Roald Dahl

This is absolutely insane. These are children's books that have been beloved for decades. I won't be buying the new versions for my two little ones. Of course language changes over time and terms that were acceptable once are not longer accepted. But seriously, what's going to be targeted next? Shakespeare? It's such a silly argument.

I assume Dahl only used 'female' here for alliteration purposes, though ('formidable female'). He wasn't some sort of proto-incel.

To keep the alliteration, you'd have to change it to something like 'wonderful woman', but then that's greetings-card-tier blandness that I'm sure Dahl would have cringed at.

One of the changes that bothers me is in Matilda, where references to Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling have been changed to Jane Austen and John Steinbeck respectively. These are all great authors, but why change Dahl's words here? Are Conrad and Kipling now considered so problematic by publishers that they can't even be mentioned in passing in a children's book?

I seriously hope nobody buys this!

They have removed "crazy" but not "nutty"... Seems kind of random.

One of Dahl’s most popular lines from The Twits is: “You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams.” It has been edited to take out the “double chin”.

Sooner or later someone with crooked teeth will complain, and they will need to do another reprint.

Pretty much the only people I hear referring to women as “females” (as in “I work with two females”, or “she was a formidable female”) are Incels. It’s dehumanising.

Possibly didn’t have the same connotations in the 1970s, but it comes across as very misogynistic now.

I think you’ll find that Black people, as a whole, don’t enjoy anti-Black racism or our young kids being exposed to racist abuse in their reading material. We’re pretty united on that front.

I think you having the audacity to tell a Black person about Black people’s views on racism is incredibly offensive.

I think that unless you’re Black, you should be quiet on this subject. Your comments on this thread are incredibly tone deaf and very ignorant.

So, I suppose we all have thoughts.

Well if Roald Dahl ends up being amended I hope that means the same for all the offensive bits in David Walliams’ books.

I think you'll find that black people have a variety of viewpoints on this. Like pretty much everything else.

I can understand the need to change offensive words.

However the article also says:
"References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.

Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and The Giant Peach have become Cloud-People."
Surely that isn't necessary?

If you think they'd bother your kids, it would certainly be better to wait.

Yes, I think references to Black people being scary and called racist names would bother my Black kids.

Not all kids do find the same things upsetting though.

Indeed. I imagine kids who aren’t the subject of racism are less upset about it.

You have the luxury of exploring said prejudices in the abstract. We do not. Black people (who live with racism) don’t describe it as merely ‘morally problematic’ and aren’t looking back at racist books from our childhoods and describing them thusly: ‘when I was a child I really liked books where people did things I found questionable, scary, or weird’.

But, great for you and your kids that your ‘personality’ (race) is such that you can enjoy it all and treat it as a learning experience. I’ll read my kids ‘low-key nice stories’ without golliwogs, the n word and references to Black Sambo.

If you think they'd bother your kids, it would certainly be better to wait. Not all kids do find the same things upsetting though. I always tended to read my kids pretty unvarnished stuff, whether it was fairy tales, or people exploring far off places, where people's prejudices were different than ours but very much present, or Enid Blyton. That's probably partly because when I was a child I really liked books where people did things I found questionable, scary, or weird - what I'd now describe as morally problematic. Encountering that kind of thing in books was very much a way to think about them in a controlled environment.

Obviously not everyone use books the same way or has the same kind of personality. Which isn't bad, but it doesn't mean we should only have books that are low-key nice stories with nothing that would bother anyone, even for kids.

You know some of us are Black and have Black children, right? Black children who are dealing with racism in real life from an early age? As someone who read those sorts of things as a child, I can assure that it was confusing and unpleasant.

Regardless of what your granny experienced growing up in the Cotswolds, explaining to a five year old why their skin colour is a thing of shock and horror to the characters (with whom they are supposed to identify) in the book you’re reading them/they’re reading is not our preference.

So, yup, these things can he understood by kids pretty well. They also cut deep and start to do so early.

Even this kind of thing is somewhat context specific. It seems so odd and nasty now, everyone has seen a black man. My grandmother, however, was a contemporary of Blyton, and grew up in the Cotswolds. She had never seen any black person until she was an adult and went to work in London. Even photographs weren't that common, in part because there was just less of that kind of thing around, no tv, picture quality wasn't always great in newspapers and magazines many had more illustrations rather than photos.

It likely would have been surprising and shocking to see a black man outside your window in that kind of scenario, and it's easy to think of anything very outside your experience as potentially scary. Novel and scary are connected in the brain, which of course makes perfect sense.

There's some language I don't mind being changed, but scenarios like that can, I think, be understood by children pretty well.

Oh I never even clicked re Dick & Fanny ... was that an inside joke or something??!

I was an avid reader of blyton but I remember in one famous five book they had seen a shadowy figure or Face at the window and we’re discussing all the horrendous things it could have been . One of them says “ maybe it was a black man” and they all gasped. The horror of it! 😂

I did enjoy a lot of her books, wouldn’t give that book (and many others she wrote) to any child unless that part had been removed. That would be irresponsible.

My guess is because it implies "fat". They had a sensitivity reader who was specifically looking for references to weight, and anything like that has been cut out.

I think it's pretty clear he is saying the opposite of that, that actual features don't matter. And people who think otherwise are therefore mistaken, and probably shallow.

Yes @GoodChat i feel I can decide whether my 5 year old needs to hear the BFG talk about Hottentots for example. Some of it just hasn’t aged terribly well and bedtime isn’t always the time to have the discussions.

my preference is to talk about the language

It is very offensive,I agree. Mind you, we shouldn't be surprised that Dahl can be corrected in the name of wrong-think when these woke sensitivity readers can declare Shakespeare 'problematic'.
Why have publishers put self confident illiterates in charge of literature?

David Walliam's books are full of comments about women being fat and ugly. And still being published...

Books are of their time, and can and should be a starting point for conversation. children are not stupid and are perfectly capable of understanding that some things are unkind, that people believe different things now.

@PlaitBilledDuckyPuss absolutely fair point - and taken. That way it is horrid and upsetting.

I thought the whole appeal of his books were that he didn't sugar coat anything.
There are loads of new books that people can buy if they don't want to deal with his words.

You could read it either way, I agree. But if you are assessed as 'ugly' by people (on the basis of how you look) then that paragraph reads as though it's your punishment for having ugly thoughts.