Roald Dahl: Cultural Vandalism

The woke censorship mob is at it again. This time they have gone back over thirty years to destroy Roald Dahl’s children’s books, which I grew up with as a child. I remember having the book Charlie and The Chocolate Factory read to me, and as a toddler I apparently watched the film repeatedly; I even had a birthday party based on this book. When I was at primary school, they used to read Matilda and George’s Marvellous Medicine to us at the end of the day. But for future generations, the chances of having the pleasure of these wonderful books has been all but extinguished.

In February 2023, the ‘sensitivity readers’ at Puffin Publishers decided to rummage through Dahl’s books and take out any content that might be considered ‘offensive’. These people find almost anything offensive, so the chance that these books would survive their scans was slim. As I expected, they have found something that may hurt kids’ feelings in most of his bestselling titles so far. In Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, you can no longer call Augustus Gloop ‘fat’. Instead, you have to call him ‘enormous’ which means almost the same thing. In The Twits, you can no longer refer to Mrs Twit as ‘ugly and beastly’ – you now have to call her just plain ‘beastly’, which does not have nearly the same effect.

The list continues: the Oompa-Loompas are no longer ‘small men’, they are now ‘small people’ – in other words gender-neutral, one of the sensitivity readers’ obsessions. I do not believe the average child cares what gender the characters are; they just want to read the book. How is a child going to find the word ‘men’ offensive? Fantastic Mr Fox’s three sons are now his three daughters. Next they’ll change Hans Christian Andersen’s Cinderella’s stepsisters to ‘stepbrothers’. If Dahl wanted his characters to be described this way then he would have done so. I truly feel for his legacy as he has no way of stopping this vandalism – he died in 1990.

Effectively, the original books will be banned, with the new versions replacing them. Shops will now be keeping Dahl’s original books under the counter. Instead of selling drugs, the criminal underclass could now make a nice side-hustle selling the old copies of Dahl’s books. To that end, make sure that you always have an original copy of Matilda with you. If the police search you for drugs, they will lost interest when they find the book.

What George Orwell predicted in1984 is coming to pass. Winston had to rewrite news stories to make it look as if the stories had always been that way and the current woke censors are rewriting these books with the same intention. Orwell’s ideas, which he wrote as a warning, have not been heeded. We already have the 77th Brigade, as exposed by Big Brother Watch, and are heading into a future where our every move will be monitored. The Thought Police will replace the Metropolitan Police to ensure that we are all reading the right books and thinking the right thoughts. What chance is there for subsequent generations?

Hopefully parents will refuse to read these ‘inclusive’ versions of the books to their children, and will manage to lay their hands on the original copies. It’s time to start collecting the old Roald Dahl books, and if you already have them, consider it a duty to keep them. Once these absurd versions of the books become the norm, we may lose Dahl’s masterful wit and dark humour forever. 

Jack Watson has a Substack newsletter called Ten Foot Tigers about being a Hull City fan. You can subscribe here.