Changes to Roald Dahl books prompt claims of ‘absurd censorship’: tweaks to lines about weight, mental health, gender and race cause anger
- A review of new editions of Dahl’s books, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Matilda, shows that some passages were altered
- Critics such as Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie call it ‘absurd censorship’, going on to say the publisher and the Dahl estate ‘should be ashamed’
Critics are accusing the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colourful language from works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda to make them more acceptable to modern readers.
Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was originally published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”. In the new edition of Witches, a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”.
The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in 1970s The Fabulous Mr Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”.
