Puffin’s Ministry of Enlightenment (formerly Puffin Books) has come out with a defense of its decision to secretly rewrite sections of some of Roald Dahl’s children books.
The publisher of Roald Dahl has defended changes to the books, saying it has a “significant responsibility” to protect young readers.
Puffin insisted the changes were “minimal” — despite them running into the hundreds — and said the stories remained “unchanged”.
A spokesman for the publishing house told The Bookseller: “Children as young as five or six read Roald Dahl books, and often they are the first stories they will read independently. With that comes a significant responsibility, as it might be the first time they are navigating written content without a parent, teacher or carer.
“It is not unusual for publishers to review and update language, as the meaning and impact of words changes over time.
Leaving aside the fact that most parents will have a good idea of what their six year olds will be reading at home (what they will be reading at school under the supervision of teachers is an altogether different matter), there was a lot more going on in the Dahl case than reviewing and updating language.
For example, in the 2001 edition of Matilda, Matilda “went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.” In the 2022 edition, the trip with Hemingway remains, but now Matilda is traveling to California with John Steinbeck. Kipling has been canceled. That has nothing to do with updating language, and everything to do with shoving one of the great figures of English literature down the memory hole. The Puffin Books of 2022 is dedicated to the impoverishing of culture, the antithesis of what publishing is meant to be about, the antithesis of what Puffin Books was once about.
The Daily Telegraph quotes Puffin’s spokesman as saying that, “like many authors, Dahl ‘has been edited through the years, including in his own lifetime.’” Well, yes, but there is a difference between editing a book while its author is alive and able to have a say, and the posthumous twisting of his or her work. Most editing of books from an earlier era (and in this case, we are referring to books that were only written a few decades ago) is done with a light touch — Puffin’s changes are hardly that — and is designed to clarify what a writer might have meant, not to obscure it:
Puffin’s spokesman added that “Within the context of the word count of the wider books, these textual changes are minimal.”
Within the context of the word count.
I have a late edition of a work by the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov. It shows the extensive changes made by a censor, but one of those changes, if I recall correctly, was the addition of the word “not.” Just one word in the sentence, nothing in terms of the word count, but it completely reversed the meaning of what the author had written.
Puffin Books would approve.