The twats

Inevitably the press frames the story of posthumous edits to Roald Dahl's work as "wokery gone mad" rather than "corporate interests as usual".

Previously: Mapped out

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At today’s Lobby briefing in Westminster, the fearless members of London’s most select band of political stenographers and sycophants asked the Prime Minister’s spokesman for Rishi Sunak’s view on edits made to children's books by the companies that own the rights to that frequently-exploited IP.

He told them:

When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the Prime Minister agrees with the BFG that you shouldn't gobblefunk around with words. 

It was a classic example of how those briefings are often as real as basketball games between the Harlem Globetrotters and the professional patsies of the Washington Generals; a feed line question followed by a prepared punchline.

The spokesman continued…

It's important that works of fiction are preserved and not airbrushed. We've always valued the right to speech and expression.

… and The Sun delightedly ran his comments under the shrieking headline:

YOU TWITS Rishi Sunak slams woke publishers rewriting Roald Dahl books

The newspaper — like numerous other media outlets — is chasing a story that was kicked off by a big and highly-produced (check out that animated header) feature in The Daily Telegraph (The Rewriting of Roald Dahl)

After a relatively straight new story by Arts and Entertainment Editor, Anita Singh and columnist/features writer, Ed Cumming, albeit with a heavily spun headline (Augustus Gloop no longer fat as Roald Dahl goes PC), the long read, bylined to Cumming; feature writer, Abigail Buchanan; features journalist, Genevieve Holl-Allen; and editorial graduate Benedict Smith, is extensive.

Measured in terms of reach, impact, and as a trigger to debate, the feature has undoubtedly been a success. It opens by observing…

“Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

Put simply: these may not be the words Dahl wrote. The publishers have given themselves licence to edit the writer as they see fit, chopping, altering and adding where necessary to bring his books in line with contemporary sensibilities.

… and goes on to show the reader those changes by presenting comparisons of earlier editions with the newest versions of a number of Dahl’s books; the piece is also illustrated with animations of red ink striking out old sentences with new ones forming in their place.

The sheer scale of changes to Dahl’s books justifies the Telegraph story as does the amount of debate that highlighting them has provoked. Of course, it’s all presented through the prism of the newspaper’s general love for hyping “cancel culture” stories and columns that suggest “the left” has actually been running the country for decades.

The Telegraph quotes Matthew Dennison, author of the 2022 Dahl biography Teller of the Unexpected (a slight and fairly sympathetic book), who says:

Dahl typically worked seven days a week for a year on one of his full-length novels and was drained by the experience, which involved extensive rewriting as he worked, followed by a lively back-and-forth with his editor. 

The process of editing often focused on individual words or particular expressions, as Dahl kept faith with some of the interwar slang of his childhood, and aspects of his vocabulary up to his death continued to recall the enthusiasms of English prep schoolboys. This was both natural to him and deliberate, and he resisted interference. 

Dennison quotes Dahl writing to his American editor on The Witches, Stephen Roxburgh, to overrule proposed word changes:

I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain. 

Though The Telegraph article includes that quote and notes that Netflix bought the rights to Dahl’s works in 2021 — Puffin and The Roal Dahl Story Company say the language review began in 2020 — it doesn’t raise the prospect of the publishers trying to increase the books’ appeal to a US audience.

Changes such as choosing to excise a sentence referring to “the rest of the world… America and France and Holland and Germany” in The Witches, ditching references to Rudyard Kipling (while Ernest Hemingway remains) in Matilda, and alterations to references about guns (including erasing them from an illustration in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory) seem less about “woke” concerns and more about American ones.

The Telegraph identified many changes but it doesn’t categorise them, and the tone of the piece — along with the headline of the preceding news (“gone PC”) — carries the implication that a “woke” campaign to censor the titles is being undertaken. But there’s no evidence of outside pressure on the publishers and many changes seem silly, pointless or contrary to some imagined ‘progressive’ effort, while others just reflect simple shifts in language or styling (“Pondicherry” becomes “Puducherry” because the Indian state’s name changed in 2006 to correct a corruption forced upon it by the French).

