Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Bowdlerising Factory

[lpm]

Netflix now own Roald Dahl books and want to cater for the snowflake generation. Rewriting to remove the occasional anti Semitism is one thing. Erasing the word "fat" is another. Much of the bowdlerising seems pointless, such as giving Mr Fox daughters instead of sons.

Even worse, the new sentences are all really clumsy and flat.

[bob sterman]

Didn't Dahl himself do this? I think early editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had the Oompa-Loompas as small African slaves that Wonka had shipped over in crates. They were changed to be "rosy-cheeked" and having come from Loompaland in later editions.

[Woodchopper]

Didn't Dahl himself do this? I think early editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had the Oompa-Loompas as small African slaves that Wonka had shipped over in crates. They were changed to be "rosy-cheeked" and having come from Loompaland in later editions.

Yes, in the film the Oompa-Loompas were changed to having green skin and orange hair after the NAACP objected to them being portrayed as pigmy Africans.

At the time Dahl’s publisher also scoured the books and called for edits of anything that might be offensive, including to the use of the word ‘spade’ to refer to an implement used for digging.
https://books.google.no/books?id=ttviDw ... &q&f=false

[lpm]

My 1973 Puffin edition has them "imported" from Loompaland but not rosy cheeked. Skin colour is not mentioned. They were smuggled in in crates but came voluntarily for wages. I wonder if he added the geography teacher joke at this version.

The rival chocolate makers are named as Fickelgruber, Prodnose and Slugworth, which of course I never understood as anti Semitism at the time.

[Tessa K]

I'm rereading Trilby* by George duMaurier. It was written in 1894 and there are some anti-semitic parts. My edition from 1995 has a note about this in the introduction which is fine for an adult book but I think it's different for kids' books.

Would they read an introduction? Would an adult reading the book aloud to a child explain? In a screen adaptation it's easier to update references or characters. It's often done with other non-offensive elements of old stories to make them more accessible to modern kids.

*yes it is the source of the hat name and also the term Svengali. He was the grandfather of Daphne of that name.

[Woodchopper]

My 1973 Puffin edition has them "imported" from Loompaland but not rosy cheeked. Skin colour is not mentioned. They were smuggled in in crates but came voluntarily for wages. I wonder if he added the geography teacher joke at this version.

Yes, apparently the first UK and US editions from the 60s had the Oompa-Loompas come from the darkest jungles of Africa and they are portrayed as black in the illustrations. This was seen as racist and there were objections. Though Dahl protested that he hadn't intended to evoke slavery.

[Tessa K]

My 1973 Puffin edition has them "imported" from Loompaland but not rosy cheeked. Skin colour is not mentioned. They were smuggled in in crates but came voluntarily for wages. I wonder if he added the geography teacher joke at this version.

Yes, apparently the first UK and US editions from the 60s had the Oompa-Loompas come from the darkest jungles of Africa and they are portrayed as black in the illustrations. This was seen as racist and there were objections. Though Dahl protested that he hadn't intended to evoke slavery.

Ah right, not slavery, just colonialism.

[Grumble]

My 1973 Puffin edition has them "imported" from Loompaland but not rosy cheeked. Skin colour is not mentioned. They were smuggled in in crates but came voluntarily for wages. I wonder if he added the geography teacher joke at this version.

Yes, apparently the first UK and US editions from the 60s had the Oompa-Loompas come from the darkest jungles of Africa and they are portrayed as black in the illustrations. This was seen as racist and there were objections. Though Dahl protested that he hadn't intended to evoke slavery.

Ah right, not slavery, just colonialism.

But where they came from was really bad, so it was only fair they repay the nice factory owner by working for him for the rest of their lives and never seeing the outside world again.

[jimbob]

Yes, apparently the first UK and US editions from the 60s had the Oompa-Loompas come from the darkest jungles of Africa and they are portrayed as black in the illustrations. This was seen as racist and there were objections. Though Dahl protested that he hadn't intended to evoke slavery.

Ah right, not slavery, just colonialism.

But where they came from was really bad, so it was only fair they repay the nice factory owner by working for him for the rest of their lives and never seeing the outside world again.

Ooof

[headshot]

Y'all know that Wonka isn't the hero of that book, right?

