Dahl publisher will put originals back in print

Puffin UK says it ‘listened to the debate’ after removing references to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter and fighter pilot Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl’s publisher will produce a classic collection of his works featuring the original versions after a backlash against changes to new editions.

Puffin UK said it had “listened to the debate” after criticism of edits that removed references to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race. The publisher added that it understood there were “very real questions around how stories can be kept relevant for new generations”.

It said the collection of 17 books would be republished this year and made available alongside the sanitised versions, “offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvellous stories”.

It emerged last week that Puffin UK, the children’s division of Penguin Random House, had made hundreds of changes to Dahl’s books to minimise offence. The Daily Telegraph revealed that in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Augustus Gloop was no longer described as fat, nor was Mrs Twit in The Twits “fearfully ugly”, while in The Witches “old hag” had become “old crow” and “you must be mad” was “you must be out of your mind”. Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull no longer had a “great horsey face”.

Roald Dahl's classic Matilda.

Francesca Dow, the managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s, said the debate about the changes had “reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation . . . our role is to share the magic of stories with children with the greatest thought and care. Roald Dahl’s fantastic books are often the first stories young children will read independently, and taking care for the imaginations and fast-developing minds of young readers is both a privilege and a responsibility. We also recognise the importance of keeping Dahl’s classic texts in print.”

Owners of Dahl ebooks have, however, had their libraries automatically updated with the sanitised versions. Clarissa Aykroyd, who works in children’s publishing, reported on social media that books she bought before 2020 had been changed.

Aykroyd, 43, told The Times: “It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and [it] has made me weary of ebooks. I assumed that because the changes to the work were so big that I would be given the option of whether to download it.”

Matthew Dennison, a biographer of the author, who died in 1990, said: “There’s an irony to the current automatic updating of Dahl’s ebooks. Time and again, in his writing for adults as well as children, Dahl championed the bullied against the bullies. Yet here we have a kind of cultural assertiveness that strong-arms readers into accepting without alternative - though, happily, not without demur - a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.

“This particular revisionism sits oddly with Dahl’s irrepressibly anarchic outlook, his distinctive combination of mischief and wonder, and, of course, ignores the fact that words, central to a writer’s armoury, are a matter of choice in order to manipulate meaning and conjure effect.”

Robert Hampson, professor emeritus at Royal Holloway, University of London, and chairman of the Joseph Conrad Society, said it was “nonsense” that a mention of the Heart of Darkness author had been erased from Matilda over his “racism”, saying Conrad’s views were “what we might expect from a British sea-captain in the 1890s”.

Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company began a review in 2020.

THE TIMES