Roald Dahl was an unpleasant man — a snob, a racist, a cad, and a bounder — but at least he was consistent. His books are unpleasant, too. They are also funny, not least because comedy is cruel. Dahl’s theme was Charles Dickens’s theme, the cruelty of childhood. While Dickens wrote for sentimental adults, Dahl wrote for cruel children.
Cruelty comes naturally to children, but adults have to work on their game. In Dahl’s world, the adults are generally blinkered, dimwitted, hypocritical, power-crazed sadists. Children learn all this by imitation, but imitation, as the children’s revenge on Miss Trunchbull in Matilda shows, is also the material of mockery. This is why tyrants have no sense of humor. If their subjects are to surrender, conform, and imitate correctly, there must be only one narrative and one interpretation — and no talking back.
Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, has prepared new editions of his books to suit the taste of our nannyish, bullying era. All references to sexual difference and racial difference are expunged. So are all adjectives that might imply value judgments about minorities, including witches, dwarves, giants, foxes, farmers, aunts, Africans, and fat people, who may have been thin on the ground in Dahl’s day but are now a very substantial majority.
Instead of “his father’s toolshed” and “Mummy’s dressing table,” read “the toolshed” and “the dressing table.” As any reference to color is likely to brainwash the children into doing a racism, for “flashing black eyes,” read “flashing eyes,” and for “brown teeth,” read “rotting teeth.” If you must eat someone, remember your sensitivity training and call them “a nice Inuit,” not “a nice fat Esquimo.”
The censors have already attained the historical illiteracy they wish to impose upon the children. References to Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling have become references to Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. Neither Conrad nor Kipling was an unconditional imperialist, but Austen’s father was a trustee of a slave plantation in Antigua, and Steinbeck was a big supporter of the Vietnam War.
Other changes are inexplicable and suggest that our would-be rulers are idiots. The Bowdlers bowdlerized all traces of the prostitute Doll Tearsheet from Henry IV, Part II, but Bruce Bogtrotter, whose surname is a derogatory term for the Irish, is still in Matilda. No less mystifyingly, “She had pale brown teeth and a small puckered-up mouth like a dog’s bottom” is now “She had rotting teeth and a small puckered-up mouth like a dog’s bottom, from years of frowning.” I am frowning while puckering my mouth like a dog’s bottom right now, and I can confirm that these two muscular movements are independent of each other.
The arbitrariness is the point, an intimidatory proof of the censor’s power to annul the past and assert a false present. “By 2050, earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared,” Syme, the editor of the Newspeak dictionary, told Winston Smith in 1984. “The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed.”
The technical term is “bowdlerization,” after the Victorian brother-and-sister team Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler. Henrietta Bowdler took the rude bits out of Shakespeare, mostly the cursing and sex jokes, and Thomas Bowdler published the Family Shakespeare in 1807. He spent the rest of his futile life excising the spicy scenes from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This seems like the moment to mention that Gibbon suffered prolonged agonies from a massive cyst on his scrotum, which is the sort of indignity that Dahl visits on the tyrants.
The indignities that the Bowdlers visited on Shakespeare and Gibbon sold well, but they were widely derided. Their editions are long out of print, and their name evokes the worst kind of censorship: mere priggishness. The same impulse runs through the Dahl revisions. It is H.L. Mencken’s definition of puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.” It is also what you get when the Puritans win. The rule of the saints means moral dictatorship.
The Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare lost in the marketplace against uncensored editions. The new Dahl editions are intended to monopolize the market. Dahl’s heirs and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which managed the licensing of Dahl spinoffs, sold Dahl’s work to Netflix in 2021 for a reported $686 million.
The Roald Dahl Story Company says that the revisions were “led by” Puffin, Dahl’s English publisher, and a consultancy called Inclusive Minds, an Orwellian outfit that advises publishers on “authentic representation” of “lived experience” and “any or multiple facets of diversity.” The way we’re going, the future will be written and rewritten by George Orwell’s thought police: “Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.”
Don’t buy the new Dahls. He sold over a quarter of a billion books. Buy cheap secondhand copies while you can and hoard them for your grandchildren. Sometimes, you have to be kind to be cruel.