[lpm]

They are portrayed as really happy, always singing and laughing and all the chocolate they desire. I wanted to work at Wonkas as a child.

[Stranger Mouse]

They are portrayed as really happy, always singing and laughing and all the chocolate they desire. I wanted to work at Wonkas as a child.

George Santos did

[headshot]

They are portrayed as really happy, always singing and laughing and all the chocolate they desire. I wanted to work at Wonkas as a child.

Wonka routinely kills naughty children.

[lpm]

Wonka killed no-one. But he had an unacceptable rate of industrial accidents. And he fired his entire human workforce to prevent industrial espionage.

It's interesting there's been near zero support for these edits. Even the wokies can't defend the removal of the word fat or changing the sex of fox cubs.

[bagpuss]

Speaking as a parent who's had to self-edit while reading aloud to her child, which is a right sodding pain if you don't spot it far enough ahead, I'm generally in favour of kids' books being tweaked to remove offensive words, phrases and attitudes. It's not as if the originals disappear and history is erased - the earlier editions are still in existence and generally still available to buy second hand if you really want to.

If it were my decision, I wouldn't personally go as far as to change the gender of characters, the word fat I'm not sure of but would probably leave that in too, as long as it was used as a description and not some kind of character judgement. Changing things that would now stand no chance of being published, though, seems entirely reasonable, for children's books specifically. The case is a whole lot less clear cut for books intended for adults, that no-one is going to read before they're in their teens at least, when they will have enough understanding to comprehend that the book they're reading is of its time and therefore different in a whole host of ways from what would be written and published now.

There's an argument perhaps to leave everything as it was and use these things as a teaching point for kids as to how attitudes have changed and how racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, etc, views were the norm when these books were written, really not that long ago. I've certainly done that myself. But sometimes you just want to read a bedtime story and not get into political discussions when you're trying to get your child to sleep. And of course, if they're reading a book themselves, you can't know exactly what they're reading, unless you re-read everything just before they read it - believe me, you can't rely on your own memory of reading the book as a child, <cough> decades ago, even if you're a much younger parent than I.

As for any replacement text being of considerably lower quality than the original, that's unforgiveable. Emulating Roald Dahl isn't an easy job, but it shouldn't be too difficult for a half-decent writer to make a good enough job of it that it's not too obvious where the joins are.

[Fishnut]

Speaking as a parent who's had to self-edit while reading aloud to her child, which is a right sodding pain if you don't spot it far enough ahead, I'm generally in favour of kids' books being tweaked to remove offensive words, phrases and attitudes. It's not as if the originals disappear and history is erased - the earlier editions are still in existence and generally still available to buy second hand if you really want to.

If it were my decision, I wouldn't personally go as far as to change the gender of characters, the word fat I'm not sure of but would probably leave that in too, as long as it was used as a description and not some kind of character judgement. Changing things that would now stand no chance of being published, though, seems entirely reasonable, for children's books specifically. The case is a whole lot less clear cut for books intended for adults, that no-one is going to read before they're in their teens at least, when they will have enough understanding to comprehend that the book they're reading is of its time and therefore different in a whole host of ways from what would be written and published now.

There's an argument perhaps to leave everything as it was and use these things as a teaching point for kids as to how attitudes have changed and how racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, etc, views were the norm when these books were written, really not that long ago. I've certainly done that myself. But sometimes you just want to read a bedtime story and not get into political discussions when you're trying to get your child to sleep. And of course, if they're reading a book themselves, you can't know exactly what they're reading, unless you re-read everything just before they read it - believe me, you can't rely on your own memory of reading the book as a child, <cough> decades ago, even if you're a much younger parent than I.

As for any replacement text being of considerably lower quality than the original, that's unforgiveable. Emulating Roald Dahl isn't an easy job, but it shouldn't be too difficult for a half-decent writer to make a good enough job of it that it's not too obvious where the joins are.

This is the best take I've seen written about the edits.

[lpm]

Lol, Thomas Bowdler himself was the parent who had to self-edit while reading Shakespeare aloud to family, particularly with ladies present, and thought it was a right sodding pain if you don't spot naughty bits far enough ahead.

