Yes, Roald Dahl sometimes got it wrong. But it isn’t up to us to make it right

Augustus Gloop is no longer “enormously fat”. He is simply enormous. Matilda’s fearsome hammer-throwing headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, does not now have a “great horsey face” that turns the colour of molten lava when she is angry. She just has a face.

In my 1983 edition of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, readers are warned that witches “dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs ... working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving around in a fancy car”. Today’s young readers are similarly warned to watch out for them working in ordinary jobs – this time the potential roles include “top scientist or running a business”.

The news, first reported by the UK’s Daily Telegraph, that Puffin has made changes to the latest editions of Roald Dahl’s best-loved books appears to have turned a few faces the colour of molten lava, such is the incandescent fury it has provoked.

The revelation that some of his novels – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches and Fantastic Mr Fox, among others – have been edited or rewritten to excise potentially insensitive language has been widely greeted as the latest salvo in the culture wars, an episode of egregious, McCarthyite wokewashing. The Telegraph offered several examples of “hundreds of changes to the original text”, including the removal of the word “fat” from every book. An older edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory described one character as looking “fat and well-fed. He had big lips and fat cheeks and a very fat neck”. In the newest edition, these sentences have been removed entirely. Oompa Loompas are now “small people”.

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“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed,” the writer Salman Rushdie tweeted in response.

The actor Brian Cox described it as disgraceful in an interview with Times Radio. “It’s a kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say, ‘Oh, that didn’t exist.’ Well, it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history.”

Even as a lifelong fan of his children’s novels who finds it hard to suppress an instinctive shudder at the idea of them being edited, these criticisms strike me as somewhat hyperbolic. In the clamour to outrage, one important fact seems to have been overlooked: even Roald Dahl himself recognised that he sometimes got things wrong and was not averse to making changes.

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Oompa Loompas, the most obvious example, have been through several iterations in the 60 years since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published. In the 1964 edition they are depicted as black pygmy people, who were smuggled over in crates from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before” to work for cacao beans in Wonka’s factory, after an en-masse firing of the white workers. This act of human trafficking and enforced slavery is treated as an undertaking of great benevolence by Wonka. Mel Stuart’s 1971 film portrays Oompa Loompas as little people with orange skin and green hair.

After a backlash sparked by the American children’s author Eleanor Cameron, who slammed it as “one of the most tasteless books ever written for children” and observed that the unfortunate Oompa Loompas “have never been given the opportunity of any life outside of the chocolate factory”, Dahl appears to have relented – although not before he offered full-throated response in print, in which he described Cameron as “patronising, all-knowing ... completely out of touch with reality.”

However, his subsequent 1973 revision depicts Oompa Loompas as “dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white’ skin”, says Dahl’s biographer Jeremy Treglown. They were transported not from Africa but from Loompaland. Tim Burton’s 2005 version digitally cloned a Kenyan-British actor of Indian ethnicity to play the entire tribe.

Dahl himself later admitted he had messed up. “It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa Loompas was racist, but it did occur to the NAACP and others ... After listening to the criticisms, I found myself sympathising with them, which is why I revised the book.”

Other contemporary criticisms of this and his other books, which seem to have faded over time, include that it offered a fake, patronising representation of poverty and that it is unduly violent, or that The Witches was misogynist. Cameron was also exercised about the fate of the grandparents, who were forced to move to the factory against their will.

What this reflects is that, for all the contemporary moral panic about so-called wokewashing, critics, writers, publishers and film producers have always been mindful of sensitivities in a changing culture. Making efforts to protect young people from lazy or crude cultural, ethnic and gender stereotypes in literature and other media is not a new or a harmful impulse – it is recently, through the prism of the culture wars, that it has come to be seen as deeply problematic.

The other salient fact that got lost in the collective fury is that, as Rushdie said, Dahl was “no angel”. In fact, he had some deeply repugnant views. In a 1983 article in the New Statesman, he suggested that Hitler had his reasons for murdering six million men, women and children. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”, he said. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

His family later apologised for his anti-Semitism, saying they recognised the “lasting and understandable hurt” it caused. He created some wonderfully strong, astonishingly mature small children but was off-puttingly fixated on the perceived physical attractiveness of the adults in his books. I’d argue that you wouldn’t take much away from the deliciously loathsome Revolting Rhymes if you amended the reference to Cinderella as a “dirty slut”. Similarly, he engaged in frequent, unapologetic body shaming.

