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They fall into two categories: angelic Miss Honey types, who are small and slender, and grotesque women who are criminally ugly, fantastically fat, and either feckless, selfish and slatternly (like Matilda’s mum), or plain evil (like Mrs Twit).
A few years ago I purchased the audiobook of Revolting Rhymes – Dahl’s wickedly funny rewriting of fairy tales – and played it to my daughter. I remembered the book as being delightful, subversive fun. Imagine my dismay then when the prince in Cinderella turns on his paramour, having beheaded her stepsisters with his sword: “The Prince cried, ‘Who’s this dirty slut?/Off with her nut! Off with her nut!’” Yikes.
Roald Dahl with his wife, actress Patricia Neal, and their children Theo and Tessa pictured in their garden in 1965. Neal would later describe him as ‘Roald the rotten’.Credit:
Most parents would like to delay, for as long as possible, the heavy weight that lands on every girl eventually: the discovery that her body will be picked over and objectified, and that she will be judged by different standards to her male peers.
But then: Dahl spins such good yarns! So inventive and full of playful language! We want to pass them on! And so, we censor, or add editorial commentary of our own.
This is what has been missed in the righteous global outcry over the move by Puffin to “amend” Dahl’s works for contemporary audiences.
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The changes – which were over-the-top and silly – were not motivated by political correctness for its own sake. They were a commercial decision taken by the publishers to cater to the contemporary market and maintain the relevance of the books.
Modern parents feel uncomfortable reading their children stories which write off (some) women as sluts and fatties, or which skate close to racial stereotyping. Perhaps that makes them, or their children, snowflakes, but snowflakes buy books, and publishers exist to make money, not to agitate for woke values (although the two things may be increasingly in symbiosis).
The backlash against the publishers was deserved, and the whitewashing of “problematic” books sends a terrible message to all contemporary writers.
But the whole conflict raises fascinating and important questions. Are works of art living things that can be enlivened and amended for new generations? Or are they static monuments, time capsules which take us back into the time they were written? Can they be both?
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The Dahl family seems to think so – in 2021 it sold the rights of the books to streaming giant Netflix. The books will be adapted to television according to modern tastes, but when does adjustment for young audiences merge into censorship?
What are the dangers of conflating offence with harm, and what messages do we send children by doing so? It seems to me that the world is increasingly mediated for children and young people, sometimes by forces they don’t see and which aren’t acting in their interests.
They are exposed to falsified content on social media, their cultural tastes are heavily influenced by the hand of an algorithm, they read fewer credible news sources, and the movies they watch are manipulated to look “real” when they aren’t.