A statement from the Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the rights to the author’s estate, has defended the changes as “small and carefully considered”
delighted in making readers squirm. His books for children, most of them written between 1961 and 1990, are, a British newspaper, revealed that hundreds of words and phrases had been altered or removed in the latest British editions of many of Dahl’s books. In the revised “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, for instance, published by Puffin, the gluttonous Augustus Gloop is not “enormously fat” but merely “enormous”.
Publishers hire sensitivity readers to offer an extra layer of editorial oversight, usually before a book is published. Their individual areas of expertise usually match their own identities or experiences—a given ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation, say—which, publishers hope, makes them best qualified to spot troublesome phrasing.
Sensitivity readers have generally been employed to check children’s and young-adult fiction. But recent controversies have prompted their use for adult fiction, too. Irvine Welsh, a Scottish writer of gritty novels, praised a “trans reader” who had helped him refine a transgender character in “The Long Knives”, published last year. In 2020 “American Dirt”, a much-hyped novel about a family of migrants by Jeanine Cummins, was lambasted for its crude depictions of its Mexican characters.
Dahl certainly had prejudices. In 2020 his family apologised for his anti-Semitism . And this is not the first time that Dahl’s books have been updated. In the first edition of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, published in 1964, the Oompa Loompas were black pygmies from the “African jungle”. In response to criticism, in editions after 1973 Dahl gave them “rosy-white” skin instead. The new editions remove references to their skin tone altogether.
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