Penguin Random House, which holds the publishing rights to Roald Dahl’s books, had replaced Dahl’s texts with bowdlerized versions. They wanted to “make the books suitable for modern readers,” who evidently have reverted to the Victorian era. They discovered, though, that a lot of people today aren’t “modern readers” and can stand to read what an author actually wrote. As a result, Random Penguin has announced it will issue editions with the original text along with the sanitized versions.
Perhaps I should mention I’m not a fan of Dahl as a person. His reaction to Khomeini’s murder contract on Salman Rushdie was “This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on the top of the best-seller list — but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing so.” He characterized himself as antisemitic and said, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.” The portrayal of the Oompa Loompas is creepy, no matter how movie makers dress it up. For that matter, the punishments inflicted on the “bad” children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are rather horrible. They didn’t do anything that bad!
But if we’re going to read authors’ works, we should read what they wrote, without being “protected” by publishers. For many years, it was nearly impossible to get Shakespeare in a form that wasn’t heavily sanitized. The word “bowdlerize” comes from Thomas Bowdler’s cleaned-up versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Sometimes we seem to be in a new era of bowdlerization.
It’s not as if Dahl’s children’s books contain highly offensive words. The sanitized Charlie and the Chocolate Factory removes the word “fat” from Augustus Gloop’s description. A witch who may be posing as a “cashier in a supermarket” is promoted to a “top scientist or running a business.” If I were trying not to be noticed while plotting to murder children, I’d opt for the cashier role. The frightening tractors in The Fabulous Mr. Fox are no longer “black.” Hey, people, the color of a tractor isn’t a racial characteristic. Tractors are made, not born. (If Random Penguin got hold of Lord of the Rings, would Frodo be pursued by plain Riders?)
Books today depict the most horrible acts in graphic detail, yet publishers act as if words in isolation are the hardest to take. A word, such as “fat” or “black,” is just a building block. Its significance depends on how it’s used. Dahl himself changed the Oompa Loompas from black to white in the revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and that apparently satisfied some people, but they were still people from a different country who never left the factory, which was in effect a labor camp. Why they lived this way and how they’re portrayed would make good classroom topics.
The introduction to The Witches tells the readers that any nice woman they see might actually be a murderous witch. People once believed that, and thousands of women died. Indeed, the book suggests reviving the practice: “Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we could round them all up and put them in the meat grinder.” I wouldn’t want to inflict that book on a child, but it’s not because the witches take low-level jobs as part of their disguise. Focusing on the words rather than the content just placates the squeamish.
At least Random Penguin didn’t pull any books entirely, as Dr. Seuss Enterprises did. In both cases, long copyright is part of the problem. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more than half a century old, but it isn’t even close to having its copyright expire. One publisher decides whether it will be available and in what form, making the publisher a target for pressure groups. If copyright terms were more reasonable, Penguin Random House could produce its expurgated edition, and others could publish the real thing.