If you want to read anything by Roald Dahl, buy used.
As reported everywhere, and disputed everywhere else, in the near future all new editions of Dahl’s classic children’s texts—including James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda—will have been revised by sensitivity readers to ensure awkward, dated, and yes, sometimes hilarious passages, offend nobody and pass unnoticed under the eyes of today’s reading public.
Here are but three of the changes you’ve probably already seen. The Centipede in James and the Giant Peach used to say, “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that.” Now the bug says, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” Matilda, once a “most formidable female,” is now a “most formidable woman.” And this gem. The original: “In her right hand she carried a walking stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on her sole of her left foot and walking was painful.” And the revision to appear in new editions: “In her right hand she carried a walking stick. Not because she needed help walking.”
Puffin Books is making these changes to books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies, making the publisher rich and, it appears, thankless, but no less interested in making more money off Dahl’s name and work.
In a way, nothing’s new. Expurgation’s an old habit. Prudes in the 1500s who glued fig leaves to nude marbles. Bowlder bowdlerized Shakespeare by snipping out the dirty parts. If you try to watch Breaking Bad on Netflix, you’ll notice that the breasts on the topless woman in the pilot have been conspicuously blurred. Mark Twain’s vocabulary was domesticated in reprints of his historic writing. Warner Bros. now censors Bugs Bunny—no sexist jokes allowed. Dr. Seuss was improved by reducing the potential for offense. Public institutions take down and cover up images of whoever is offensive to today’s sensitive public. The attack on Dahl’s vulgarity only continues a tradition of “fixing” the thoughts of other people, a tradition that will never die. Like the poor, totalitarians, who have no interest or respect for art, will always be with us.
What is especially annoying about the neutering of Dahl’s work is that it undermines what the man wanted his art to do. Yes, it seems he didn’t like fat people. (He didn’t like Jews, either.) He made fun of the wide and round. His choice of language wasn’t simply a product of the times. He wanted it that way. He meant what he said. He appears to have been, as many attest, a cruel, despicable person. So what? Speaking rude is his right as a writer and an artist.
Let me correct that last sentence: It used to be the writer’s right, back in that thin era of last century when rudeness was treated with some respect. Today, publishers will unpublish works that demand they show a bit of courage and take a risk; social media will disappear unpopular opinions; elected officials will toy with the idea of making certain thoughts illegal; and a mass of literati and intelligentsia will shake their heads and say, “Do you really need to say that?” All but a few writers with steel spines will say what they want to say, and even fewer will risk a stint in the gulag for fun and art.
I can only think of one reason outside of resentment and self-loathing why a publisher might want to make books less interesting: With so many North Americans classified as overweight or obese, the publisher may not want to risk upsetting such a large group of buyers—although one has to wonder if “enormous” is a better descriptor for Augustus Gloop than “fat.” An alternative theory, one with some basis in academic literature, suggests that censors tend to be stupid, shallow people, and so a stupid, shallow decision to bowdlerize a text may not strike them as either stupid or shallow.
Soon, readers and viewers will never know what wit, smut, and inconvenient fact has been ripped from the pages of an old book or cut from the reels of a favourite film. AI, the ultimate schoolmarm, has the reach and wherewithal to delete every curse word, buttock, and fart ever committed to page and screen. (NB: Microsoft Word has informed me that “fart” “may be offensive” to my reader. Thank you, Word.)
In times of revision, readers cry for hard copies. Used books, old DVDs, VHS tapes, and LPs stand as monuments to freer times. The problem today is that digital media has consumed the market. Books still appear in print, but most other media is intangible and so much more at risk of being memory holed.
Salvation will come years from now when Dahl’s work enters the public domain. Then the texts as he originally envisioned can be read and savoured or thrown across a room in a fit of outrage and disgust. Which is how it was always supposed to be.
Robert Grant Price is a university lecturer and writer.
Expressed is an occasional mailing of essays, stories, and reviews.