Critics Reject Changes To Roald Dahl Books As "Censorship"

[TTL News 307]

Quote

 

LONDON (AP) — Critics are accusing the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colorful language from works such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda” to make them more acceptable to modern readers.

A review of new editions of Dahl’s books now available in bookstores shows that some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered. The changes made by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, first were reported by Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which originally was 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.”

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie was among those who reacted angrily to the rewriting of Dahl’s words. Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 issued a fatwa calling for his death because of the alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” He was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” Rushdie wrote on Twitter. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’’

The changes to Dahl’s books mark the latest skirmish in a debate over cultural sensitivity as campaigners seek to protect young people from cultural, ethnic and gender stereotypes in literature and other media.

 

Read more here. 

[Adam 372]

smh....

[Chris 2,153]

It’s criminal if you ask me.

Even the worst things ( by today’s standards ) written into what’s considered a classic should be left there. If nothing else, do what Disney did with some of their old cartoon shorts and have Leonard Maltin explain that, while we know better now, in their time it was acceptable.

However to change some of the things cited in this article is simply beyond the pale of hypersensitivity.