Roald Dahl is famous for writing childhood favorites such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” and “James and the Giant Peach,” but he will go down in history as yet another unknowing victim of retroactive and posthumous edits made to cater to sensitive readers and, more importantly, leftist ideologues.
Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, recently decided to make hundreds of changes to his work including no longer referring to gluttonous Augustus Gloop as “fat.” These alterations weren’t just protested by the public, they were made against the late author’s explicit wishes.
“I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!” Dahl told artist Francis Bacon during a meeting in 1982.
Even after Puffin reluctantly agreed to keep selling the original versions of Dahl’s work, the publisher continued to “force censored versions” on readers who had previously purchased digital versions of his books.
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Some argue such changes are simply “commercially savvy” because they appeal to younger generations and extend profits, but they are kidding themselves. Readers might not know it, but in the last decade especially, it’s become all too commonplace for the people who control America’s books to retroactively edit out narratives they find distasteful and words they find offensive, and strip awards from authors they deem racist. For more than a century now,