The author

Lincoln Michel

put it well in the latest edition of his newsletter Counter Craft:

One way you can tell the edits are about corporate interest more than “wokeness” is because, well, the edits aren’t particularly woke. (The actual woke response would be to ditch Dahl not tweak a handful of lines in works of a guy who, as noted, was famously anti-Semitic.) Many of the edits involve removing words like “fat” while keeping descriptions of characters as monstrous for being overweight. One character’s description is changed from “ugly and beastly” to just “beastly” while another is changed from having “fearful ugliness” to “ugliness.” Some of the edits themselves are more offensive, such as an “attractive middle-aged lady” being changed into a “kind middle-aged lady” (because middle-aged women can’t be attractive?) Etc.

There is balance in the Telegraph feature; for instance, it says:

Language evolves. Few would defend retaining the “n-word” in contemporary publishing, or any number of other outdated racial slurs which bring the modern reader up short and do not add to the text. But where does sensible pruning give way to unnecessary tinkering?

The trouble comes now broadcasters and other publications are chasing the story with spicy takes that require the seasoning of nuance be replaced with stronger, simpler flavours. So we have The Sun blaring that Rishi Sunak has “[slammed] woke Dahl publishers” as if continuing to publish the works of a virulently antisemitic man is the apex of ‘woke’ behaviour.

In The Daily Mail, Bel Mooney, herself a successful children’s author, rails under the headline The snooty 'sensitivity readers' who censored Roald Dahl are robbing children of the right to make up their own minds about the world that:

This latest example of the appalling stranglehold that ‘wokery’ (or political correctness, as it used to be called) now has on our society must take us beyond weary smiles and sighs. The issue affects every one of us. Most important of all, it denies to children the right to be shocked, to be scared, to laugh at the ‘wrong’ things, and to make up their own minds about the world.

For their sake we have to shout: ‘Enough!’ What gives these censors — who also find Shakespeare and many other writers greater than Roald Dahl ‘problematic’ — any right to tamper with our cultural heritage?

The serious backlash is overdue. How about refusing to buy any book published by Puffin? After that — I’ll meet you on the barricades to hurl their paltry, rewritten efforts at the enemy, waking them up with a vengeance.

It’s a curious argument for right-wing newspapers that mither and fearmonger about all that ‘modern’ children are exposed to endlessly; most children have a “censored” experience of the world to some extent.

Society generally thinks that it’s desirable to curate what children consume; radio bulletins turned down when a horrific story comes on; films rated to ensure age-appropriate viewing; and books suggested not just because a child can read them but when they should read them. Take Mooney’s argument to its conclusion and we’d be shoving Mein Kampf in front of our little darlings and saying, “See what you make of that.”

In The Sunday Times, Camilla Long practically wrung her hands to the bone with performative concern:

Sometimes you read a story and just see civilisation ebbing away. You see the forces of evil posing as good. You see people making hundreds of satanic changes to children’s classic books and you think: why isn’t there a law against this? Why isn’t there a law to stop Netflix, now the owner of Roald Dahl’s estate, chopping up his beautiful books in the wrongful interests of “sensitivity”?

In collaboration with Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, the streaming company has overseen huge changes to new editions, cutting any references that might be conceived as fattist, sexist, colonialist or ableist.

There are no longer any mentions of Dahl’s favourite words, “crazy” and “mad”. People don’t turn “white” with fear; they go “quite pale”. The Oompa-Loompas are gender-neutral; Augustus Gloop isn’t “fat”; he’s “enormous”. No one is fat — but what is Dahl without his fat jokes? Also, I thought being fat was fine now. Isn’t it?

Scan any of the monstrous new passages and you will see the best writing turned into the worst. Characters talk to one another to remind the reader how women with wigs are actually great; how Matilda didn’t read Kipling and Conrad but Jane Austen. Don’t they know that Austen, too, has been cancelled? (Slavery.) That’s the spiral we’re in now.

The first solution is to buy up first editions: so far I’ve acquired The BFG, The Twits, The Witches and Matilda, about a tenner each on eBay. Then there’s the law. Can’t we declare some literature part of our heritage and not to be cut or changed?

In its statement to The Telegraph, Puffin said that Netflix didn’t instigate the review of the books’ content but that claim has no place in Long’s polemic. Why isn’t there “a law against this” (this being “editing books”)? Because it happens often and frequently without notice. IP holders who have lobbied so hard to ensure that their copyrights run long after authors’ deaths would hate a world where their properties could not be altered to maximise profit.

Long may have acquired soft cover first editions for “about a tenner each on eBay” but a hardback first edition of The BFG runs to about £120, with signed copies going for thousands.¹ She repeated the "first editions" anecdote on Times Radio this morning in a newspaper review in which she also said that…

The Roald Dahl canon is very important to us as British people. 

