The Guardian (“Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive“):
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.
Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
Hundreds of changes is, well, a lot of changes. They mostly seem to be of the sort mentioned above—removing references that equate being ugly or fat with being evil or greedy. More on that in a bit.
In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
Most of these changes seem silly but, at the same time, relatively harmless. As a general rule, my preference is to leave historical works alone so audiences can enjoy them as their creators intended. Then again, there has been tinkering with the words in the Christian bible for two millennia.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, said they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”.
A notice from the publisher sits at the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Dahl’s books: “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
A spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company said: “When publishing new print runs of books written years ago, it’s not unusual to review the language used alongside updating other details including a book’s cover and page layout. Our guiding principle throughout has been to maintain the storylines, characters, and the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text. Any changes made have been small and carefully considered.”
The thing is, these works are supposed to be those of Roald Dahl, not so panel of busybodies trying to ensure no one is offended.
But here’s the thing: beloved as these stories are, Dahl’s sensibilities were rather harsh. A decade-old critique (also published in The Guardian) of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory rightly refers to it as “a twisted Victorian morality tale.” This, despite being written in 1964—well into the second Elizabethan era.
The chocolate factory of the title is a mega-factory that relies on slave labour, with hastily whitewashed racist overtones. In its shadow lives noble Charlie. His dad works shovelling snow since he lost his job and the whole family are starving. No wonder Saint Charlie wants to win the lottery, aka find a golden ticket. And if you’ll excuse the spoiler, he totally does. So do four other kids. Unfortunately, these turn out to be the four worst kids in the world – simply by being four kids who aren’t paragons of Victorian silent virtue.
When these kids act like kids, eating the sweets that they are invited to eat and messing with stuff, they have violent, cruel accidents, which we’re meant to applaud. Ha ha, they totally deserve it for being disgustingly fat. Or for chewing gum. (Hey, wait though, doesn’t this factory make gum?) Or for watching television.
[…]
But the fate of shy fatty Augustus Gloop touches my heart the most. What chance did he have? He’s in a chocolate factory. He’s in the “chocolate room“. He’s there because he won a ticket by eating chocolate, as part of a competition which was a marketing exercise to sell more chocolate. But fat people don’t know how to behave around food, do they? He dares to drink from a chocolate river and faster than you can say, back away from the doughnuts, fatty, he is sucked into a pipe to his possible death. So c’mon kids let’s all sing along with this fat-shaming song about how much the Oompah Loompas would like to kill the “great big greedy nincompoop”.
I was never the fat kid but I thought the whole thing weird when I saw the original Gene Wilder Willy Wonka movie half a century ago. Still, it’s Dahl’s art and, it turns out, he, too, had “lived experience.” From his Wiki:
Dahl’s children’s works are usually told from the point of view of a child. They typically involve adult villains who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one “good” adult to counteract the villain(s).[4] These stock characters are possibly a reference to the abuse that Dahl stated that he experienced in the boarding schools he attended.[4] Dahl’s books see the triumph of the child; children’s book critic Amanda Craig said, “He was unequivocal that it is the good, young and kind who triumph over the old, greedy and the wicked.”[12] Anna Leskiewicz in The Telegraph wrote “It’s often suggested that Dahl’s lasting appeal is a result of his exceptional talent for wriggling his way into children’s fantasies and fears, and laying them out on the page with anarchic delight. Adult villains are drawn in terrifying detail, before they are exposed as liars and hypocrites, and brought tumbling down with retributive justice, either by a sudden magic or the superior acuity of the children they mistreat.”[116]
While his whimsical fantasy stories feature an underlying warm sentiment, they are often juxtaposed with grotesque, darkly comic and sometimes harshly violent scenarios.[9][11] The Witches, George’s Marvellous Medicine and Matilda are examples of this formula. The BFG follows, with the good giant (the BFG or “Big Friendly Giant”) representing the “good adult” archetype and the other giants being the “bad adults”. This formula is also somewhat evident in Dahl’s film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Class-conscious themes also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World where the unpleasant wealthy neighbours are outwitted.[73][119]
Dahl also features characters who are very fat, usually children. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter and Bruno Jenkins are a few of these characters, although an enormous woman named Aunt Sponge features in James and the Giant Peach and the nasty farmer Boggis in Fantastic Mr Fox is an enormously fat character. All of these characters (with the possible exception of Bruce Bogtrotter) are either villains or simply unpleasant gluttons. They are usually punished for this: Augustus Gloop drinks from Willy Wonka‘s chocolate river, disregarding the adults who tell him not to, and falls in, getting sucked up a pipe and nearly being turned into fudge. In Matilda, Bruce Bogtrotter steals cake from the evil headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, and is forced to eat a gigantic chocolate cake in front of the school; when he unexpectedly succeeds at this, Trunchbull smashes the empty plate over his head. In The Witches, Bruno Jenkins is lured by the witches (whose leader is the Grand High Witch) into their convention with the promise of chocolate, before they turn him into a mouse.[120] Aunt Sponge is flattened by a giant peach. When Dahl was a boy his mother used to tell him and his sisters tales about trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures, and some of his children’s books contain references or elements inspired by these stories, such as the giants in The BFG, the fox family in Fantastic Mr Fox and the trolls in The Minpins.[121]
At the end of the day, I suppose, whoever owns Dahl’s intellectual property (he died in 1990) has the right to do what they wish with it. If they think this makes the books more appealing to today’s kids—or more likely to be acquired by schoolteachers and librarians—it’s their call.
Still, while getting rid of fat-shaming may well make the books more appealing to a modern audience (kids are, alas, much fatter today than they were when they were written) we shouldn’t pretend that these are small tweaks. The entire storylines depend on knowing that the characters are fat and getting, well, their just desserts.
