Editing Roald Dahl for sensitivity was silly
It was also a sign of a deeper rotsomeness in British publishing
Why stop at fatness? If you are going to put a red pen through Roald Dahl—as his publisher, Puffin, did recently—there are so many better bits to choose. The sensitivity readers contented themselves with excising such words as “fat”, “flabby”, “ugly” and “Kipling”. But Dahl doesn’t merely offer sexism, racism and colonialism; in his adult fiction you can find sins so frankly filthsome and swigpilling there has yet to be an -ism coined to cover them. There is violence, voyeurism and an unforgettably frightsome story in which a scorpion collector accidentally has sex with a leper. Not for nothing did his family call him “Roald the Rotten” and—more bluntly—“Roald the Bastard”.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Censory deprivation”
Britain March 25th 2023
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- Editing Roald Dahl for sensitivity was silly
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