He wasn't a roald model.
The book of his that I remember most vividly is actually the autobiography Boy, which spoke to my priors that being a boy among boys was a nightmare, at least until the end where he somehow gets good at sports and improbably earns the respect of his peers.
I think the edits are fine. It's going to be clumsy in places but it's easy harm reduction, the original texts are in no danger of being lost to history and it's not a travesty on the level of what Alexander Pope did to Shakespeare.
The guy can't even spell his own name and they let him write for kids.
It's all just so tediously stupid, like being trapped in a conference room with odd lots from the previously-owned and factory seconds sections of the university and college administrator LinkedIn.
I don't think it's wrong to edit them but these particular edits, especially the insertions, seem extraordinarily clumsy.
You can take some of the bad stuff out, but there's a nasty edge that's going to stick around, can't be undone by a few affirming additions, and it might mean the book ages out of suitability for the rising generation. This happens all the time.
I did not like the Dahl books when I was supposed to be reading them, so I stopped. I don't remember why beyond not enjoying them. It wasn't because there was a fat kid.
It's weird with Dahl specifically, because a certain level of cruelty and fucked-upedness is kind of his whole deal. Changing a sentence here and there just isn't going to get you anywhere.
I loved Danny, the Champion of the World beyond all reason. The Witches scared the shit out of me. I enjoyed James and the Giant Peach and Boy. The rest of them I was lukewarm on. The streak of cruelty was very unsettling to me.
Oh, there were five short stories - Henry Sugar? - that made a big impression on me. But I didn't quite love them. A boy on a turtle, a card trickster with ESP, and now I'm drawing a blank on the others.
His adult short stories are quite something. The most famous one got adapted into a Tarantino film, which again is someone who is going to be hard to sanitize with small edits.
The Guardian is mad at me because I read 43 articles this year and didn't give them money. But I did give them money. I just didn't give them money on my phone.
It does seem as though the editors removed literally every mention of the words "black" or "Africa", even from innocuous sentences describing the colour of someone's overcoat or the region of origin of pet tortoises. So I think a bit of mockery is called for.
Aha: Dahl himself rewrote a later edition of Chocolate Factory to de-Africanize the Oompa-Loompas.
Motivated, in his telling, by an NAACP press release when there was word a movie was on the way.
I think most of the edits are silly. Gloop isn't fat, but enormous, and presumably still described as gluttonous elsewhere in the text; kids aren't going to not tease just because they don't use the word 'fat'. Hemingway is still OK? What?
But on the general point: if one is going to read old stuff to kids one has to have a game plan for dealing with casual racism/prejudice. ( Dahl is way easier than The Secret Garden on this front.). It's not crazy to think that an estate that wants its books assigned in schools to the kids of people who saw the movie wants to get rid of the troublesome bits. Most of us read an edited version of Huckleberry Finn and an edited version of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, which is good. (Parents complained about renaming Jim in the 80s too, damned liberals not letting kids read n---- like in the good ol'days.).
Dahl is easier, btw, because his stories always have a nastier edge. The Secret Garden is aggressively wholesome, so it's more jarring.
I also think the edits of Dahl are odd, since -- yes -- nasty bullying is sort of his purview. But also this isn't the government editing the books, it's the publishers doing it, and this sort of thing (editing children's books to take out offensive bits) has always been common. I told this elsewhere, but I remember buying an early edition of some kid's book (I think it was The Railway Children) and being surprised to find one of the characters just casually calling something "n***r-brown." Later editions, the one I had as a kid, for instance, changed that to just brown, which seems like a good edit.
A side-note: When my mother was a kid, they had a black dog, and you can guess what its name was. When I expressed surprise, she said everyone named black dogs that back then. That would have been 1940s Indiana. Community standards change, I guess is my point.
I can't remember - does the colonialism permeate beyond the origin story of how she gets to England?
I got the kids to read A Little Princess with me, which I'm still fond of, but couldn't get them into The Secret Garden.
I can't remember - does the colonialism permeate beyond the origin story of how she gets to England?
I got the kids to read A Little Princess with me, which I'm still fond of, but couldn't get them into The Secret Garden.
