Times change. Should classic children’s books?
It is the publishing world’s version of New Coke vs. Classic Coke.
After a week in which everyone from Salman Rushdie to the queen consort weighed in on Puffin’s decision to make Roald Dahl’s works less … nasty (resulting in hundreds of changes to the text), parent company Penguin announced that classic versions would be released. That way, the publisher said, families can choose for themselves.
Why We Wrote This
Do children need to be protected from books? The controversy over Roald Dahl is the latest in the debate over whether children’s literature should be adapted to the current time or understood as relics of their own.
The brouhaha over the “BFG” author is reminiscent of the 2021 controversy in which six lesser-known Dr. Seuss books were removed from publication – accompanied on the right by accusations that woke progressives were coming for childhood. It also comes at a moment in which children’s books are being yanked off library shelves, particularly in red states, at a rate the American Library Association has not seen in decades.
Daniel Handler, author of the popular “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” calls the Puffin edits censorship, full stop. And, to boot, the changes were “particularly absurd.”
“Roald Dahl is notoriously nasty on and off the page,” says Mr. Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, “and people can talk about that and have their own emotional reaction to it and make their own decisions about reading his work, but his [original] work should be available to read, rather than some cleaned up, strange, truncated version.”
“The idea that you could make a book that wouldn’t offend anyone is a really offensive idea.”
It is the publishing world’s version of New Coke vs. Classic Coke.
After a week in which everyone from Salman Rushdie to the queen consort weighed in on Puffin’s decision to make Roald Dahl’s works less … nasty (resulting in hundreds of changes to the text), parent company Penguin announced that classic versions of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” and others would be released with their writing intact. That way, the publisher said, families can choose the version of “James and the Giant Peach” that best suits their own child.
The brouhaha over the “BFG” author is reminiscent of the 2021 controversy in which six lesser-known Dr. Seuss books were removed from publication by his publisher – accompanied on the right by accusations that woke progressives were coming for childhood. Highlights included GOP senators reading “Green Eggs and Ham” (not one of the titles) as a fundraising tool. In recent years, classic works from “Little House on the Prairie” to “Babar the Elephant” have come under renewed scrutiny for racist passages. Most of all, it comes at a moment in which children’s books are being yanked off library shelves, particularly in red states, at a rate the American Library Association has not seen in decades.
Why We Wrote This
Do children need to be protected from books? The controversy over Roald Dahl is the latest in the debate over whether children’s literature should be adapted to the current time or understood as relics of their own.
Some writers who object to the changes to Dahl’s work say any attempt to sanitize his writing is both futile and repressive – akin to covering nudity in Renaissance art. Other authors say that, with works that have entertained generations of children, a judicious update might preserve the magic for modern readers. But, whether or not they thought Puffin had lost the plot, writers on both sides of the Dahl divide say it points to the centrality of children’s books in culture.
“Children’s books have always been the battleground of the culture wars,” says Betsy Bird, a children’s author and librarian. “That being said, children’s literature is sort of remarkable in that it is probably where you will find the most open-minded books on a wide variety of subjects.”
“The solution is not to change the book”
Daniel Handler, author of the popular “A Series of Unfortunate Events” books written as Lemony Snicket, calls the Puffin edits censorship, full stop. And, to boot, the changes were “particularly absurd.”
In “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the line “each man will have a gun and a flashlight” was amended to, “each person will have a person and a flashlight.” (That is not a typo.) In “The Witches,” the grandmother’s advice that “you can’t go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try and see what happens,” is removed and replaced by, “besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
“I’m all for a conversation about what people might find offensive about a particular book. I think that’s super interesting,” says Mr. Handler. But “if there’s a problem, the solution is not to change the book. You can have a conversation about it.”
“Roald Dahl is notoriously nasty on and off the page,” says Mr. Handler, “and people can talk about that and have their own emotional reaction to it and make their own decisions about reading his work, but his [original] work should be available to read, rather than some cleaned up, strange, truncated version.”
Dahl himself was clear that his writing delighted in the nasty, the rude, and certainly the hyperbolic. “I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview. “If a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. ... That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.”
The case for updating
Other writers, like children’s author Debjani Chatterjee, point to the tradition of rewriting and abridging classics like Shakespeare’s plays to present them to young readers. “I think that happens for a very good reason, because if we did not adapt them for modern audiences, then [we’d have] wonderful literary treasures which really would be inaccessible,” says Dr. Chatterjee.
