By Arjan Arenas
When I hear the name Roald Dahl, I think of the extraordinarily vivid and imaginative worlds and colourful characters he created in his books, which I and so many others devoured when we were kids. It’s not for nothing that he’s regarded as arguably the greatest children’s writer in history, and his work occupies a significant place in the popular consciousness. So it was with a weary sigh that I found out earlier this week that Dahl’s beloved children’s stories have become the latest target of the never-ending culture wars. On Sunday, the Telegraph revealed that Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, have rewritten several of his most famous children’s books. The paper reported that the publisher had made “hundreds of changes”, in line with recommendations from sensitivity readers, an increasingly prominent presence in the publishing industry.
Like every contemporary outrage, this move provoked a couple of days’ fevered discussion on Twitter and opinionated musings in newspapers. For once, though, the vast majority of commentators were united in condemnation. The novelist Sir Salman Rushdie – himself no stranger to censorship – denounced the edits as “absurd censorship”, adding for good measure that “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.” Even the Prime Minister weighed in, with a spokesman for Rishi Sunak stating that works of fiction should be “preserved and not airbrushed”. Camilla, the Queen Consort, concurred, imploring a reception of authors at Clarence House, “Please remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.”
It was probably that last intervention that tipped the balance, prompting something which all too rarely happens in today’s controversies. When I told the Opinion Editors at The Beaver on the day after the story first broke that I wanted to have my say on it in print, my plan was simply to add my voice to the chorus of “This is stupid, here’s why”, and that would be that. However, a mixture of coursework and procrastination meant that by the time I actually got round to writing this article a few days later, there’d been a surprising development which knocked my plan slightly off course. That’s the news cycle for you. Five days after the news of Puffin’s edits to Dahl’s books originally broke, the publisher announced a miraculous and universally welcomed U-turn; the original versions will be kept in print after all. A rare victory for common sense – and probably a small one – but a victory nonetheless.
The changes to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, my personal favourite of Dahl’s books growing up, would be as good a place as any to start. The rotund Augustus Gloop, the embodiment of gluttony, was no longer described as “fat”. The iconic Oompa Loompas were no longer “titchy” or “tiny” or “no higher than my knee”. Just “small”. And for good measure, not even “small men”, but “small people”.
In The Witches, one of the darkest of Dahl’s stories, a passage in which the protagonist is warned that a witch could be disguised as anyone, whether it be “a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”, was edited so that the suspected sorceress could now be “working as a top scientist or running a business”. Elsewhere in the same novel, there’s another warning about uncovering witches, who hide their clawed fingers with gloves and their bald heads under wigs (“You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens”). That became the decidedly less thrilling “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Perhaps most tellingly was an edit made to Matilda, a book which celebrates the joys and importance of reading more than any other of Dahl’s children’s novels. A passage in the original in which the heroine is transported to other worlds by the books she borrows from a library (“She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling”) was expurgated to have her engrossed by authors deemed less “problematic” nowadays: “She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen… and California with John Steinbeck.”
There were two main reasons why these edits were a terrible decision. Firstly, they suck the creativity out of Dahl’s writing, blunting his sharp edges. It’s that acerbic, subversive, and at times outright sadistic streak that sets him apart from all other children’s authors, which was probably shaped by the dark Scandinavian tales his Norwegian immigrant parents told him when he was growing up in Cardiff (a period brilliantly recounted in his memoir Boy). As Dahl himself once admitted, “When writing stories, I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person.”
The second reason is indicative of a much bigger problem in literature and the creative industries in general these days. Namely, the infantilising desire to avoid offending audiences by exposing them to challenging images and themes. This mentality treats adults with kid gloves and treats actual kids as subjects to be programmed with the right kind of outlook rather than left to explore, and find out for themselves. Hence the decision two years ago in the States to remove some of Dr. Seuss’s books from circulation, including his classic stories And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and Scrambled Eggs Super! With this approach, storytelling and nuance are thrown out the window in favour of being on-brand. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the public never asked for Dahl’s classics to be rewritten. There was no petition for his books to be edited which millions signed. This was a top-down decision taken by those at the publisher who don’t seem to care about preserving literature for future generations. One columnist who dared to defend the edits argued that it was a commercial move, to make the books more appealing to a younger, more woke generation of parents to read to their kids. My first thought was that if Puffin really wanted to make a commercial move, they’d sell the edited versions alongside the originals, and let the public vote on which they prefer with their wallets. Which, funnily enough, is what happened in the end.
The exceptional level of the outcry over the rewriting of Roald Dahl, and the fact that it actually prompted a U-turn of sorts (the bowdlerised versions of his books will remain available alongside the original editions), doesn’t just signify the high regard he’s held in among children’s authors, but might also suggest that hopefully, the tide might be turning. Then again, I wouldn’t quite hold my breath, considering that shortly after the Dahl U-turn, the publishers of the James Bond novels – written by Dahl’s old friend Ian Fleming – announced that those books will be reissued with a number of similar edits and a disclaimer. Had they not seen the news? My guess is that this’ll go down about as well as the edits to Dahl’s books – like a lead balloon.