Trust in the intelligence of children, particularly the better educated children of today. They know what are the bullying or abusive words. The bullies alway lose in Dahl and readers will always back Dahl's underdogs.

[El Pollo Diablo]

Meh. It's a battle between capitalism and public sentiment. If Philip Pullman is right that Dahl is best left to the past and new authors should be allowed the limelight, and if the public over time agree with him, then book sales will decline. Dahl's estate and the publishers don't want that, so here we are.

Can't really summon up much energy to give a sh.t about it to be honest. Most people won't notice or care. It doesn't matter.

[kerrya1]

Speaking as a parent who's had to self-edit while reading aloud to her child, which is a right sodding pain if you don't spot it far enough ahead, I'm generally in favour of kids' books being tweaked to remove offensive words, phrases and attitudes. It's not as if the originals disappear and history is erased - the earlier editions are still in existence and generally still available to buy second hand if you really want to.

If it were my decision, I wouldn't personally go as far as to change the gender of characters, the word fat I'm not sure of but would probably leave that in too, as long as it was used as a description and not some kind of character judgement. Changing things that would now stand no chance of being published, though, seems entirely reasonable, for children's books specifically. The case is a whole lot less clear cut for books intended for adults, that no-one is going to read before they're in their teens at least, when they will have enough understanding to comprehend that the book they're reading is of its time and therefore different in a whole host of ways from what would be written and published now.

There's an argument perhaps to leave everything as it was and use these things as a teaching point for kids as to how attitudes have changed and how racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, etc, views were the norm when these books were written, really not that long ago. I've certainly done that myself. But sometimes you just want to read a bedtime story and not get into political discussions when you're trying to get your child to sleep. And of course, if they're reading a book themselves, you can't know exactly what they're reading, unless you re-read everything just before they read it - believe me, you can't rely on your own memory of reading the book as a child, <cough> decades ago, even if you're a much younger parent than I.

As for any replacement text being of considerably lower quality than the original, that's unforgiveable. Emulating Roald Dahl isn't an easy job, but it shouldn't be too difficult for a half-decent writer to make a good enough job of it that it's not too obvious where the joins are.

Absolutely agree. I have used some outdated words / phrases when reading older books to have a discussion with my little ones (6 & 8) but when it is 9pm and I just want them to go to sleep so I can drink a glass of wine in peace then it would be nice to know that a book is "safe" for want of a better word. The quality is a much bigger issue I think, Dahl is so good because the writing is brilliant for kids and adults alike so if that is spoiled then it is unforgiveable.

[lpm]

Meh. It's a battle between capitalism and public sentiment. If Philip Pullman is right that Dahl is best left to the past and new authors should be allowed the limelight, and if the public over time agree with him, then book sales will decline. Dahl's estate and the publishers don't want that, so here we are.

Can't really summon up much energy to give a sh.t about it to be honest. Most people won't notice or care. It doesn't matter.

It does matter.

It is Orwellian, in the 1984 sense of trying to change words to change reality. That anti-semitism ceases to exist if a sentence disappears from a page and that bullying jibes won't happen in schools if bullying words are erased. Imagine believing a fat boy won't be bullied in the playground if Augustus Gloop is now described as "enormous". That racist kids won't discover racist abuse if the BFG's cloak is no longer black.

It's storytelling that determines the world and young children need to be exposed, in tiny doses, to the cruelty of humanity. Move on from Sparkle the Unicorn having fun with her friends. Get an inoculation to tyranny and evil through seeing Trunchball abusing children and being defeated. It's not nice but it's totally necessary.

Thomas Bowdler wanted to obscure the sexuality and rudeness of Shakespeare from his family, concealing the existence of things like prostitution and female sexual desire. We mock the Victorians for it. So why would we want to repeat this in 2023, obscuring hatreds from our family and pretending nasty things don't happen? Children's books are all about good vs evil, getting more complex with age range with the goodies beginning to have flaws and the baddies beginning to have redeeming features, until teenagers get the full literary exploration of the nature of humanity. Not only is it pointless to interrupt this development, it's dangerous. Empathy with others comes with understanding others as they are, not seeing a sanitised version of others.

Sensitivity reading is fundamentally wrong as a concept.

