The decision to revise some of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books to make them more inclusive was met with widespread condemnation over the weekend.
Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, and the Roald Dahl Story Co., which manages the works’ copyright and trademarks, told Britain’s Telegraph for a report published Friday that the two collaborated with Inclusive Minds, a collective that works on making children’s literature more inclusive, to make the hundreds of changes. Critics of Dahl, who remained a vocal anti-Semite until his death in 1990, have argued that some of his works are bigoted.
PUBLISHER REWRITES ROALD DAHL’S CLASSIC CHILDREN’S BOOKS TO BE MORE ‘INCLUSIVE’
Renowned author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses led Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling on all Muslims to kill him, denounced the changes to Dahl’s works.
“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” Rushdie tweeted Saturday. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Actor Brian Cox, who currently stars in HBO’s Succession and has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, decried the revisions by likening them to McCarthyism.
“I really do believe [these books are] of their time and they should be left alone,” he told the Times of London in a radio interview. “Roald Dahl was a great satirist, apart from anything else. It’s disgraceful.”
“It’s this kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say, ‘Oh, that didn’t exist.'” he continued. “Well. it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history.”
Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression in literature and other art, said her organization was “alarmed” by news of the changes.
“If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society,” Nossel wrote on Twitter.
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Laura Hackett, a lifelong Dahl fan who serves as deputy literary editor for London’s Sunday Times newspaper, vowed to collect old, unaltered copies of Dahl’s works for her children while condemning the revisions.
“The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they’ve carried out on some of the finest children’s literature in Britain,” Hackett wrote. “As for me, I’ll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl’s stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colorful glory.”
