Against the bait and switch censorship of Roald Dahl

"Attractive" is out. "Cashier" is out. "Boys and girls" are out. These are a handful of the many changes to the published books of Roald Dahl. Announced by his publisher Puffin and first reported by The Telegraph, the hundreds of changes have impacted new editions of classic books like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "The Witches" and "Matilda." As the AP reported, "some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered."

Salon's Kelly McClure wrote, "Other big changes are being made to gender-specific character descriptions, swapping 'female' with 'woman,' or doing away with the mention of gender altogether. The Oompa Loompas, a favorite from Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' will now be called 'small people' rather than 'small men.'"

In other words: censorship. The censoring of Dahl comes at a time when books, literature and their writers face very real threats. In 2022, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage in a near-fatal attack; the writer has since lost sight in one eye. Thousands of books about race, gender and sexuality have recently been banned around the country, with librarians, including elementary school librarians, on the front lines dealing with serious prosecution for something as simple — and necessary — as providing access to books. 

Is the censoring of Dahl meant to avoid being burned in this hot climate, or to somehow bring relevance to an antiquated author? Either way, censoring Dahl is a bad idea and actually commits the ultimate sin in children's literature: viewing child readers as less-than. 

Dahl was the author of dozens of children's books which have sold over 250 million copies worldwide. A former wartime pilot, he also wrote short stories, several stage and screenplays and wrote for television shows. Dahl's first book "The Gremlins," written for Walt Disney in 1943, was not a success. But after next publishing several story collections for adults, Dahl wrote the hit "James and the Giant Peach" for his own children in 1961. 

A movie adaption quickly followed, as it did for his next novel, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," turned into the widely popular "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" film starring Gene Wilder. As a children's book writer, Dahl was a commercial success. 

Meesha Garbett as Hortensia in "Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical." (Dan Smith/Netflix)He also had a history of antisemitism, a prejudice the writer publicly admitted to, including in an interview with the New Statesman in 1983, where he said, "There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews . . . Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."

Thirty years after his death in 1990, his family wrote a public apology for his antisemitism in, as The Guardian put it, "a statement buried deep in the author's official website." The statement has since been deleted. The timing seemed suspect, the apology coming mere months after Netflix announced that Taika Waititi would be making an animated "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" series and an Oompa Loompa movie.

In 2021, Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company. Puffin, an imprint of Penguin Books, worked with them to produce the rewritten books. In 2022, Netflix aired a well-reviewed version of "Matilda," titled "Matilda: The Musical," despite some viewers' concerns about alleged transphobia in the story.

Holly Thomas wrote on CNN about Oompa Loompas, "the live-in workforce Willy Wonka trafficked from the 'deepest and darkest part of the African jungle' in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'? In Dahl's original version, published in 1964, they were Black pygmies. His 1973 rewrite, published after the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder, recasts them as 'little fantasy creatures.'"

There are very real concerns around Dahl. But those concerns aren't whether the earthworm in "James and the Giant Peach" is described as "pink" (now changed to "smooth") or the Oompa Loompas as "men" (now "people."). As the writer David Baddiel points out on Twitter, the censorship "has no logical consistency. Here, double chin has been cut, presumably to avoid fat shaming. But what about wonky nose or crooked teeth shaming? Once you start on this path you can end up with blank pages."

It feels like a bait and switch, ignoring the very real issues with the writer while labeling as bad, wrong or offensive words that have no such inherent value. "Fat" is one of the words that has been excised repeatedly from the new Dahl, but as fat activists have been saying for years, "we as a collective society need to make room for understanding fat the way many plus-size people do: as a neutral, even affirming, term," Aubrey Gordon writes. 

The word by itself isn't offensive just like the word "disabled" isn't offensive. What is offensive is ableism, fatphobia, racism, antisemitism. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain who actually behaved and spoke in this disturbing way; instead, change "cashier" to "top scientist," as if working as a cashier is the distasteful thing. (Spoiler: the distasteful thing is the classism on the part of the censors.)

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Few people are defending the sanitizing of Dahl. PEN America has come out against it, as have prominent writers like Rushdie. One could imagine Puffin (or perhaps Netflix) arguing for the censorship as an attempt to bring Dahl to a new, modern and much broader audience; Puffin has already said that the changes were so Dahl's books "can continue to be enjoyed by all today." But this would imply that children can't understand a book written in the past, that they don't know a badger's son would be a badger, for example, that "tiny" means "small," and it implies that by its mere presence, a word is offensive. 

The number one rule of writing for children? Don't talk down to them, don't underestimate them. It's a rule that Dahl, for all his issues, understood. But years later, his censors seem not to.