It's more trying to explain the backstory (there's a lot of kids books that just assume Dad is abroad somewhere running the Empire which maybe didn't need to be stated when written but doesn't make a lot of sense to an American kid in 2022.) It's done very well, and from the perspective of Mary, who feels sick and wakes up in a lliteral horror film with everyone she knows dead or fled. The problem is that the Calabat had NO idea why such a thing would have happened, or why Mary -- portrayed as a spoiled brat who has had servants dress her and wait on her -- would be so indignant that Martha would think she is 'black' coming from India. Otherwise the story is mostly about how jump rope cures depression, but we had to have a crash course in what went down, and why Mary would think it's a bad thing to be thought to be Indian, etc.
1: Boy is terrifying. I remember reading it in fourth or fifth grade, which seems like maybe it ought not to have been on the shelf?
1: Boy is terrifying. I remember reading it in fourth or fifth grade, which seems like maybe it ought not to have been on the shelf?
I think the racism-related updates are totally reasonable and normal. The Augustus Gloop stuff, on the other hand, just doesn't hold up to any actual thought. Maybe kids shouldn't read Charlie and the Chocolate factory at all, but you can't somehow tell the story without it having a large section about a boy getting punished for gluttony.
The casual racism of early-20th-century popular writing is really something. You see it with nonfiction too. Both Bob Marshall's Arctic Village and Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters have parts where they just randomly veer into stuff that would be totally outrageous today. (Both good books otherwise though.)
And sometime in high school you want to have people read critically and understand the history there, rather than just pretending the casual racism wasn't there. But kids books is not really the time for that, which is why I don't have a problem with sanitizing kids books when it can be done. It's just that you can't remove the cruelty from Dahl, and it's stupid to pretend that you did just because you changed fat to enormous.
Also the book is so chock full of poetic justice, it's impossible to divorce Gloop being punished for greed from Salt being punished for brattiness.
11: I recently watched Reservoir Dogs for the first time (on a plane), and the use of the n-word was really jolting and surprising in a very different way from Django Unchained. Which got me wondering, I imagine it wasn't unusual language for white criminals at the time, and I wonder whether there's been a change in terms of whether that word is taboo *among criminals* in the intervening years. Like do younger white mobsters now not say the n-word? Or is the mob still a hold out of the previous racism norms? (I guess this is a bit complicated by a lot of the modern mob being Russian or Russian-adjacent, where I think old-school racism is much more common than among even racist Americans.)
9-11: The Dahl story is Man from the South and Tarantino didn't really adapt it for The Man from Hollywood in Four Rooms. It's more like he satirized it. Or Tarantino-ized it.
Anyway, Dahl's story and Tarantino's take on it are both appalling and lots of fun.
And sometime in high school you want to have people read critically and understand the history there, rather than just pretending the casual racism wasn't there. But kids books is not really the time for that, which is why I don't have a problem with sanitizing kids books when it can be done.
Yeah, both of my examples would have been considered popular science at the time and today would be read mainly for the window they give into contemporary attitudes rather than for the science itself, so it makes perfect sense to leave the racism in. Kids' books being read as such today are quite different.
27: Do I recall right that for Gloop his poetic justice is that he gets stuck in the pipe? Even if you remove any mention of his size you can't get around that his size is relevant to how he gets his poetic justice.
I'm mostly on board with non-clumsy edits. As per many comments above, this is a fairly venerable tradition in children's book publishing and a lot of parents do informal editing as they go anyway, if they are reading aloud. Some of the advertised edits to Dahl _are_ clumsy and tone-deaf, but I notice it has engendered a lot of nice publicity for the Dahl estate, too.
My son deeply loved* the Twits, Danny the Champion of the World, and Fantastic Mr Fox, but can take or leave most of the rest.
* still loves, I guess, although at nearly 10 he doesn't read them any more. He does still listen with nostalgia to the audiobooks sometimes when he's doing something else.
Maybe the problem is that the book lionizes a depraved capitalist who devises clever ways to murder children.
They all survive in the end, right? Just having gone through a lot of torture to get there. (Does one of them get stretched by a taffy-stretching machine to get back to normal size?)
