Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books are being rewritten by sensitivity gurus to remove language they find offensive, including creating a world where nobody is “fat” and the Oompa Loompas are gender neutral.
Publisher Puffin hired sensitive readers to rewrite parts of the author’s text to ensure the books “can still be enjoyed by all today,” leading to extensive changes in Dahl’s work.
Significant changes have been made to the descriptions of the characters’ physical appearance – the new editions no longer use the word ‘bold’, which has been dropped from every book, The Telegraph reports.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory can now only be described as “enormous”.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text, erasing Dahl’s colorful and memorable descriptions, some of which were over fifty years old, to make his characters less grotesque.
Extensive changes were made to Roald Dahl’s works, including gender-neutral styling of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The word “fat” was dropped from every one of Dahl’s books, Augustus Gloop was only described as “enormous”.
Mrs. Twit’s “fearful ugliness” has been chopped up into “ugliness” and Mrs. Hoppy in Esio Trot is not an “attractive middle-aged lady” but a “friendly middle-aged lady”.
Gender is also eliminated as books no longer refer to “female” characters.
Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “Most Impressive Woman” is now a “Most Impressive Woman”, while her “big horse face” is now called “her face”.
Oompa-Loompas who were once “little men” are now “little people,” and Fantastic Mr. Fox’s three sons have become daughters.
The publisher has also added passages that were not written by the author, who died in 1990, to complete its new editions.
In The Witches, a paragraph describing her as bald beneath her wigs is briefly followed by a new line: “There are many other reasons women might wear wigs, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.”
A witch posing as a “supermarket teller” now works as a “top scientist,” and Matilda reads Jane Austen instead of Rudyard Kipling.
Mental health was another focus for sensitive readers, with the words “crazy” and “crazy,” which Dahl used in a comical way, being removed from his books.
The big friendly giant in The BFG no longer wears a black cape as the words “black” and “white” no longer exist in the new editions
In the new version of The Twits, Mrs Twit’s ‘fearful ugliness’ has been chopped up into ‘ugliness’.
Mrs. Hoppy in Esio Trot is no longer an “attractive middle-aged lady” but a “friendly middle-aged lady”.
Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “Most Impressive Woman” is now a “Most Impressive Woman”.
The big friendly giant in The BFG no longer wears a black cloak and characters cannot go “white with fear” as the words “black” and “white” no longer exist in the new editions.
Elsewhere, the cloud people in James and the Giant Peach are now known as “cloud people”.
Changes were made by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company – bought by Netflix in 2021 for a reported £500million.
But the scrutiny began in 2020, when the company was still run by the Dahl family, who apologized that same year for the author’s anti-Semitic remarks.
Dahl, a World War II fighter pilot, is one of the best-selling children’s book authors in history with more than 250 million books sold.
According to The Telegraph, Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, said the author chose his vocabulary carefully: “I’m almost certain he would have recognized that changes in his novels prompted by the political climate were made by adults rather than children were advanced. ‘
Problems with the content of Dahl’s children’s book were compounded in 2020 when a Hollywood version of The Witches received backlash after the Grand Witch, played by Anne Hathaway, was missing a finger on each hand.
Paralympians and charities said it was offensive to the limb disparity community, and Warner Bros was forced to apologize.
In the latest installment of The Witches, 59 changes have been made to avoid offending, such as the phrases “You must be crazy, woman!”. and ‘big herd of ladies’ is changed to ‘You must be crazy!’ and ‘large group of ladies’.
Elsewhere, the passage that reads, “I don’t want to speak ill of women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women. There is no male witch” changed to “A witch is always a woman. There is no such thing as a male witch.’
Hundreds of changes were made to Dahl’s books, adding some passages not written by the author
With 250 million copies of his books sold, Dahl is one of the most successful authors of children’s books of all time
In the latest installment of The Witches, 59 changes have been made to avoid offending. Pictured: The 1990 film of the book
In Esio Trot, a joke about the book’s backward title was deleted: “Turtles are very backward creatures. Therefore they can only understand words spelled backwards” was changed to: “They can only understand words spelled backwards”.
The new edition of the book no longer states that turtles “come mostly from North Africa”, but from “many different countries”.
Not even Quentin Blake’s famous illustrations of the books have escaped changes from previous editions, like Mike Teavee’s toy guns from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which will be removed by 2022.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the latest changes in collaboration with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective of people passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature.”
Organizations like Inclusive Minds have sprung up to help publishers navigate these new troubled waters.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, says they “aim to ensure authentic representation by working closely with the book community and with those who have experienced all facets of diversity”.
Authors and publishers warn that “sensitive readers” destroy books
Authors have warned of the dangers of “sensitive readers” editing or removing language in books they find offensive.
Such readers review manuscripts prior to publication to raise concerns about language they find unacceptable.
Authors and publishers have said the practice could destroy the art of writing through overzealous censorship, The Times reported.
Writing Diversely is an agency that provides sensitivity readers where such reader identifies as a “disabled nonbinary Jewish queer person with ADHD”.
Another sensitivity reader describes himself as “bisexual, gender-neutral, Caucasian, brown, Mexican, self-diagnosed with autism and EDS [ehlers danlos syndrome]depression and anxiety.
In a case of so-called sensitivity reading, award-winning author Kate Clanchy was told she could not call the Taliban “terrorists” because they now control the Afghan government.
Author Anthony Horowitz was tricked into removing the word “scalpel” from a book for fear it would offend Native Americans, as it is very similar to the word “scalps”.
And this despite the fact that the word comes from the Latin “scalpellum”, which means a surgical knife.
A fiction writer described how a publisher asked that his book be sent to sensitive readers because a character was disabled, even though the author has the same disability.
Kate Clanchy has been asked to send her Orwell Prize-winning book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me to sensitive readers after some social media users claimed descriptions in it were racist.
When the book came back with hundreds of suggested changes, she left her publisher, Picador.
The author then joined independent publisher Swift Press, who reprinted her original book.
Clanchy said: “The problem is that authors now self-censor their work before it’s even shown to these people.
“We already have fact-checkers, so I don’t see why we need sensitivity readers. They are mind examiners.’
Mark Richards, Swift Press co-founder, said: “I wish these books would be taken up by mainstream publishers, but the industry has lost its backbone in the last five years.
“Publishers don’t want to get caught in Twitter storms, so they hire sensibility readers as insurance.”