Category Archives: 21st century

Roald Dahl and His Posthumous Editors: Send in the Crocodile…

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Roald Dahl told painter Francis Bacon in 1982 that he did not wish to be edited posthumously. “I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!” he announced.   “When I am gone, if that happens…I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”  He had no intention of passing along control over his texts to anyone else: he would decide if editing himself was necessary and execute the job himself.

He famously characterized his audience as “much more vulgar than grown-ups.  They have a coarser sense of humour.  They are basically more cruel.”   Not everyone will agree with this (although those who protest may need to watch children play unsupervised) and even those who are sympathetic have grounds to fault him for the extent to which he stooped to engage them.  It’s fair to ask if he might have put his gifts to better use than he did, but perhaps the truth is he deployed them perfectly.

Critics have found it easier to attack Dahl’s anti-Semiticism, racism, and misogyny than  his  craftsmanship. . Yet the wild word play, tumbling energy of the prose, and ability to conjure up extravagant characters in few words are not within the powers of an indifferent or careless writer, any more than is the creation an instantly recognizable fictional world where downtrodden children overcome monstrously cruel adults.  It’s a world which recalls the rise fairy tale and Dickens, with the knock-about humor of a Punch and Judy show punctuated with the gleeful cautionary alarms of Struwwelpeter.

As the years have passed, Penguin has found its star children’s book author’s unpleasantness more problematic.  No one released a crocodile last week when Puffin Books, a division of Penguin-Random House and Roald Dahl Story Company announced that  the author’s most popular works for children would be published in new texts revised to be more accessible and inclusive, a decision made on the basis of a routine  reassessment of steady-selling older stories that contain elements likely to offend a new generation of prospective purchasers, according to Rick Behari, a Story Company spokesman.  The study began in 2020 before Netflix  purchased the Story Company to obtain the film rights to Dahl’s books in 2021.

The announcement raised as many questions as it dodged.  Not a word was said about the release dates of the new editions.  According to a British and an American bookseller I spoke with, they had no copies for sale and had no idea when the books would be shipped.  Another interesting conundrum: would the revised and original texts both be available simultaneously, or would the originals be withdrawn, following the precedent of the six Dr. Seuss picture books judged in 2021 unacceptable by today’s standards.

Yesterday Puffin retreated in the face of criticism from PEN, Sir Salman Rushdie, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and a host of Dahl defenders in the media.   A set of the seventeen novels in the original versions will be reissued as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” at the end of the year alongside “the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time.”  The various stakeholders in this venture seemed to be avoiding the mistake of Hachette’s  attempt to alter outdated language and gender-role stereotypes in Enid Blyton, the only other children’s writer whose popularity approaches Dahl’s.  Her “Famous Five” series was tweaked, but the publisher withdrew the improved texts some years later when it became clear that readers had not responded enthusiastically.

The Daily Telegraph published the changes detected by four staff writers after collating the 2001 and 2023 texts of ten Dahl titles. (The Telegraph also sprung the story that the sensitivity consultant  Inclusive Minds, an organization dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in children’s literature, was secretly engaged to edit the stories.)  Eliminating the shaming adjective “fat” was a obvious target, given Dahl’s delight in creating grotesques whose bodies are as overweight as their personalities are repellent.   In the passages devoted to Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,  the word  “fat” no longer appears, “enormous” having been substituted for it.  The comparison of his face to “a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes” now reads simply a “ball of dough.”

Perhaps these smallish changes would be improvements if the rest of the passage had been carefully edited as well, but his mother still tells the journalists that “He eats so many candy bars a day that it was almost impossible for him not to find one.  Eating is his hobby.”   He still steals down to the chocolate river and kneels “scooping hot melted chocolate into his mouth as fast as he could.”   “Deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach” now reads “Augustus was ignoring everything” as he still sprawls down “full length on the ground with his head far out over the river, lapping up the chocolate like a dog.”   How many readers, regardless of age, will fail to agree with the Oompa-Loompas when they sing that  Augustus Gloop is a “great big greedy nincompoop”  by the time he blocks the pipe?   Will the  ninety-year-old Sir Quentin Blake be asked to redraw his two illustrations so that Augustus no longer personifies gluttony?   And Penguin is powerless to soften the even more hateful representation of Augustus Gloop in Tim Burton’s film, which leaves nothing left to the imagination and reinforces distasteful stereotypes of Germans.In The Witches, the edits in the scene where the grandmother teaches the little boy how to tell a witch from a real woman has received a good deal of publicity.  When the grandmother explains that  a real witch is bald and conceals her bare head under an expensive wig, the boy no longer responds with “Horrid.”  His suggestion that he’ll pull the wig off is flatly rejected.  “Don’t be foolish,” she says.“You can’t go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves.  Just you try it and see what happens.”  This has been struck and replaced with “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”   Would the grandmother, an old Norwegian witch hunter say anything like this in the middle of revealing her secret knowledge about these diabolical creatures to her grandson, who is completely enthralled?  Was the intention to remove triggers for women stricken with aleopecia or cancer?  By the way, why wasn’t the grandmother’s dirty of smoking “foul” black cigars that “smell of rubber” eliminated?