35: Not normal size. He's something like 10-feet tall and very skinny.
As a kid, I was a huge fan of Hugh Lofting and Dr. Dolittle. Wikipedia advises me that he wrote 14 Dr. Dolittle books, and I'm sure I read every one.
I can't find it in the archive, but I have been advised by the Unfoggetariat that Lofting's books have been extensively rewritten since I read them, and I'm quite sure that's a good idea.
Do I recall right that for Gloop his poetic justice is that he gets stuck in the pipe?
The theme for this week is that every day we must discuss a literary figure whose girth exceeds their through-path.
Camels, rich people, and the eye of a needle?
Don't really have a dog in this fight. I'm pretty sure I read Matilda, the BFG, and James and the Giant Peach at some point, but the first one is the only one I have any memories of and that more from its adaptations. Atossa found the Netflix musical of Matilda scary but enjoyed it in the end. She still doesn't like books with more words than pictures too much. To the extent that there's a crime here, I'd say the perpetrator is the publishing house, the motive is capitalism, and the damage is to the academic purity of children's literature, i.e. not much.
37.1: I probably read all the Dr. Dolittle books too! Turns out our minds were being poisoned!
Among the earliest and harshest of the doctor's detractors was the New York librarian Isabelle Suhl who, in a 1968 Bulletin of Interracial Books for Children, charged that ''the 'real' Doctor Dolittle is in essence the personification of The Great White Father Nobly Bearing the White Man's Burden and that his creator was a white racist and chauvinist, guilty of almost every prejudice known to modern white Western man.'' In her view, ''editing out a few racial epithets will not make the books less chauvinistic.''
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/28/books/childrens-books-doctor-dolittle-innocent-again.html
On this general topic, we watched Rat Race with the kids, and I wish that we could edit out the 2 transphobic jokes because the rest of it held up well and is still really hilarious. The two instances were minor enough that we could have a quick conversation about them and carry on, but it's still a bummer.
I don't want to know if Jon Lovitz has become a crazy right-winger, because he's so goddamn hysterical in that movie and I'd like to preserve my innocence.
I think he's just a Democrat with mild "get off my lawn"-ism.
40 was me. The name wasn't saved because I was at an office computer. For the first time in about seven months, because it was a crazy day. Aren't you all honored that I managed to find the time for you on a day like this?
I'm now having a beer on the way to picking up the kid. I don't want to make too much of this, I still have my job and family and health and that puts me ahead of 90 percent of people, but really it's been a crazy week.
43: Phew.
44: That's the worst. I'm sorry.
24: Fourth grade for me too, or whatever was the equivalent in UK primary school, where I actually was at the time. Maybe they had it on the shelf because reading about caning was thought to be morally improving in the same way that caning itself was for earlier generations.
8: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More! I got that for Christmas when I was eight or nine and sat up reading almost all of it until after midnight, when the adults realized that I was still up and made me go to sleep.
I used to worry a lot about having a blood clot in my heart as in "Henry Sugar"; now that I am in my late forties this is a more realistic anxiety. The story about the swan was one of many stories about bullying which did a lot to amplify my fear of my classmates. It felt so psychologically true that it really reinforced the idea that my peers hated me (sometimes true) and would laugh if they had the opportunity to murder me (probably not actually true; they were kids).
I am ambivalent about the edits; I guess I don't think that those books are very good for "school" books in any case because of their general cruelty, misogyny, structuring racism, etc. There's a difference between encountering a difficult book at home, whether on your own or with parents, and encountering it in school - in school you can't have a frank discussion of what's wrong with it, for instance, because some loony toon from the PTA will complain to the principal, so you have to talk around the actualities.
As a kid I read compulsively and fluently, so I think I'm a bad case study, though - most of the books we had to read in school were pretty boring but I read them anyway because I read everything and could usually find almost anything at least a little interesting once I got started. For kids who don't read fluently, a boring and thus totally non-controversial book is going to be much more offputting to them. I could read Johnny Tremaine and it was all right - but then, it didn't take me long. Spending a week slogging through it would have been awful.
