NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE E gregious though it is that Roald Dahl’s books have been edited to make them “morally acceptable,” we should not be too concerned about the editing itself. People have always interfered with literature. Charles C. W. Cooke recently asked whether the sensitivity editors will come for Shakespeare next — well, they already have! Shakespeare has been mangled out of all recognition several times. There is one clear difference, though, between Shakespeare and Dahl. Anyone can edit Shakespeare, whereas only Dahl’s estate can edit him.
Copyright — not the sentimental urge to “improve” a book — is the real villain. Once Dahl goes out of copyright, anyone will be able to do whatever they want to his work. His stories won’t just have a few words changed: Plots will be altered, characters added and removed, adaptations made, scary stuff turned to cheery stuff. But once the original is out of copyright, these would become additions, not replacements.
We should not oppose such adaptations. Free speech is premised on people outbidding each other. All writers have to outcompete their imitators. Great authors out of copyright survive the competition. Pride and Prejudice stands mighty among hundreds of variations, sequels, and prequels. There were, at one time, a great many pseudo–Sherlock Holmes characters, all quite forgotten now.
The Dahl edits caused so much consternation because they were done by his work’s current gatekeepers. If they want to issue a set of his works full of graceless and anachronistic changes, they ought to do so outside the protection of copyright so that it can live where it belongs — with all the other adaptations. Augustus Sleek has every right to populate some expurgated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, so long as it is on the same shelf as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. By allowing copyright to persist in Britain for 75 years after an author’s death, we give unearned, unwarranted power to a writer’s descendants. Copyright in a writer’s lifetime is sensible, maybe for a few years after they die; but extending it for nearly a century after they’re gone is too much.
Shakespeare provides a good example. For a long time, theaters didn’t use his original scripts. The Tempest became The Enchanted Isle, with two-thirds of the script replaced. Scholars generally agree that it was trash. In 1674, a version of Macbeth was created that included songs. Yes, they made Macbeth into a musical. For over 150 years, King Lear — one of the bleakest things ever written — had a happy ending. All of these gatekeepers thought they knew better than Shakespeare and were making him relevant to the 17th and 18th centuries.
The ending of Lear was considered too much to bear. Something it shares in common with Dahl. As a child, I was utterly terrified by The Witches, hardly able to turn the page. Later on, I found the death of Cordelia too much to read. No wonder both were changed. The impulse to edit like this is sentimental. The new Dahl puritans are no less sentimental than the old Shakespeare adapters. Making Aunt Sponge thin in James and the Giant Peach comes from the same artistic impulse as wanting to only watch happy movies. It’s comparable to the turning of Pygmalion into My Fair Lady.
Removed from the umbrella of copyright, though, it’s perfectly harmless. Despite all the interference with Shakespeare’s work, the originals lived on. He lost out on the stage for over a century — his adapters thought they really had outdone him — but anyone could still read Shakespeare as he wrote it. Editors like Samuel Johnson preserved the text and argued for its greatness. This was the basis of a Shakespeare revival, started by 18th-century actor and playwright David Garrick, which gathered steam through the 19th century. Left to the system of free exchange and free expression, Shakespeare won.
You might argue that all the interpretations of Shakespeare today — a trend that started after the Second World War — are another form of doctoring him. We set his plays in all eras, change the sex of the actors, make implications about his meanings, cut uncomfortable scenes, or simply ignore the plays we don’t like. Culture wars are fought about whether he ought to be on the curriculum. The canon wars in universities were concerned with how central such authors should be to the curriculum. But Shakespeare carried on.
Teachers can ban him, theaters can run woke productions, films can distort him to modern perspectives. The Taming of the Shrew can be turned into Ten Things I Hate About You. Still, there is no gatekeeper with copyright, so it becomes harder to control his text. His works are secure from edits because they are decentralized. The First Folio is in all good bookshops now.
If we are worried about further edits of the sort Dahl has suffered, we ought to reduce copyright after an author’s death. The current system incentivizes writers’ descendants to change books to fit them to modern political ideas. There’s no reason books should not be subjected to that process: We have added sex scenes to Jane Austen, for example. Do we care that The Lion King is a riff on Hamlet? Free-speech advocates should be comfortable with this kind of thing. After all, Shakespeare took other people’s work and changed it as he saw fit. What isn’t sensible is giving exclusive authority to one set of people to make these changes. That can lead to the source of a book being changed, rather than allowing a wide field of competition, in which the original retains a unique place.
That the Dahl estate chose to issue both the original and the new versions shows the logic of this position. The problem is not the introduction of new versions, but the attempt to remove the original. In a fair fight, Dahl will win over his grandchildren. What makes the fight unfair is their copyright over his work.
The question is not whether anyone should ever alter Dahl, but rather: Why should Roald Dahl’s grandchildren tell me what I am allowed to read?