Handing down beloved books to your children is one of the best things about being a parent. And so like countless others raised on Willy Wonka’s golden ticket and the BFG’s jars of dreams, of course I was thrilled to relive the Roald Dahl books with my son all over again.
On bored, rainy afternoons we copied George’s Marvellous Medicine by mixing potions from the contents of the kitchen cupboards. We made the pilgrimage to the Dahl museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, with its magical recreation of his writer’s hut and its collection of homesick letters the author wrote back from boarding school as a boy, which shed a sad kind of light on the cruel adults who stalk his fiction.
I understand, then, why his publisher Puffin’s decision to update the books with the help of a sensitivity reader has caused such uproar; why it leaves many nostalgic adults feeling not just deprived, but morally judged for loving them in the first place. And I winced along with everyone else at the tin-eared re-rendering of the Centipede’s song from James and the Giant Peach, in which Aunt Spiker – once “thin as a wire/and as dry as a bone, only drier” – is ploddingly lumped in with her brutish sister as “much of the same/and deserves half of the blame”.
All that said, am I shocked that the Dahl empire – and it’s quite the empire, with Netflix buying up the rights from the writer’s estate for a cool £500m in 2021 – would move to protect its investment? Do I find it Orwellian that before long you’ll find the originals only in charity shops? No, not enormously.
The author Salman Rushdie, who denounced the “absurd censorship” of Dahl, rightly focuses on the broader principle that editing cannot become suppression. But this looks more like a hardheaded business decision to protect those Netflix rights and avoid Dahl sharing the fate of the equally beloved Dr Seuss, some of whose titles were dropped in the US after being deemed culturally insensitive. Given his own famously antisemitic views, Dahl has always, perhaps, been a high cancellation risk, and the books themselves were starting to show their age compared with modern children’s titles. They’re fighting for space in a market of politically conscious millennial parents and school libraries whose inclusivity policies might in future make them think twice about a book like The Witches, whose demons hide their tell-tale bald heads under wigs.
So now children will be reminded that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that”, which doesn’t on reflection seem the end of the world, if it’s to avoid upsetting a child whose mum has lost her hair to chemotherapy. The thrilling nastiness that children love about Dahl isn’t completely expunged, but the range of things he can be nasty about is narrowing.
Mrs Twit remains beastly, but no longer ugly. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, spoilt Veruca Salt is still spoilt and Mike Teavee still screen-obsessed; but greedy, doughy Augustus Gloop is now somewhat awkwardly “enormous”, not fat. (The f-word is one of many familiar playground taunts now frowned on in primary schools to discourage bullying; I still remember my then six-year-old breathlessly reporting that someone was in big trouble for using the “i-word”, which turned out to be “idiot”). That “fat” can’t now be employed as a lazy synonym for hateful, or that schools now are infinitely kinder and gentler places than Dahl’s sadistic-sounding prep, is wholeheartedly a good thing. But these cultural shifts do create an unmistakable gap between today’s under-10s – the actual audience for children’s books – and nostalgic adults, which seems increasingly hard to bridge.
Should publishers even try? On Radio 4, the children’s author Philip Pullman reeled off a string of brilliant modern writers who might get read more if Dahl’s texts were left to grow old as their author intended, and thus to drop naturally down the bestseller lists. Increasingly, publishers face the same dilemma over children’s classics as ageing female actors do over their faces: get some “work” done and remain contenders, or graciously fade away.
As with plastic surgery, the ideal sensitivity edit is one readers barely notice, but which just makes everything feel fresher. Dahl himself agreed in the late 1960s that his original Oompa Loompas – who in the original 1964 novel were human pygmies bought for cocoa beans in the African jungle – could be recast as the little orange creatures with which we’re all now familiar. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is less gratuitously offensive for dropping the N-word from the title, but no less gripping. The current West End production of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird is, if anything, richer for the addition of a scene in which the idealistic white lawyer Atticus Finch is taken to task by his Black maid Calpurnia, after failing, despite his best efforts, to save a Black man from the electric chair. It’s a beautifully judged intervention by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who adapted the novel for the stage, letting the story move with the times but without taking liberties.
Unfortunately, not every sensitivity reader is a Sorkin, and whoever rewrote the Centipede was no Dahl. If there is a moral to this story, it’s perhaps less political than literary: come for a classic, and you’d really better not miss.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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