Can We Please Stop Rewriting Roald Dahl’s Books?
Augustus Gloop is now ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’.
This was first published in February, 2023.
The publisher of Roald Dahl’s children’s books has quietly rewritten some of them. The aim, it said, was to remove language it deemed offensive. Sensitivity readers at Puffin identified instances of perceived sexism, racism and other -isms, and editors dutifully changed the wording. Augustus Gloops is now ‘enormous’, not ‘fat’; Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull’s famously ‘horsey face’ is now just her ‘face’, and ‘the old hag’ (in The Witches) is now ‘the old crow’. Roald Dahl is a notoriously divisive author — one justifiably accused of hatred towards women, Black people and Jews. Furthermore, he allowed some small changes to his own work to be made to satisfy his editors’ wishes to be au fait with modern mores. So should Puffin have made the changes they did? Well, no. It shouldn’t have. Here’s why.
Literature is a form of human expression, and a work of literature is typically the expression of one human, who lived at a specific time and in a specific place and was formed by specific conditions. It is therefore not something that exists ‘out there’, divorced from context—able to be shaped each generation of publishers so that it reflect the world in which they live or the world in which they would like to live. Certainly, it is not something that may be shaped to promote a political cause or point of view (which is the O.E.D.’s definition of propaganda). Those publishers may think they will sell more copies if they do. But unless they have the permission of the writer or his estate, it is not their job to do so. Even if they do have the writer’s permission, it is still not their real job to do so. Anthony Horowitz has written about changing his work because a Native American character attacking someone with a scalpel was deemed offensive. As he pointed out, the word ‘scalpel’ has nothing to do with scalps; it comes from the Latin word scalpellus (from scalpere, to cut). He said that making the changes ‘hurt’, but that he was over a barrel. That publishers, who ought to be guardians and stewards of world literature, should think it acceptable to change the work of a much-loved author like Dahl to reflect fleeting social anxieties is really quite depressing.
Literature is a form of human expression, and a work of literature is typically the expression of one human, who lived at a specific time and in a specific place and was formed by specific conditions.
What is also puzzling about this is that adults seem to be putting their worries ahead of the reading experience of children. Literature should challenge readers. It should provoke thought. It should inspire and kindle imagination. It should raise questions. Surely, reader, you remember as a child coming across something unfamiliar or difficult while reading, and asking someone about it? It sparks off useful and often memorable conversations. Publishers are seriously underestimating children and their ability to deal with complexity. And just as over-protected children make fearful adults, children deprived of reading about the less palatable parts of life will make adults who are less liable to think critically or engage with difficult topics, secure in the knowledge that they can overcome whatever discomfort those topics cause.
What is also puzzling about this is that adults seem to be putting their worries ahead of the reading experience of children.
But perhaps I am blowing things out of proportion. Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company insist, after all, that the changes they made were ‘small and carefully considered’ so that the books could be enjoyed by children everywhere. That may be so. As I have already said, that does not justify them. More still: it is surely worth remembering that the stories they took upon themselves to revise have been read and enjoyed for decades without any changes needing to be made as society has. More than 250 million unedited copies of Dahl’s books have been sold worldwide. And what makes Dahl’s stories so fun and readable is that, though fantastical, they are also grounded firmly in the emotional realities of childhood, with all its meanness and name-calling and simplistic points of view. When you water down Dahl’s language, you water down those realities and so the books’ appeal.
In the end, changing the language in Roald Dahl’s books harms the integrity of his original works. Literature is a product of an author and his time, not a means to make a point or advance an argument or even sell more copies. Revising Dahl warps his voice and erases the cultural and historical context that gave rise to it, depriving those reading them of the chance to learn from and engage with the past. It puts the fleeting above the timeless, the ‘relevant’ above the enduring. And that is a big shame.
Or so it seems to me.