[dyqik]

Meh. It's a battle between capitalism and public sentiment. If Philip Pullman is right that Dahl is best left to the past and new authors should be allowed the limelight, and if the public over time agree with him, then book sales will decline. Dahl's estate and the publishers don't want that, so here we are.

Can't really summon up much energy to give a sh.t about it to be honest. Most people won't notice or care. It doesn't matter.

It does matter.

It is Orwellian, in the 1984 sense of trying to change words to change reality. That anti-semitism ceases to exist if a sentence disappears from a page and that bullying jibes won't happen in schools if bullying words are erased. Imagine believing a fat boy won't be bullied in the playground if Augustus Gloop is now described as "enormous". That racist kids won't discover racist abuse if the BFG's cloak is no longer black.

Orwell was correct. Antisemitism, racism and other bigotry, as well as bullying, are largely learned behaviors, usually learned at a young age. Remove the source of learning from young children, and it's much easier to reduce the amount of it.

[lpm]

Huh? The source of learning is adults, older children and peer children. That's how humans develop.

Children's fiction explores how bullying and bigotry affects people. It's what creates empathy. How can children rebel against their bigoted elders if they don't delight in fictional rebellion?

[dyqik]

Huh? The source of learning is adults, older children and peer children. That's how humans develop.

Children's fiction explores how bullying and bigotry affects people. It's what creates empathy. How can children rebel against their bigoted elders if they don't delight in fictional rebellion?

They can't rebel, or deal with bigotry of the author in stories in the correct way, until they've developed the analytical skills necessary to recognize and understand dogwhistle bigotry and the like. Which is not something taught to children at the target age for having Ronald Dahl books read to them. It's more of a secondary school thing.

Young children don't rebel against their parents, it's not until teenage years that that starts to happen. Younger children are more likely to copy and conform.

Much of the bigotry in Roald Dahl's work discussed above is not rebelled against in the stories, it's just there as background that demonstrates the author's bigotry.

[lpm]

It is taught in primary schools. It's taught in nurseries!

Young children absolutely rebel against parents, in the sense of escaping parental control. Almost every story has the children acting without or beyond their parents, frequently with a bad guardian to escape from. Have you never hovered behind a two year old who is marching away from parents in defiance of already established rules?

I agree that there's subtle bigotry in Dahl, such as "Fickelgruber" being one of Wonka's rival chocolate makers, and that's worthless crap that should be edited. But that's completely different to asking children if it's unfair to Augustus Gloop to call him fat or unfair to girls to make Mr Fox's cubs boys, which are everyday discussions coming out of the books. Changing language does not change reality.

[bagpuss]

Meh. It's a battle between capitalism and public sentiment. If Philip Pullman is right that Dahl is best left to the past and new authors should be allowed the limelight, and if the public over time agree with him, then book sales will decline. Dahl's estate and the publishers don't want that, so here we are.

Can't really summon up much energy to give a sh.t about it to be honest. Most people won't notice or care. It doesn't matter.

It does matter.

It is Orwellian, in the 1984 sense of trying to change words to change reality. That anti-semitism ceases to exist if a sentence disappears from a page and that bullying jibes won't happen in schools if bullying words are erased. Imagine believing a fat boy won't be bullied in the playground if Augustus Gloop is now described as "enormous". That racist kids won't discover racist abuse if the BFG's cloak is no longer black.

Funnily enough, I haven't seen a single person arguing that bullying and racism will magically disappear because of the changing of a few words in a handful of books. So feel free to laugh at that idea all you like, as it's something you've made up.

But a young child calling a black kid in their class the n word because they read it in a book and had no idea that in the 21st century it's pretty universally accepted as an appalling word that no one should use - that I can absolutely imagine happening. The fault of the parents for not teaching them that, you say? Well, funnily enough, I don't have time to read every book my child reads before they do and, as I said before, I most definitely cannot rely on my memory of those books from when I was a child. I've had to censor the n word at least twice from classic children's books, when reading them aloud. The sort of quality book that you'd happily let your child read without ever questioning it, because they're "good" books so why not? Both times I had to censor the word, I was completely taken aback and had to remind myself how long ago those books were written. Had I not been reading them myself, I would never have known that the word was in there. Why would I teach my child not to use a word that I have no reason to believe they've ever heard of?

