And it always goes wrong.
Roald Dahl’s children’s books were unsettling. That was the point of them.
The author enforced his own code of morality, seeing to it that the unworthies regularly met fitting fates. He properly identified the depravity of used-car salesmen in Matilda, and Mr. Wormwood gets his. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory follows a Se7en-like plot arc, the sins personified by insufferable kids dispatched in steady succession.
So the exercise of rewriting parts of those books to make them supposedly less offensive is not only unnecessary — but contrary to the author’s intent. Caroline Downey reports:
The publisher Puffin has scrubbed language deemed “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” from author Roald Dahl’s children’s books, in many cases rewriting the author’s words to be more politically correct. . . .
References to characters’ physical appearances have been sanitized, with the words “fat” and “ugly” now missing from every new edition of the books, the Daily Telegraph reported. So-called “sensitivity readers” were hired to make the changes. . . . The famous glutton Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no longer introduced as “fat” but rather as “enormous.” In The Twits, Mrs. Twit used to be described as “ugly and beastly” but is now only “beastly.”
Never mind that these deletions don’t solve the problem the ludicrously named sensitivity readers think they do (being called “enormous” stings just as much as being called “fat.” “Beastly” is as barbed as “ugly.” Etc.). The assignment descended quickly into madness. “Female” was changed to “woman,” for some reason. The BFG in The BFG no longer wears a “black” coat, and characters don’t turn “white with fear,” Caroline reports. In The Witches, whose title villains are famously bald under their wigs, the disclaimer was added: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” Good heavens.
Dahl was a flawed person, as his documented antisemitism attests. That said, this isn’t about Roald Dahl. It’s about weak-willed institutions outsourcing the discretion their leaders should be uniquely qualified to wield to a cottage industry of mediocrities whose only skill is getting offended.
The racket feeds on fecklessness. Boy, is there money to be made.
Witness advertisers allowing third parties with nonsense rubrics to determine which news outlets to avoid based on their “disinformation” trafficking. Witness the University of Michigan agreeing to spend millions on 142 DEI staffers, most in the six-figure range. Witness sensitivity readers.
And where this industry has its hooks in content, the sanitation doesn’t stop with Roald Dahl (or Dr. Seuss).
Charles C. W. Cooke has written about how the once-“forever” internet is more a living document, with media companies increasingly willing to go back and change old content in the name of sensitivity. Books are the logical next target in this progression. Their often-dead authors’ misfortune is that their product is easy to revise. But doing so is no less absurd than it would be for any other art form: overdubbing the Beatles’ “Taxman” with the more inclusive “taxperson,” or brushing over the violence in Goya’s Black Paintings (and, while you’re at it, changing their name to Paintings for good measure). Might it make Prado visitors more comfortable if the decapitated corpse in Saturn Devouring His Son were a large tomato or some kind of tapa? I think so.
Puffin allowed Roald Dahl’s books to be adulterated. It joins the ranks of mealy-mouthed institutions that would rather pay to surrender judgment than resist five people on Twitter who might complain someday.
It won’t stop with Roald Dahl. In this environment, any artist or author interested in preserving the integrity of his work should lock that IP in a trust today.