School library. The school has removed dozens of old non-fiction texts from its library because they use offensive or outdated descriptions of First Nations peoples, or promote one-sided views of colonial settlement. In the long run, revisions like this are much more important than messing with Dahl, and I welcome them.

History is written by the victors, but it can also be rewritten in a more balanced, nuanced and comprehensive way, and that is happening all the time. Our children deserve to get accurate and up to date reading material. But I’d like some of those old books to be kept as conversation starters, to show the way we used to view our history.

Making nice with history for the sake of some tyke's self-esteem seems a high price. If the tyke does not know what was, they will assume a moral certainty undeserved to human beings. The world is not a kind place, people have not been uniformly good. Understanding current stands on morality, we need to know where we were. Huckleberry Finn came up in discussion. does the use of the N word negates the novel's morality? Think about it.

And McSweeney's take is here and in language I cannot replicate on my blog. It strikes me as a bit of a rant, rather unusual for McSweeney's.

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