Rewriting Roald Dahl

The Herald reports:

Critics are accusing the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colourful language from works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryand Matilda to make them more acceptable to modern readers.

A review of new editions of Dahl’s books now available in bookstores shows that some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered. The changes made by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, first were reported by Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”. In the new edition of Witches, a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”

The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in the 1970s The Fabulous Mr Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”.

The worst part of this kind of revisionism is it insults the readers. It treats us as imbeciles who can’t deal with context. If a book has language that isn’t appropriate for today, then it is a teaching opportunity.

I recall a while back when my five year old started saying “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and I was holding my breath, and enormously relieved when he used the “tiger” version. I presumed he picked it up from friends at school.

But if he had used the older version, then it would have been an opportunity for me to explain to him why that word should not be used.

Let’s not rewrite every book published before 1980.