Words such as “father” and “mother” have become offensive not because some children are orphaned, as was always the case, but because some children have two fathers or two mothers, and even more have no fathers. The new versions of Dahl’s books contain hundreds of amendments, some pointless, most implicitly doctrinaire, and others outright mendacious-for example, the dedication of a whole book to all doctors, which Dahl never made. Children are to be indoctrinated into not being disgusted by ugliness. It is the task of publishers, apparently, to prevent feelings of discomfort among readers, or at least designated groups of readers.
In the new versions proposed by the publisher, Puffin, words such as “fat” and “ugly” have been removed because some people are ugly, and many are fat (many more than when Dahl wrote the books, in fact), and therefore might be upset by the use of these words and suffer some kind of crisis. Children, necessarily dominated by adults and required by them to control their impulses, delight to see adults in all their hideousness, physical and moral. Children love them because-dare I say it-they are transgressive.
The latest victims of bowdlerization are the children’s books of Roald Dahl, which have now sold 250 million copies worldwide. The desire to bowdlerize, it seems, springs eternal. We thought that, being fully mature for the first time in human history, we had overcome both the need and the impulse to bowdlerize. I remember a time when we laughed at the Bowdlers, and the bowdlerizers, as being absurd, prissy, and prudish. Her brother, Thomas, did the same for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, thus giving the English language a delightful new verb: to bowdlerize, that is, to remove supposedly offensive language from a literary work, thereby weakening it and reducing its impact. In 1807, Harriet Bowdler edited The Family Shakespeare, a version of the Bard from which anything vaguely salacious had been expunged.
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