New Delhi: Books of beloved British children’s writer Roald Dahl are being re-edited in a bid to remove “offensive language” and add more gender-neutral vocabulary to the original text, according to reports.
The changes have been made by publisher Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, and Roald Dahl Story Company in collaboration with Inclusive Minds – a collective that is passionate about “inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature” – to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all”, a report in The Guardian said.
According to Roald Dahl Story Company, “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
Dahl, who died in 1990, is known for stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Witches, The Twits, and many more.
Changes have been made, for instance, to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances, and the word “fat” has been edited out from every book.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In the same story, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer “tiny”, “titchy” or “no higher than my knee” but instead, they are described as “small”, The Telegraph reported. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
Changes have also been made in favour of gender-neutral terms. While the Oompa-Loompas were once called “small men”, the words have now been edited to “small people”.
New text has also been added to the stories. In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs, is now said to end with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Words such as “crazy” and “mad”, which Dahl used frequently in comic fashion, have been scrapped and “boys and girls” has been changed to “children”, reports said.
A notice from the publisher, which is said to have hired “sensitivity readers” to rewrite the text, can be seen at the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Dahl’s books. It points out that the book was written “many years ago” and “we regularly review the language”.
Puffin had begun the re-editing process in 2020, when Roald Dahl Story Company was still run by the Dahl family. Netflix acquired the literary estate in 2021 for a reported £500 million.
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‘A dangerous new weapon’
Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a non-profit that aims to protect free expression in literature in the US and worldwide, said in a tweet that the organisation was “alarmed” at the “hundreds of changes” being made to Dahl’s works.
“Selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon,” she said in a series of tweets, adding: “The problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle. You start out wanting to replace a word here and a word there, and end up inserting entirely new ideas (as has been done to Dahl’s work).”
Speaking on behalf of the non-profit, Nossel contended that those who might be in favour of the specific edits should consider how the “power to rewrite the books” might be “used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities”.
Agreeing that children’s books should not foster stereotypes, Nossel suggested that a better idea would be “to offer introductory context that prepares people for what they are about to read, and helps them understand the setting in which it was written”.
“Literature is meant to be surprising and provocative. That’s part of its potency. By setting out to remove any reference that might cause offense, you dilute the power of storytelling,” she pointed out in another tweet.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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