Roald Dahl and the vanilla factory
Christopher J. Scalia
On Friday, the British newspaper the Telegraph ran a story revealing that new editions of works by the popular children’s novelist Roald Dahl include hundreds of changes to the deceased author’s writing. Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, performed what is known as a “sensitivity read,” in which people working in the names of authenticity and inclusion render someone else’s writing as anodyne and dull as possible. Except sensitivity readers usually suggest changes to drafts by a living author before publication rather than making them to works — including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The Witches — that have been read by generations of children but have yet to inspire witch hunts or the enslavement of pygmies.
This compulsion not to offend is especially strange regarding Dahl, whose work is distinctively unsettling. His publishers were once proud of that. A 1982 edition of one of his novels features a blurb from the Times Literary Supplement: “For some time now Roald Dahl has been the most popular living novelist that we have for children, despite, or sometimes possibly because of, lapses in taste that have not always found equal favour among adult readers.”
Sensitivity readers identify and destroy these “lapses in taste.” The Telegraph’s list of the changes to Dahl’s works includes many instances of changes to common words, presumably to align the books with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Style Guide. They’ve trimmed a lot of fat — two dozen instances of the word, to be precise, in the name of body positivity. Twelve appearances of the word father are gone, either removed or replaced by parents. Mothers suffer even more in these unchivalrous edits: 14 instances, never to be seen again. These particular words are not gender-neutral, you see, so they must be replaced.
Both mother and father have been escorted out of the very first sentence of one of Dahl’s most popular works, Matilda, which now reads: “It’s a funny thing about parents.” This shift to gender neutrality is absurd because it’s a general reference to both types of parents, not a comment that could conceivably be construed as an insensitive assumption about a particular child’s guardians. Besides, it would be wise to ward off especially sensitive readers before the biting second sentence about mothers and fathers: “Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.” These books are not supposed to be for the easily offended.
Matilda’s imagination has changed, too. An avid reader, she no longer spends her time “sailing ships with Joseph Conrad” or going “to India with Rudyard Kipling.” She now visits “nineteenth century [sic] estates with Jane Austen” and “California with John Steinbeck.” Kipling’s support of imperialism probably did him in, but I wonder if the people at Puffin remember they publish an edition of his novel Kim, which features language more offensive than anything they removed from Dahl. (I also wonder if they’d mangle the last lines of Kipling’s poem “If—” to something like: “Yours is the Earth to steward responsibly, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Person, my offspring!”)
Although Conrad was a critic of imperialism, he had to be excised so young readers aren’t encouraged to encounter the terrible horror (read: literary masterpiece) of Heart of Darkness. Nobody can begrudge Matilda her walks with Jane Austen, though they should avoid Mansfield Park — the owner of that estate had a sugar plantation in the West Indies. And how is Matilda still allowed to visit “Africa with Ernest Hemingway” — doesn’t anyone at Puffin know what Toni Morrison said about race in To Have and Have Not? And do they approve of big game hunting?
The most aggressive changes to Dahl’s novels include replacing two limericks in James and the Giant Peach with offensively badly written doggerel. One limerick read originally: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat, / And tremendously flabby at that. / Her tummy and waist / Were as soggy as paste— / It was worse on the place where she sat!” As limericks go, pretty tame. But because it emphasized the character’s girth, out it goes, replaced by a poem that’s twice as long and half as clever. One of the new poems does include some wisdom in the lines “the absence of charm / Can do so much harm.” Sensitivity readers apparently lack self-awareness.
But perhaps most remarkable, because most damaging to the point of the novel, is the vandalism done to the end of George’s Marvelous Medicine. The novel is about a boy who teaches his evil grandmother a dramatic lesson that his father summarizes as: “That’s what you get if you’re grumpy and bad-tempered.” His mother, initially upset by the grandmother’s fate, calms down and agrees that “it’s all for the best, really. She was a bit of a nuisance around the house.” But that dialogue is gone now — and with it any sense of the novel’s justice. Instead, the reader is left with a sense of ambivalence and even sadness as George’s mother — sorry, parent — seems to miss the old hag.
A co-founder of the agency that helped bowdlerize Dahl’s works explained that they wanted “to help ensure that the stories can continue to be enjoyed by all children,” which is an absurd goal for works that include detailed instructions for eating earwigs. She also said her organization (which calls its vandals for the enforcement of virtue “Inclusion Ambassadors”) believes “better authenticity is achieved through input at development stages” but also that “those with lived experience can provide valuable input.” Just think: A person who uses that vapid jargon is helping decide whether Roald Dahl’s language is appropriate and which words children can handle. It’s a good thing we have books like Matilda — the older editions, anyway — to inoculate us against this attitude.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.