If the revisions were supposed to neatly and unobtrusively excise offensive elements from Dahl without significantly altering the ethos, then the exercise was indeed a success, although a Pyrrhic victory, because largely cosmetic changes were not enough to dismantle his fictional world. Parents made uncomfortable by his nastiness may feel pressured to introduce their children to the books because they rank among the classics of children’s literature for the moment.  But if the stories are not consistent with their values, they can vote with their pocketbooks or library cards.    A classic for children does not live forever, but has a life span, contrary to received wisdom.  When it no longer finds an audience, it will go out of print.  As Philip Pullman suggested, let Dahl’s books run their course and in the meantime encourage children to explore the works of other better writers who are not household words..  There may be no perfect solution to this conundrum, but for my money the home is a better place to ban or censor books than the publisher’s offices.

 

 

 

 

 

Mother Goose Land: An Early Shared World?

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Fictional universes are nothing new in children’s literature and it’s been acknowledged for some time that contemporary techniques for worldbuilding so widely used in science fiction, fantasy, video games were explored by authors like Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley in the mid-nineteenth century.

Makers of alphabet, toy, and cloth books also began to visualize shared worlds within the children’s literature universe around the same time.  By 1871, an uncredited artist created a set of puzzle pictures in The Alphabet of Fairy Tales  in the Routledge Shilling Toy Book series.  In the shadow of the house that Jack built, the forty thieves glower at Goody Two Shoes, while Little Thumb scampers by in his seven league boots, and Mother Goose hovers overhead.   The rhyming captions provides clues as to the identity of the various characters in this enchanted space where no one from the real world has blundered into.

Mother Goose takes on a new role in the early twentieth century presiding over a land populated by the familiar characters in nursery songs and lullabies, which over time has taken many increasing ingenious forms.  Polly-Peters Picture-Map and Guide to Mother Goose Land (ca. 1921), draws the realm in the shape of the good old dame in her steeple hat  flying on a goose, with their features superimposed on the northernmost reaches of the continent and the bird’s webbed feet trailing over the sea.

Gathered within her outline are her silly subjects, all recognizable from the original ditties, but otherwise unconnected by any geographical logic.  Alan and Janet Ahlberg did not need maps on the endpapers to their two iterations of Mother Goose Land in Each Peach Pear Plum or the Jolly Postman series because the action centered on a ramble through the countryside in the first, and a mailman on his bicycle delivering the post to the residents in the second.  While readers cannot give directions from one house to the next on the mailman’s route, they know that names of the different houses and their addresses because they are printed on the envelopes in the book.

One of the few startling narratives set in this country is William Pene du Bois’ Mother Goose for Christmas (c.1972), a  miniature cozy mystery. The old lady is a poet and proprietor of a book shop with an attached day care in a tiny village that has no policeman.  On Christmas Eve, the villagers are horrified to see two strange  suspicious looking men dragging the dame and Goosey Gander towards the boarded-up bakery.  Soon after they break and enter, clouds of black smoke rise from the chimney and the concerned villagers, terrified that Mother Goose is being mistreated and Goosey Gander roasted, build a bonfire to keep them warm so they can sing Christmas carols all night and forestall disaster. By morning, the smoke is bearing the delicious smells  of sugar and spice, but fears are still running high.  Suddenly the shutters of the bakery burst open, the thugs appear in pure white aprons and wide smiles just as Mother Goose flies in to introduce them to Simple Simon and the Knave of Hearts, the new owners of the Queen’s Bakery.

More recently Chris Raschka and Vladimir Radunsky compiled Mother Goose of Pudding Lane: A Small Tall Tale (2019) a typically quirky collaboration which is a nursery rhyme anthology that is also tells the story of Mother Goose and her husband Isaac, based on the hoary old urban legend that the patron saint of nursery rhymes and fairy tales was a real person, an Elizabeth Goose living in Boston at the end of the seventeenth century.  The author and illustrator cleverly frame rhymes as responses, comments, or extensions to  the stages of the Gooses’ lives.  The newly weds start a family immediately and it grows so large so quickly that Elizabeth herself is cast as the old woman in the shoe.  The object that looks like a coal scuttle at the bottom is really the heel of the family home.

As long as Mother Goose Land belongs to no one and everyone, there can never be a definitive iteration, but rather many delightfully different ones from which we can enjoy.