… and compared the outrage at the edits to how the French might feel if there were to be any messing with Molière. Only… the French had a rather sensible debate about rewriting Molière in modern language on the 400th anniversary of his death last year.

If Long has really got hold of a first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for her children, she’ll be reading racism to her children. The Telegraph feature recognises that:

Dahl has long been controversial. This is not the first time his books have changed to reflect contemporary mores, or around Hollywood interest. In the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), the Oompa-Loompas were black pygmies, enslaved by Willy Wonka from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle” and paid in cocoa beans. Dahl rewrote the characters in the late 1960s to “de-Negro” them, in his words. For Mel Stuart’s 1971 film starring Gene Wilder, the Oompas became green-haired, orange-skinned figures. By a 1973 edition of the book, they had become “little fantasy creatures”.

In the 1964 edition, Wonka explains he found the Oompa-Loompas — look at that name again — “in the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before,” and smuggled them to England “for their own good”. It’s a deeply colonialist slavery narrative played for kicks in a kid’s book. It was received with little pushback in the UK but news of the Hollywood adaptation — with a screenplay by Dahl — led to protests by the NAACP in 1971.

Dahl told his editor at Knopf, Bob Bernstein, he couldn’t understand why the activists saw his story as “[a] terrible dastardly anti-negro book” and described their protests as “real Nazi stuff”. Dahl — though he flew for the RAF during the war and then became a spy after a horrendous crash — knew plenty about “Nazi stuff”. In a piece for Literary Review on God Cried, a book on Israel’s brutal siege of Lebanon in 1982, Dahl wrote this about Jewish people: …

Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion…

… Now is the time for the Jews of the world to follow the example of the Germans and become anti-Israeli. But do they have the conscience? And do they, I wonder, have the guts?

Michael Cohen interviewed Dahl for The New Statesman in April 1983 and found he doubled down on his views:

Union of Jewish Students Chairman Matthew Kalman sees the article as “one of the most vitriolic pieces ever written about Jews in a British publication”, and when Roald Dahl was asked about it by the NS he made a series of startling comments. Referring to “do they, I wonder, have the guts?” Dahl said: “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it came from my wartime experience [in the RAF], we saw almost none of them in the armed forces then. I mean if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they were always submissive.”

He continued: “This I did not dare to say, but there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason…”

In a reflection on that encounter, published in 2021, Cohen recalled:

Was this some sort of deep irony that was over my head, or a satire that he was about to explode or explain? Nope. With little change in tone, and still courteous, he told me that during his service in the Second World War he and his friends didn’t see any Jewish men fighting. He was about to say something else when I finally responded.

It was not a one-off; seven years later, Dahl told The Independent:

I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become anti-Semitic… It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.

The estate published a short and self-serving apology for Dahl’s antisemitism in 2020 which sits on a deliberately unobtrusive page — it was first flagged up by a Sunday Times report — on The Roald Dahl Story Company website:

Apology for antisemitic comments made by Roald Dahl

The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by Roald Dahl's antisemitic statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.

To speak a little like the BFG, that’s an unpology, a nonpology, a pomposology; that was the man they knew: His wife, Patricia Neal, called him “Roald the Rotten” and his granddaughter, Sophie, recalled, “a difficult man… roaring around the house.” It is an unpology because the Dahl family and Roald Dahl Story company would not point to the “prejudiced remarks” they were rejecting, or accept that Dahl meant them.

At the time the Dahl estate offered its nonpology, it had engaged the lobbying firm Portland Communications to organise celebrity readings of Dahl’s books and promoted charity events linked to his name. The unpology was not drafted after speaking to Jewish groups and was not followed by any kind of donation to Jewish charities. There were limits to the Roal Dahl Story Company’s contrition.

In response to PEN America’s Twitter statement that it was “alarmed at news of ‘hundreds of changes’ to venerated works by Roald Dahl in a purported effort to scrub the books of that which might offend someone,” Salman Rushdie tweeted:

Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.

It was an impressive commitment to letting bygones be bygones given the way Dahl responded to the fatwa issued against Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses but it’s also worth revisiting what Dahl said. In a letter to The Times on 28 Feb 1990, he wrote:

Sir, With all that has been written and spoken about the Rushdie affair, I have not yet heard any non-Muslim voices raised in criticism of the writer himself. On the contrary, he appears to be regarded as some sort of hero, certainly among his fellow writers and the Society of Authors, of which I am a member. To my mind, he is a dangerous opportunist. 