...now that I am in my late forties this is a more realistic anxiety
Over fifty here, with medically controlled blood pressure, statins, and moderate exercise trying to reassure myself that I don't need a stress test this year.
Oh lord, the swan one is so deeply upsetting.
32/35: Gloop crouches down to drink from a chocolate lake and tumbles in (gluttony), then gets stuck in an intake pipe that recirculates the chocolate. The stretched kid (I think) is Mike Teevee, who transmits himself via experimental television but is shrunk to 3" or some TV-appropriate height.
I think I came to the conclusion at some point that I somehow never read any Dahl at any point in my life and probably never watched film adaptations of anything he wrote. I'm pretty sure my sister did so I'm not sure how I didn't. Maybe they were never assigned. Maybe I was infected with the woke mind virus. Who knows.
I liked the Fantastic Mr. Fox movie with Streep and Clooney. The book annoyed me, except for the "Bogis, Bunce, and Bean" bit.
Everyone always talks a lot about cruelty, nastiness, overall turpitude, etc in the Dahl books and not so much about their weird virtues. I remember being taken aback as a kid when I got to the end of The Witches, where the mouse-transformed boy does not get his transformation reversed, as would have happened in literally any other kids' book I'd read up to that point, and instead goes on to live a rich and fulfill life as a mouse. I think it did start me thinking a bit more broadly about what counts as a worthwhile existence.
Vaaaaaaaguely related, I've been wondering if I want to get some of Jan Morris' books in audiobooks. I am worried that the Suck Fairy will have visited.
I was also very disturbed by the swan story, and enjoyed the other stories in that book a lot.
I just found myself thinking about this in relation to Chesterton, who I would be very fond of except that he's so, so, so antisemitic. (Racist as well, and also as sexist as you'd expect, but it's the antisemitism he drags in to everything.) The guy I'm dating said something about being able to smell things in a context that made him think about what it must be like to be a dog, and I wanted to text him The Song of Quoodle, but reread it first and wow -- just a few verses, most of which are whimsical and fun, and one is just horrible. I would sort of like to wave a wand and make all those bits of Chesterton go away so I could enjoy the remaining 35% without feeling bad.
54: and he's happy because iirc it means he won't outlive his grandma.
Dahl's cruelty is usually toward people who deserve it (mean aunts, greedy farmers, cruel teacher) and gleeful about it in kind of a childish way. It's not surprising it appeals to 8yos. CatCF also holds a mirror up to kids in illustrating the ways they can be little shits, so it's hard to hate or take too seriously.
Anyhow, I adore Fantastic Mr. Fox and I hope nothing is wrong with it.
My favorite part was when the man farmer goes "You wrote a bad song Petey."
I don't remember edits to Huckleberry Finn, just arguments over whether to assign it in schools or ban it from libraries. I don't think the version I read in high school was edited, anyway. But I didn't really pay attention to what was happening nationally.
As no doubt I've mentioned before, I went to school in Berkeley. There was much more assigning books outside of the "canon" in my high school years among teachers trying to go in another direction than anything involving changing or even commenting on canonical works. Obviously, high schools are a different market than children's books but presumably the Dahl estate is also trying to protect their market position against schools and families simply reading other things.
57: In his kids' books, maybe. "The Last Act" is one of the most gleefully misogynistic stories I've ever read (and I've read a lot of midcentury science fiction).
I read Rosamond Lehmann's Invitation to the Waltz last year and there is in an otherwise wonderful novel a description of a garment as n-word brown. Not shocking, I guess, in a book by a white Briton from 1935, but jarring as hell.
And the framing of this story has been exasperating; as with the "Dr. Seuss is cancelled!" hysteria of 2021, this is something the estate and the publisher (Netflix, that terminally woke company that would never chase controversy even if it pays) are doing that I don't think anyone on team "try not to use hurtful words" was particularly asking for. But yes, if the rights wants to reduce copyright times so that a book from 1960 is in the public domain and they can read the un-Bowdlerized version, they will really be sticking it to me, a libtard, and I would hate that.
there is in an otherwise wonderful novel a description of a garment as n-word brown.
