To my mind, Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was a great man. British children’s literature is one of the big leagues of world culture. Despite tremendous competition, he was perhaps the top man for a long time.

As a very young RAF pilot, he became an ace dogfighting the Luftwaffe during the British defeat in Greece. The government sent the handsome 6’5″ hero to America to give speeches. C.S. Forester, author of the Horatio Hornblower sea novels working at the British embassy on propaganda, asked Dahl to write up some notes about his experience, which Forester would then ghostwrite into a first- person story for the Saturday Evening Post.

But when Dahl delivered his notes, Forester realized the young war hero was an even better writer than him.

Netflix bought the rights to all of Dahl’s books from the Dahl family for $686 million in 2021. New editions are now out in Britain after being censored by “diversity and inclusion readers.” From The Telegram:

The Rewriting of Roald Dahl

Across his beloved children’s books, hundreds of the author’s words have been changed or entirely removed in a bid for ‘relevancy’
By
Ed Cumming; Genevieve Holl-Allen and Benedict Smith
17 February 2023 • 7:59pm

The modern editor of Dahl faces a dilemma: how to retain Dahl’s compelling spikiness, which has enthralled generations of readers, while bringing it in line with the hair-trigger sensitivities of children’s publishing.

Puffin’s overhaul is the result. While there have been tweaks before, there has never been an alteration on this scale. Take The Witches, for example, Dahl’s memorably unpleasant 1983 novel about a young boy growing up in a world ruled by a coven of secretive witches. A 2001 version of the text includes the following passage, about yanking women’s hair to check if they are witches. (In the story, witches are bald, and wear gloves to disguise their claws.)

Here are some more examples from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

From The BFG:

“When you ask children and adults why they are drawn to Dahl’s books, it’s often the sense of rebellion within them that they mention,” [some sensitivity reader] adds. “While maintaining this spirit in children’s books is essential and suppressing it entirely is not the answer either, it’s about making sure that the characters and content are mischievous, and not malicious, in their nature.”

But malice is a big part of Dahl’s appeal to kids. He was a greater hater who hated things healthy boys hate, like injustice. Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, says:

When it came to children’s books, Dennison says Dahl didn’t care what adults thought as long as his target readers were happy. “‘I don’t give a b—-r what grown-ups think,’ was a characteristic statement,” Dennison says. “And I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children, and this always inspired derision, if not contempt, in Dahl.

“He never, for example, had any truck with librarians who criticised his books as too frightening, lacking moral role models, negative in their portrayal of women, etc,” he continues. “Dahl wrote stories intended to kindle in children a lifelong love of reading and to remind them of the childhood wonderlands of magic and enchantment, aims in which he succeeded triumphantly. Adult anxieties about political niceties didn’t register in this outlook. This said, although Dahl could be unabashed in offending adults, he took pains never to alienate or make unhappy his child readers.”