There was a bit of an online sensation when a story broke that Puffin Books, part of the Random House publishing group, had a group of sensitivity screeners read and edit the children’s books from the late author Roald Dahl.
The changes were sweeping and, as one can imagine, idiotic:
Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat,” just “enormous.” In the new edition of “Witches,” a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”
The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in the 1970s
The Fabulous Mr. Fox.” The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters.”And so on. Quite rightly, contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie slammed the changes as “absurd censorship.” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said “selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon” in the ongoing war over banned books.
Nossel added:
Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.
Which is exactly right. Censors, whether they are on the left or the right, all have one thing in common: a fear that someone, somewhere, will learn something new and perhaps see the world in a different way.
Perhaps understanding they went too far, Puffin Books has done some quick damage control:
Puffin announces…the release of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to keep the author’s classic texts in print. These seventeen titles will be published under the Penguin logo, as individual titles in paperback, and will be available later this year. The books will include archive material relevant to each of the stories.
The Roald Dahl Classic Collection will sit alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time.
Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.
It’s not a complete climb down. But it’s an acknowledgment that unleashing the PC censors on a beloved children’s author was bad for business.
And on the upside, we now have a real-life test underway to see which set of Dahl books the market prefers to buy: “classic” Dahl or “new” Dahl. If it turns out like the Classic Coke v. New Coke experiment of long ago, “new” Dahl is destined for the remainder shelf.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Sane people cannot entrust their children to any leftist. The commies have infiltrated so much of our society that a purge is necessary and immediately.
Agree absolutely. There is FAR too much at risk.
Let the revised editions sit on the shelves of the bookstores – unsold, and costing the publishers a great deal of money. It’s the only way to get them to stop all this nonsense,
Seems to me that this type of “abridgement” should be fully disclosed on the books themselves–including the name of the abridger. When reading literature as a new reader, my parents would steer me toward the original works instead of the abridged (Reader’s Digest) versions in order to take full advantage of the language intended by the original author.
Nothing really new about this – look at how many of Mark Twain’s works have been ‘cancelled’ in the last few years.
Outright banning books is actually more honest than what they were doing.
They shouldn’t rename the originals “classic”. They should be called by the original titles. IF the “revised” versions are released at all, THEY should be labeled as edited.