Editing Roald Dahl: Help children to navigate history, don’t try to rewrite it

Click HERE

Note the evaluation using books meant for adults vs children....

Some of the issues of censoring art can be seen HERE and HERE

The changes, recommended by sensitivity readers, include removing or replacing words describing the appearance of characters, and adding gender-neutral language in places.

In Matilda, the protagonist no longer reads the works of Rudyard Kipling but Jane Austen.

Should we consider children’s literature on a par with adult literature, where altering the author’s original words is roundly condemned? Or do we accept that children’s fiction should be treated differently because it has a role in inducting them into the contemporary world?

Children’s literature implicitly shapes the minds of child readers by presenting particular social and cultural values as normal and natural. The term we use for this process within the study of children’s literature is “socialisation”. People do not view literature for adults as directly forming how they think in this way, even if certain books might be seen as obscene or morally repugnant.

Dahl’s original Oompa Loompas were “a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies” whom Willy Wonka “discovered” and “brought over from Africa” to work in his factory for no payment other than cacao beans. While Dahl vehemently denied that the novel depicted black people negatively, he revised the book. The Oompa Loompas then became residents of “Loompaland” with “golden-brown hair” and “rosy-white skin”.

refusing to alter texts may still be troubling for segments of the readership (for example, black children reading editions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in which the “N” word has not been removed).

Although many aspects of the fictional past do not accord with the ideal version of the world we might wish to present to children, as adults we can help them to navigate that history, rather than hoping we can rewrite it.