Penguin announces ‘The Roald Dahl Classic Collection’ after outrage
Penguin has decided Roald Dahl’s books can remain intact after all.
The decision to publish “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” comes just days after Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House, faced an onslaught of backlash for announcing alterations of Dahl’s texts in new editions of the 20th-century books. The classic collection, however, would offer readers 17 of Dahl’s original titles free of any sensitivity rewrites.
Classics like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda” and “The Witches” were sanitized to remove offensive and insensitive language. Some references to ethnicity, gender, physical characteristics and mental health were changed to adhere to more modern sensibilities.
British newspaper the Telegraph compared the original text to the altered versions and found rewrites that included using “enormous” rather than “fat” to describe Augustus Gloop in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” And in “James and the Giant Peach,” a line that read, “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat/ And tremendously flabby at that,” had been rewritten to say, “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute/ And deserved to be squashed by the fruit.”
Celebrated author Salman Rushdie, who is also published by Penguin Random House, called the move “absurd censorship,” writing on Twitter that “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
PEN American Chief Executive Suzanne Nossel was
another critic of the move.
“At @PENamerica we are alarmed at news of ‘hundreds of changes” to venerated
works by @roald_ dahl in a purported effort to scrub the books of that which might offend
someone,” Nossel tweeted. “Amidst fierce battles against book bans and strictures on what can be taught and read, selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon.”
And on Friday, Puffin changed its tune and released a statement offering a compromise of sorts.
“We recognise the importance of keeping Dahl’s classic texts in print,” the statement reads. “By making both Puffin and Penguin versions available, we are offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvellous stories. Puffin announces today the release of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to keep the author’s classic texts in print.”
Nossel shared news of the classic collection on Friday in a nine-tweet thread, sharing that she and Rushdie had a conversation about the revised texts.