Speaking of unsettling language for shades of brown, I recently learned about the history of Mummy Brown, made for about 400 years until the early 20th century, and containing actual mummies or other deceased people.
A lot of reason for people outside Europe to view people from there as a race of cannibals: not only the wafer thing but also stealing all the mummies to eat.
I mean, lead paint chips aside. And those are fucking delicious. At least I assume so.
I read, or had read to me, a lot of Dahl and remember essentially nothing except parts of his WWII memoir, which I rember favorably. And in which, unless I'm conflating it with something else, he is briefly in charge of British East African troops for no other reason than he's the nearest white guy, and the absurdity of this is made abundantly clear.
They also just grabbed a bunch of white prog rockers to bless the rain.
I wouldn't mind seeing Dahl retired from the cannon of children's lit and replaced with stuff written this century. Same with the Harry Potter books.
We don't need to keep everything around, and the more past-their-time cultural artifacts we can dump the more space there is to embrace new stuff.
Let's wait until I've published my essay on wizard birth control, "Accio Spermatozao: How to Avoid Ripping it Directly from the Testicles of Random Guys. "
55: The ones I've read lately are Conundrum (which is probably not in the set of books you were thinking of) and Last Letters From Hav, which I found odd and wonderful.
Conundrum in 1974 managed to draw murderously vitriolic reviews from both Nora Ephron and Rebecca West which read exactly like something you'd find in the Guardian today, it's uncanny.
68: yes, Going Solo has that bit. It's one of my favourite Dahls and the Small God-Daughter loved it (when still Small) because of the flying bits.
He basically gives his orders for a standard roadblock and then goes aside and says to the sergeant "look, I'm new to this, you've done this before, could you please tell me if I've done anything stupid?" and the sergeant looks around and says "no, looks about right boss".
Going Solo skips over some of the details, but according to his biographer not only had Dahl never done anything like that before, he wasn't even in the army - he was there because he was a special constable (volunteer unpaid policeman), most or all of whom I would imagine were white in British East Africa in 1939, and the askaris were there to support him in closing the road, because it was a police task, not a military task.
Aid to the Civil Power, they called it (it's now MACA, Military Aid to the Civil Authority). Civil primacy remains one of the key principles - you can have a colonel with twenty years service and five hundred troops under his command, but he's there to support the police (or fire service or whoever) and they'll be telling him what to do, never vice versa.
My favourite part is where, just after the description of his crash in the desert, he goes into full Dahl-children's-narrator mode and embarks on a rant about the obsolete aircraft he was flying that starts "If a very clever man were to say to himself 'I am going to build something that will burn better and faster than anything else in the world', he would probably end up with something very like a Gloster Gladiator..."
The most popular British children's writer before Dahl was Enid Blyton, who was savagely and gratuitously racist. She was also prolific. Her stuff has been essentially rewritten, but nobody objected because they had zero literary merit in the first place.
The most popular British children's writer before Dahl was Enid Blyton, who was savagely and gratuitously racist. She was also prolific. Her stuff has been essentially rewritten, but nobody objected because they had zero literary merit in the first place.
63-64: "There was some debate as to which bits of the mummy to use to get the best and richest browns--recommended for transluscent glazing layers for shadows and skin tones." (pp. 254-55) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, though, artists came to dislike some of the color's traits (permanency and finish, writes St. Clair), and were unhappy about its origin. She notes that a London art shop that had opened in 1810 ran out of mummy in the 1960s.
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/23/the-secret-lives-of-color-by-kassia-st-clair/
You want weird, though? Tyrian purple.
The Romans were always putting pee in stuff and aging the pee and what not.
I'm pretty stale urine was what they used instead of Oxyclean, because they didn't have cocaine.
I was so pleased, years later, when I realized what the joke was in The Twits about Mrs Twit catching Mr Twit "plotting" because he's drawing triangles on his thigh with the foam from his pint, and why my dad laughed uproariously about it
Ground-up mummy was so widely used - as a medicine as well as a pigment - that "mummy" was used as a synecdoche for "finely ground dust" until the 19th century. Tennyson talked about rifle fire "pounding [the enemy] into mummy".