Language changes over time, says Dr. Chatterjee, as do societies’ morals and values. Rather than turning away from Dahl entirely, modern classics can be saved by edits that bring a book along with current sensibilities, she says, adding that she would be open to such updates in her own books.
Others say such changes should be done judiciously, and sparingly.
Certain changes, such as removing slurs, can be appropriate, says Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, which categorically opposed the Puffin edits and applauds the restoration of Dahl’s words. “I think it has to be done surgically, judiciously. I’m very dubious about adding things to the text to sort of make it more politically palatable, which is part of what was done in this case.”
If books don’t fit current sensibilities? “People don’t have to read them,” says Ms. Nossel.
For her part, Ms. Bird draws a distinction between picture books that are read to children, and mid-grade books that children often choose themselves. Because Dahl’s books are written at a level that children read independently, Ms. Bird says, conversations about problematic portrayals or content often don’t take place.
Should books be “safe”?
On the other hand, Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist and author of the Substack newsletter Natural Selections, argues that prioritizing safety-ism for children doesn’t help them navigate the world or understand actual risks that come along.
“Safety isn’t what we’re supposed to be seeking in literature or in art in general. And I would argue it shouldn’t be our highest goal in life either,” says Ms. Heying. “Certainly not psychological safety.”
Children’s books today are a lightning rod, pulled into the debate over whether they should be adapted to the current time or understood as relics of their own.
It’s understandable that people want to protect children, says Mr. Handler, but many of the edits, such as removing a reference to Rudyard Kipling but leaving Ernest Hemingway, “seem like quite a stretch.”
“The idea that you could make a book that wouldn’t offend anyone is a really offensive idea.”
PEN America’s Ms. Nossel argues for not banishing books. “They may yield insight even if they offend contemporary sensibilities,” says Ms. Nossel, adding that context about the time, setting, and mores in which a work was created is an important part of the discussion. “Even if there is an offending word, that doesn’t negate the value of the whole story ... you may learn that somebody who would use such a word might have also some noble ideas that you really subscribe to, and it’s an opportunity to embrace that kind of complexity.”
Ms. Bird, who is the collection development manager of Evanston Public Library in Illinois, is optimistic about efforts to dig into nuanced issues.
“I often say that we’re kind of living in a golden age of children’s literature right now,” she says. “There is so much more complexity regarding history and contemporary issues and things like that in books for kids than there ever was before.”
Puffin did not respond to an interview request. A spokesperson for Inclusive Minds, which worked with the publisher on the updates, wrote that the company doesn’t edit or rewrite texts or provide sensitivity reads. Instead, the company has a network of Inclusion Ambassadors who consult based on their own lived experiences.
Whitewashing a “complicated legacy”?
One thing that sets this situation apart, says Kat Rosenfield, a novelist and cultural critic who has written on the rise of sensitivity readers, is that Dahl, who died in 1990, is unable to provide input.
“There’s an element of fraudulence to it,” says Ms. Rosenfield. “They’re going to change the language of his books in a way that is quite substantial and really has stripped quite a lot of the magic and the cheekiness in the way that he saw the world that was so resonant to kids specifically, because it can be kind of crude and funny and colorful and definitely not sensitive.”
“I’ve been trying to think of what a comparable thing is,” says Ms. Rosenfield. “The thing that I came up with was if they put some bikini briefs on Michelangelo’s David and then they told everyone that it always looked like that.”
By editing Dahl’s work to make it more palatable, publishers run the risk of portraying the author more favorably than perhaps he deserves, says Ms. Rosenfield, pointing out that Dahl was openly anti-Semitic.
“I think it’s good to know that [his books] were written by not a very nice man,” says Ms. Rosenfield. “And to sanitize them is actually to kind of whitewash that complicated legacy.”
As it happens, Dahl himself weighed in on his preferences about posthumous editing.
In a recorded conversation with the artist Francis Bacon in 1982, Dahl threatened to unleash his “enormous greedy grumptious brute,” the Enormous Crocodile, on his publishers if they tweaked “a single comma.”
“When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir,” said Dahl in the conversation recorded by Barry Joule and published in the Guardian, “Or I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”
Staff writer Stephen Humphries contributed to this report.
