It was a great experience when we drove to Bournville’s Cadbury World near Birmingham about 15 years ago. However, the flavour of British chocolate in Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was indeed greater. Well, that flavour might be evolving. Hundreds of words and parts of texts regarding weight, mental health, violence, gender, and race in Dahl’s children’s novels have been deleted and altered by the publisher, Puffin, in the new editions of the books. It created a major outrage in the UK and elsewhere. Salman Rushdie termed it “absurd censorship,” PEN America, a community of 7,500 writers that advocates for freedom of expression, was “alarmed” by reports of the changes, and Laura Hackett, deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in London, called it “botched surgery.” Dahl was not an ordinary author, for sure. More than 300 million copies of Dahl’s books have been sold so far; in 2008, he was ranked 16th on The Times’ list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945; and Forbes ranked him the top-earning dead celebrity in 2021!
The changes are of varied types. For example, Augustus Gloop, one of the four main antagonists of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” is no longer “enormously fat” but merely “enormous.” The Oompa-Loompas, the workers at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, who were imported directly from Loompaland, have now become gender-neutral. In the updated version of the children’s dark fantasy novel “The Witches,” a supernatural lady posing as an ordinary woman might manage a company or be a top scientist rather than a supermarket cashier or type letters for a businessman. In “James and the Giant Peach,” the Cloud-Men are now Cloud-People, and Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda” is now the “most formidable woman” rather than the “most formidable female.” With Joseph Conrad, Matilda no longer travels on “olden-day sailing ships,” but rather, she goes “to nineteenth-century estates with Jane Austen”.
Yet, censoring and altering books is nothing new. Six children’s books by Dr Seuss were withdrawn from publication in 2021 because of their racist and offensive imagery. About two years ago, the publisher of the French translation of Agatha Christie’s mystery novel “And Then There Were None” changed its title to remove an offensive word that the British edition had dropped decades earlier.
While there might be debates on how such changes should be viewed in society, an incident concerning “Tintin in the Congo” might be intriguing. It was published in the UK with a warning about its content. That might be a good way to sound the alarm in general. Interestingly enough, a Belgian court rejected a request to prohibit the book in 2012 due to an alleged racist depiction of Africans. The court said the book was created at a time when colonial ideas were prevalent and didn’t have a goal to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating environment. Can this be a template for other situations? A book should be viewed as a representation of a specific historical period.
Can we dare to censor Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” for example? The broader question is: Should a writer’s writing be altered? If so, to what extent? And who will decide? Do we run the risk of undercutting the brilliance of great writers, preventing readers from facing the world as it is, and risking clouding the crucial lens that literature offers to society in the name of cultural sensitivity and shielding children from cultural, racial, and gender stereotypes in literature and other media?
Dahl’s writings have changed during his lifetime, though. The Oompa-Loompas were black pygmies in the original version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” but they were transformed into green-haired, orange-skinned characters for Mel Stuart’s 1971 film adaptation. Moreover, they were described as “little fantasy creatures” in the 1973 edition of the novel.
But a writer approving the alternation is one thing. If the works of long-dead authors start to be altered by others, both the literature and the offended sensibilities are endless. And how far into the past? Milton? Voltaire? Shakespeare? Machiavelli? Kautilya? The Bible? Awesome epics? And if books are changed this way, they are no longer original works.
If Matilda hadn’t been to India with Kipling, would she or her creator have approved? Matilda is still travelling to Africa with Ernest Hemingway in this updated version. While Kipling is edited out of the novel “Matilda,” references to Hemingway were left unaltered – despite his great white hunter persona, his alcoholism, his alleged wife-beating, his womanizing, and his antisemitic tropes in “The Sun Also Rises.” Anita Singh, the editor of the Daily Telegraph’s arts and entertainment section, was also annoyed at the stupidity of the changes made: “A ban on the word ‘fat’ yet keeping in the rest of the description in which Augustus Gloop is clearly fat.”
Yet soon, the flavour of Roald Dahl’s “Chocolate” won’t be altered, despite the botched surgery. Millions of copies of the older editions of Dahl’s books are still being used in schools, libraries, second-hand shops, and other places worldwide. My college-bound daughter, who spent many happy hours in Roald Dahl’s universe throughout her childhood, is glad since she has the old edition volumes in her bookcase.
Atanu Biswas
Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata