To think if you find a book this bad, best just not to read it?

[DemiColon]

I am just flummoxed by the changes Penguin publishing house have made to Roald Dhal's books.

I know not everyone likes them, and I really would very rarely change anything in a book, so that is my general approach, but I am shocked with what they have done with his stories:

"Mrs Twit’s “fearful ugliness” is cut to “ugliness”. The words “black” and “white” have been removed: characters no longer turn “white with fear” and the BFG cannot wear a black cloak.

The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People. Matilda reads Jane Austen rather than Rudyard Kipling, and a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now works as “a top scientist”.

nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

Super annoying but i do kind of wish they'd re-write some of the Mr Men. There's one or two of those ive had to edit as i go

Of course, they deleted references to hags. OF course they did. God forbid women were ever allowed to age and be ugly and powerful.

But but but….The BFG operates at night! He has to have a black cloak to hide in the shadows. He’d be pretty bloody conspicuous prancing around in a day glo pink one!

YANBU OP it’s all getting a little bit ridiculous now I don’t understand why they needed to make changes to perfectly good books there was nothing wrong with the words he chose when I was a kid so I don’t understand why it’s suddenly so offensive to people that it needs changing. I have most of his books so I will be reading the original books to my kids.

I work in a library, they are still very popular with children. Of books at that reading level I'd say in the top five authors in terms of circulation stats, and kids come in looking for them, and will read through them all.

But even if you change the words, the stories themselves are full of terror…

Matilda is all about child abuse.

Charlie and the chocolate factory is about a narcissist who literally picks off children one by one.

Removing the description of a black piece of clothing seems insane in the context of the stories themselves. I almost wonder if the changes were done through an automation tool? As you say, what’s wrong with the word female??

it really frustrates me that a minority are literally taking it upon themselves to police the rest of the world.

It should be illegal to change someone's book after they are dead. I'd be fucking fuming from beyond the grave.

I've read them all to the children quite recently and really enjoyed revisiting them. I found one of the disturbing ones was Esiotrot, gaslighting the neighbour to win her affections. Glass elevator is shit though.

As did mine. Most of them were fine tbh but there’s definitely stuff in there that just went over their heads, purely from a generational point of view, never mind the fact that it’s not “pc”. A lot of the stuff just doesn’t land anymore - if you have to explain the joke, it’s not funny - and if you have to explain why people in the olden days used to think this was funny, but it’s actually sexist/racist and people don’t think like that now, then it gets boring.

I think David Walliams’ books are really unpleasant - more unpleasant that Ronald Dahl’s books with far less of an excuse (because they were written recently). But they haven’t been censored, to my knowledge.

They are. I'm reading Ice Monster to the kids at the moment and it's awful. A real slog getting through it.

I struggle with the David walliams ones. I find they are really nasty - I read the hippo on the moon which was a hippo taking credit for something he hadn’t achieved and the one about the little girl taking a snake to school which was so badly ripping off Matilda and Mrs Trunchball that I couldn’t work out how it had been published

He's a horrible man and Little Britain was horrible and discriminatory so not overly surprising his books are lazy, rely heavily on stereotypes and recycle old ideas, what does surprise me is that a lot of them ever get put into print, that nobody at the publishing stage says anything. It's a shame because he seems to be monopolising the children's fiction market, when there are a lot of better writers who are not well known and will now not get a fair airing.

It's certainly the modern version of censorship

This.

A very relatable scene now gone forever, unless you're fortunate enough to have an older edition.

It is also classist. Nothing wrong with being a cashier.

Do we know when these changes were made?

Removing the word black as a descriptor of an inanimate object is one of those uncomfortable over compensations. Who reads about black clothing and thinks "ah, just like black people"? It's odd. Especially when there's no negative connotation.

The altered version said.
"This is so frustrating. I'm glad I'm not Lucy Ann because girls have to be brave, but boys can sit down and cry if they need to."

Yes, that just fucks over girls in a different way. Why do girls have to be brave? Why aren't girls allowed to cry? It's just different flavours of the same old bullshit.

To me it seems like a case of the publishers wanting to have their cake and eat it too (and generate some free publicity because of the controversy). If the books are really so heinously offensive then let them go out of print. But of course they're not going to do that because Roald Dahl still sells bucket loads. If they really wanted to take a stand against Roald Dahl's antisemitism then they would stop selling his works in any form.

Some of the reported changes seem pretty absurd too e.g. the BFG's cloak no longer being black (is the word "black" offensive now in any context? Who is seriously arguing that?).

My sister and I loved Roald Dahl as children , still got all our books and all my children have enjoyed the stories too. Just started introducing my youngest to them , thankfully I have the old versions.

The “going white with fear” thing is probably because non-white people don’t turn white in fear.

It’s important in all of this to remember there’s not an unknown cabal of people plotting to wreak wholesale cultural change upon society through sneaky change. These changes were made by Puffin/PRH and the Roald Dahl Story Company, who both have a duty (direct or indirect) to maximise sales and profit. It’s a profit driven move by a singular publisher and its client. Only because Dahl books are so popular is this a thing. If it were a tiny publishing house and a relatively unknown author without Dahl’a reach, we’d shake it off for what it is: a ridiculous attempt to monetize artistic output at the expense of the art.

There are ethical questions around this, of course. They’re huge, far huger than any thought or conversation between the two actors in this particular iteration that would have preceded these changes (all the drama around this also helps sales, btw). This is just a money-driven children’s author looking for more money, because the cash they got after they sold right to Dahl’s entire oeuvre to Netflix clearly wasn’t enough.

🙄 awful typos and missing words. Sorry. Maybe I can get a job at Puffin…

The “going white with fear” thing is probably because non-white people don’t turn white in fear

But what's the issue with using the phrase if the person it applies to is indeed white?

None, as far as I can tell! I don’t know what the context is, or indeed the full sentence. Is it about people generally turning white with fear (suggests all people = white people, so you don’t count as a person/someone worth writing about if you’re not white) or was it in reference to a person who is white?

They’re fucking with history. Stalin did this.

The more I look at these changes the weirder they become.
"Adorable dress" has been changed to "lovely dress".

Handbags has been changed to bags.

"Bingo afternoons left her so exhausted both physically and emotionally that she never had enough energy to cook an evening meal" has just been removed completely.

Foolish abandon changed to reckless abandon.

This isn't removing offensive language, it's just deciding you think a different word would work better.

Follow the money.

The publishers realise that sanitising these texts means they can be marketed to newer generation as they are more palatable.

It seems quite a modern thing for SOME children and young people - especially many of the blue-haired lot - to centre themselves and assume that everything is for them and that they are the first people to ever experience it.

They can't cope with the idea that other people's experiences, opinions or views of the world - even if from long ago - might differ from their own and still not be automatically invalid and need to be cancelled/rewritten.

As I say, by no means all; but I think the current generation of under 30s includes a huge amount of people who just think that everything the world should either be geared to them and their narrow beliefs or otherwise be banned. They see 'agreeing to disagree' as tantamount to them tolerating 'bigotry' if they don't actively shut it down, ironically all in the name of 'inclusion'!

They ARE going to come for Orwell at some point and prove his points completely, all the while never having a clue that it was them that he was writing about.