Suzanne Harrington: Roald Dahl rewrites are about money - and protecting the goldmine
Pic: Andrew Hasson
If, like me, you awake each morning wondering what fresh idiocy awaits, you need look no further than Puffin’s plans to rewrite Roald Dahl
(Puffin’s owner, Penguin, has now decided to keep the originals in print while also publishing the changed texts under the Puffin imprint). Christ on a bicycle. Have we lost our collective minds?
Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, those terrifying, glorious villains from , were written by Dahl as “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that”, while “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” Those sensitivity nincompoops employed by Dahl’s estate and publishers have replaced this magnificence with “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit”, and “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.” IT DOESN’T EVEN SCAN.
Listen, I’m as woke as the next vegan lefty BLM trans-ally tree-hugger — and proud of it, and will gladly and loudly shout it from the rooftops, especially in the presence of gammon — but this is cultural vandalism. I mean, come on. Augustus Gloop was fat. Fat, fat, fat. Mrs Twit was ugly and beastly, not just beastly. And as for adding an extra bit in — whose monstrous coven are bald under their wigs and wear gloves to hide their claws — which reads: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” What pompous, patronising drivel.
How insulting to the intelligence of children, wig-wearers and actual bald, clawed witches everywhere. Even Salman Rushdie, himself catastrophically familiar with being on the wrong end of writing the ‘wrong’ words, has weighed in, calling these changes “absurd censorship”. Which is a polite version of what I’d call it.
This is not sticking up for Roald Dahl the person. He was a grotesque anti-Semite (“even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”), but does this stop my Jewish partner from reading Dahl’s stories to his Jewish kids at bedtime? No, it does not. You can love the art without loving the artist. Imagine if we employed ‘sensitivity readers’ to art and literature through the ages — where would we stop? Dickens? Shakespeare? Religious texts that go on about an eye for an eye and not laying with goats or menstruating mothers-in-law?
This is about money. Dahl is a goldmine, and his gold-mining minders don’t want him to go the way of Enid Blyton. Which is like trying to plug the sands of time with a buttplug of woke — it’s not going to work.
Stop it now, and allow Dahl’s work to live and breathe until the work expires naturally, the same way kids no longer read or or any of those other kids’ classics from the past. Stop painting over the vicious colour and zing of Dahl’s language with sad grey wokery. Stop treating children like helpless idiots, in a bid to keep the Dahl dollar flowing.
Stop ruining culture by sanitising it. Stop immediately with this utter, utter bollocks.