You can love an artist’s work and be simultaneously troubled or even repulsed by their personal views. It is when those views and the work coincide that there is a conundrum. To be fair to Dahl, his less appealing personal characteristics are seldom reflected in his work. And this is where we come to the central question of whether the latest round of edits, which seem focused on excising language that perpetuates stereotypes around gender, race, violence, body size and mental health, are necessary.

Retrospectively editing – or, in this case, essentially rewriting – classic literature without the author’s permission (albeit with the permission of the estate) is a great responsibility and not one that should be undertaken lightly. It should be done rarely, judiciously, with the bar set to the absolute maximum height. Imagine what would be left of Dahl’s canon if, when it was in vogue to criticise the misogyny of The Witches, the publishers had ordered the books to be rewritten, or if perceptions of ageism or the sanitisation of poverty in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had led to a wholesale redrafting to reflect the concerns of the 1970s.

In this case Puffin employed “sensitivity readers” from an organisation called Inclusive Minds. The Roald Dahl Story Company, which owns the rights to his books (and which has belonged to Netflix since 2021), said in a statement that it worked with Puffin to review the texts because it wanted to ensure that “Dahl’s wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today”.

There are good arguments for why it may be wise to do a sensitivity check on time-honoured classics. But it’s important to remember that those sensitivity checks can only reflect contemporary mores. On this occasion they went too far.

In their effort to tone down language that perpetuates stereotypes, they lost sight of the essence of Dahl’s subversive appeal. In the case of The Witches this amounted to even adding a line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” Well, yes – and children are probably bright enough to work that out for themselves. “Fat” is not the only word that has been removed; so too have references to “crazy” and “mad”, words to which Dahl was partial, though never in a way that seemed to poke fun at mental-health issues. Weirdly, Fantastic Mr Fox’s three sons have become daughters.

The darkness and macabre plot lines in his writing aren’t incidental or purely there for shock value; they are integral to his stories. These are books about young orphans who are packed off to live with abusive, sadistic aunts and who subsequently escape on a giant piece of fruit. They are stories about terrible, neglectful, loathsome parents and vengeful children. Willy Wonka is a healthy vegetarian who keeps slaves and lures children into his world with chocolate. Disobedience and rebellion are celebrated. Dahl understood, as Maurice Sendak did, that children are not entirely pure and passive but infinitely darker, more complex and interesting. Sendak said, “You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”

Vitally, Dahl also knew that children are smart enough not to take his writing literally. They know it’s wrong and disgusting and repulsive – the fact that they know this is part of its appeal. It is unthinkable that an adult would write such rude, shocking, sadistic, gruesome and outrageous things in a book for children, and that is precisely why they love it. They’re in on the joke. If you really wanted to clean up Dahl’s texts to remove everything that could potentially strike a young reader as offensive, there wouldn’t be much left. The books are offensive; that is the whole point.

As Dahl himself astutely pointed out in his February 1973 reply to Eleanor Cameron, who had suggested that teachers find more worthwhile books to read, “I would dearly like to see Mrs Cameron trying to read Little Women, or Robinson Crusoe for that matter, to a class of today’s children. The lady is completely out of touch with reality. She would be howled out of the classroom.”

Might children be damaged by his words? It seems appropriate to leave the final words to the writer himself, who died in 1990. He described the idea that any child would be harmed by reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as “the ultimate effrontery. The book is dedicated to my son Theo, now twelve years old. Theo was hit by a taxi in New York when a small child and was terribly injured. We fought a long battle to get him where he is today, and we all adore him. So the thought that I would write a book for him that might actually do him harm is too ghastly to contemplate. It is an insensitive and a monstrous implication.”

His own children were “marvellous and gay and happy, and I like to think that all my storytelling has contributed a little bit to their happiness. The story they like best of all is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Mrs Cameron will stop them reading it only over my dead body”.