Clearly, he has profound knowledge of the Muslim religion and its people and he must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and he cannot plead otherwise. 

This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on the top of the bestseller list (Spycatcher is another example), but to my mind, it is a cheap way of doing it. It also puts a severe strain on the very proper principle that the writer has an absolute right to say what he likes. 

In a civilised world, we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free-speech. 

How would The Telegraph’s comment pages respond to such a call for (self-) censorship these days? Well, there might be some clues in Tim Stanley’s column today (The butchering of Roald Dahl is an assault on liberty by a neurotic elite):

This is what really irritates me about culture war nonsense: the hypocrisy. Our culture is obsessed with policing language, to ensure we’re saying the right things, but this superficial concern for politeness ignores the obscenities of everyday life, its cruelty, greed and moral ugliness.

Stanley concludes in typical hyperbolic, builderphobic, bowtie-fetishist fashion:

Where will it end? If you think Dahl is offensive, try Evelyn Waugh or Henry Miller or Chaucer or Shakespeare – or even the Old Testament. But the one thing that might save us from the sensitivity readers is that they are surprisingly ill-read – and, for now, the classics remain an oasis of uncensored outrage in which ancient Greek actors would boast about their privilege to a reactionary audience, kitted out in a fake phallus, padded belly and bottom. That’s the secret joy of high culture. People don’t realise how low-brow it actually is.

The deliberate and proudly-wielded ahistoricism of this is almost impressive. The term "bowdlerise” — to omit parts of a work on moral grounds — is derived from the efforts of Thomas Bowdler to censor Shakespeare in his volume ‘The Family Shakespeare’; the sexy and salacious parts of The Canterbury Tales were often censored in the years after Chaucer’s death; the mere hint of homosexual characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has seen it banned in various US states; Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was infamously banned as “obscene”; and the history of censoring, ‘revising’, and redefining the Old Testament needs a newsletter series all of its own.

There is also a big difference between Dahl and all the authors and playwrights that Stanley rounded up for his argument: His profitable books are his books for children and they comprise not just a bibliography but a brand.

Just as Disney endlessly edits and self-censors its catalogue, the owners of the Roald Dahl IP care about being able to exploit it as much as possible. They’ll tweak the texts to extend their hold over them under copyright laws; they’ll amend them to make them more understandable to broader and younger audiences; they’ll do whatever is necessary to defend their corporate interests.

There was no campaign to change Dahl’s writing; no marches outside publishing houses; no petitions or hashtags. The hundreds of changes happened quietly in 2022 and went largely unnoticed until the Telegraph picked up on the notice at the front of the new editions. I think a great many of the deletions and additions are terrible, stupid, and wrong but there’s nothing ‘woke’ about it; the review is a product of pure capitalist calculations.

And the framing of those moves as a ‘new’ front in the ‘culture war’ is equally as cynical. It makes for heated discussions on radio shows and easy op-eds in newspapers who see ‘wokesters’ behind every decision and under every bed, nestled next to the reds who are just waiting for the revolutionary signal.

On the Today programme this morning, Justin Webb tried desperately to get Phillip Pullman to agree that the changes to Dahl’s books represented “literary damage” as though Puffin were burning every second-hand copy and erasing our collective memories in the process. Pullman wouldn’t say it because that’s not what he believes.

In 2010, Hachette announced it was making “sensitive text revisions” to Enid Bylton’s Famous Five books; in 2016, they were reversed (though some minor word changes remained). The Little Black Doll, her book about a character called Sambo who is only accepted after his “ugly black face” is washed pink by the rain is out of print and was rightly decried by newspapers when it was published, notably in an editorial by The Guardian.

Books have no inherent right to remain in print and read forever. The Roald Dahl Company has made changes — many of them very stupid — in its effort to keep them selling and make the forthcoming adaptations successful. The market, so beloved by papers like The Times and The Telegraph, will decide if it wants the versions that it’s offered.

I doubt Dahl, the racist old antisemite, would have cared very much. In a BBC interview from 1982, he concluded — putting the words of his fellow antisemite and childhood favourite Hilaire Belloc into the mouth of Wilde — that:

You can quote Oscar Wilde: “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”

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Thanks to DKD for reading the draft today.

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1. This one, signed by Dahl and his granddaughter Sophie, is priced at nearly £5k.