Though there seems to have been a lot of confusion between natural bitumen and the exudate from bitumen-wrapped mummies, both being referred to as mumia and used in medicine.
Honestly, medicinal bitumen seems suspect regardless.
82 don't knock it if you've never tried it
Right, there was a ton of confusion about what mumia actually was and where it came from. European medicine in that era was super-confused in general.
Well, since mummies were really taken and ground up, presumably the corpse-kind of mumia was not perfectly interchangeable with natural bitumen, but was at minimum a higher-grade product (at many times and places).
Hey, you got your crime against human decency in my fossil-based pollutants.
You got your fossil-based pollutants in my crime against human decency.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary. There were various strands of confusion: words being passed down through various lines of transmission/translation in scholarly treatises, Crusaders encountering the physical medicine but not knowing exactly where it came from, doctors in Europe encountering powders coming from the East through long trade routes but not knowing exactly what they were, etc.
Almost missed the opportunity to say "Roald Lang Syne"
I don't think they should be edited.
I don't even under why they would do this except to avoid some kind of snowball effect of parents rejecting the books thus costing money.
There's nothing in the books that would warp a child's mind. There's no reason for a child to think in these fantastical scenarios that there are essential values to be adopted.
I would rather have my kids see books as products of their author, time period, culture , etc. I guess?
I don't think they should be edited.
I don't even under why they would do this except to avoid some kind of snowball effect of parents rejecting the books thus costing money.
There's nothing in the books that would warp a child's mind. There's no reason for a child to think in these fantastical scenarios that there are essential values to be adopted.
I would rather have my kids see books as products of their author, time period, culture , etc. I guess?
I don't think they should be edited.
I don't even under why they would do this except to avoid some kind of snowball effect of parents rejecting the books thus costing money.
There's nothing in the books that would warp a child's mind. There's no reason for a child to think in these fantastical scenarios that there are essential values to be adopted.
I would rather have my kids see books as products of their author, time period, culture , etc. I guess?
I don't think they should be edited.
I don't even under why they would do this except to avoid some kind of snowball effect of parents rejecting the books thus costing money.
There's nothing in the books that would warp a child's mind. There's no reason for a child to think in these fantastical scenarios that there are essential values to be adopted.
I would rather have my kids see books as products of their author, time period, culture , etc. I guess?
I wouldn't mind seeing Dahl retired from the canon of children's lit and replaced with stuff written this century. Same with the Harry Potter books.
This is up to the children, though, not you, and the children are still reading Dahl (and Potter) in their millions.
WE'RE ON THE ROALD TO NOWHERE
They probably didn't know you were still around either.
I just associate them entirely with the era of Suck.com and The Onion being funny and Instapundit.
I don't think it's that The Onion got worse, it's that reality got harder to parody. Though some say moving away from Wisconsin hurt it.
If you had an ebook version of a Roald Dahl book, it's just been replaced with the sensitive version. Your consent is not required for the change.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roald-dahl-collection-books-changes-text-puffin-uk-2023-rm2622vl0
Could you buy a book or publisher and change whatever you wanted in the ebooks already sold. Like, replacing "Ohio" with "Deathtown"?
Apparently, yes, as long as you bought the copyright.
Depends on the terms of the contract selling the rights, I think. And in some countries you could run afoul of some kind of moral "author's rights" issue if the author is still alive.
From wikipedia: "The protection of the moral rights of an author is based on the view that a creative work is in some way an expression of the author's personality: the moral rights are therefore personal to the author, and cannot be transferred to another person except by testament when the author dies. The moral rights regime differs greatly between countries, but typically includes the right to be identified as the author of the work and the right to object to any distortion or mutilation of the work which would be prejudicial to their honor or reputation (Article 6bis, Berne Convention). In many countries, the moral rights of an author are perpetual."
From links on the same Wikipedia page it looks like the Berne Convention did not apply the moral rights regime to the US; we did enact the concept in 1990 for visual art only.
Since the first one is already public domain, get ready for "Holmes and Dr. Hugeballs".