It's storytelling that determines the world and young children need to be exposed, in tiny doses, to the cruelty of humanity. Move on from Sparkle the Unicorn having fun with her friends. Get an inoculation to tyranny and evil through seeing Trunchball abusing children and being defeated. It's not nice but it's totally necessary.

I 100% agree. Has anyone argued that "Matilda" should be removed from all libraries and bookshops, or Trunchbull's evilness dialled down so she's just a little bit annoying? If so, can you show me where?

Thomas Bowdler wanted to obscure the sexuality and rudeness of Shakespeare from his family, concealing the existence of things like prostitution and female sexual desire. We mock the Victorians for it. So why would we want to repeat this in 2023, obscuring hatreds from our family and pretending nasty things don't happen? Children's books are all about good vs evil, getting more complex with age range with the goodies beginning to have flaws and the baddies beginning to have redeeming features, until teenagers get the full literary exploration of the nature of humanity. Not only is it pointless to interrupt this development, it's dangerous. Empathy with others comes with understanding others as they are, not seeing a sanitised version of others.

Sensitivity reading is fundamentally wrong as a concept.

The reason we mock Victorians for behaving this way is in large part because they were doing it to protect the perceived delicate sensibilities of adults. As I said before, that is an entirely different thing from editing for children. We have a 9pm watershed on tv so that we know that kids can watch things before that time and not be exposed to adult content. We have ratings for films so that we know whether something is suitable for a child to watch. The idea that things are edited or made differently in the first place for the consumption of children is pretty widely accepted. And again, at what point has anyone said that we should pretend that nasty things don't happen? I'm all for kids learning about awful things through fiction first, so that they can gradually discover the horrors of humans and their behaviour towards each other in a safe way where they can sleep afterwards because "it's just a story".

What I'm arguing for is certain language being changed so that kids (and I'm talking primary school kids here) don't read books and think that certain things are OK because they read them in a book. And by "think" there I'm not meaning a clear thought process, but just kids absorbing words and language and using those phrases word for word because they read them in a book that their teachers and parents allowed them to read, so they must be OK, right?

That's why, while I have no real issue with the word "fat" being used in a book, the word "fat" being used with the clear implication that the author is using it to mean that person is lazy and inferior in some way, that's a different thing and I'd be quite happy for that to be erased. I'm not saying that that's the case with Augustus Gloop by the way, I can't remember the full description of him, but I'm expanding on my earlier point about fat being a problem if it's used to mean a character flaw. Describing Mrs Twit as "ugly" to add to the idea that she's a horrible person, is another example of what I mean. A book that refers to people in Africa as N-words and also describes them in a very casual way as being less intelligent or in other ways inferior, would not suffer from having that section removed or tweaked.

Trust in the intelligence of children, particularly the better educated children of today. They know what are the bullying or abusive words. The bullies alway lose in Dahl and readers will always back Dahl's underdogs.

And what about the kids whose parents are nasty bullies and are bringing their kids up that way too? Is it a good idea if the books they're reading are also teaching them that fat or ugly people are bad people, for example?

Also, I like to think that the bagkitten is pretty intelligent and acceptably well-educated. She has parents who do their best not to discriminate against people for any reason, and to make it very clear to her that anything like that is wrong. She reads lots of books, and thank f**k turned her nose up at anything pink and sparkly from an early age so she's definitely not living in some kind of sparkly unicorn bubble. But words, phrases and attitudes that we read repeatedly are sneaky buggers and can influence our own attitudes without us even realising it and I'd be happier if certain words, phrases and attitudes never got into her head in the first place. Stuff we read as kids sticks, firmly. I still sometimes, though thankfully now only in my own head, use the word "misled", pronounced my-zulled, because I read it in books as a kid and didn't know it was really mis-led. It has a subtly different meaning to mis-led as my understanding of the meaning from the context was obviously slightly off. But even decades later and despite having learned the correct wordage somewhere around pre-teen age, it's still in my head. Yes, that's different from nasty words or phrases, but it shows just how much things we read as kids sticks, even in this case when it was corrected when I was still a kid.