Category Archives: British children’s books

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.

 

 

 

 

 

The HMS Victory Goes Down: A Famous Naval Disaster Illustrated in The Pretty Book of Pictures (1765)

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The Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses is the best known natural history book John Newbery issued–not because its illustrations were so fine, but because the majority were copied from out-of-date seventeenth-century sources like Edward Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts (1659) and Francis Willughby’s Ornithology (1674). Sometimes owners colored them with more artistic verve than accuracy…

The handful of illustrations at the end are almost never mentioned because they have nothing to do with natural history.   Master Tommy and Miss Polly are shown “taking the air” in their coach in one and dancing a minuet in another.   Mother Bunch standing outside her cottage under the hill, where she sells cheesecakes. A natural philosopher observes the night sky through a telescope, while a student reads as he walks through the countryside.

The first one in the group, that of the sinking man-of-war Victory, had never caught my eye until last week. It suddenly occurred to me that there are illustrations of shipwrecks everywhere in eighteenth-century children’s books–ships leaving ports, ships in full sail, ships in distress, ships breaking up on the rocks.   Whoever decided to include the illustration of the Victory took it for granted that little readers were interested in shipwrecks. If they didn’t understand the reference, they would ask someone older who explain it to them.   Not having brothers who went to sea like Jane Austen, I would have to figure it out for myself.

Could it refer to the most famous ship of the line bearing that name, the HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson’s flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar, where the hero met his death in 1805.  The information I found suggested it had to be another ship.  Nelson’s Victory was not launched until 1765 and The Pretty Book of Pictures was first published in 1752.  It’s not impossible that this block was added in later editions, but I wasn’t able to confirm that hypothesis.   The Rothschild catalog doesn’t describe the illustrations in the 1752 edition and and the National Library of Scotland has not digitized its second edition of 1754.  Before Nelson, the Victory was  Keppel’s flagship in the Battle of Ushant in 1778 and Jervis’s in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797.    This ship, which saw so much action was never sunk: since 1923 she has been drydocked in Portsmouth, the oldest naval ship still in commission, with 245 years’ of service.

Admiral Sir John Balchen’s memorial in Westminster Abbey showing the Victory sinking

Nelson’s Victory, I discovered, was the sixth of her name in the Royal Navy and there is a story that the sailors, being a superstitious lot, thought it would be unlucky to give her that name.  The Victory depicted in the Pretty Book of Pictures, had to be the fifth.   A 100-gun first-rate ship of the line launched in 1737, she was the flagship of the navy squadron charged with protecting the Channel waters in the 1740s.   In the War of the Austrian Succession, she was Admiral Sir John Balchen’s flagship during the blockade of Tagus in Spain.  When Balchen’s fleet reached the Channel in early October, a storm scattered the ships before they reached port. The Victory was separated from the rest and was believed to have gone down at Black Rock in the Casquets in the Channel Islands on October 4, 1744.  The design with sides rather high for the draft of her hull were said to have made her unstable in heavy or rough weather.   All 1100 men on board were lost, making it the worst disaster in British naval history. 

Naval histories quickly incorporated accounts of the tragedy. George Berkeley and Sir John Hill’s The naval history of Britain, from the earliest periods of which
there are accounts in history, to the conclusion of the year M.DCC.LVI (1756)  solemnly reported “Parts of the wreck were found by the people of Alderney, who also gave the account that they heard the discharges of near 100 guns in the Night, Signals of Distress.”  It was a natural subject for a dramatic marine painting like the one by Peter Monamy to the left.  Allusions to the disaster turn up in contemporary literature.  A correspondent with The Wise Woman in Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1746) inadvertently reveals what a self-absorbed creature she is by complaining that the sensible young man courting her reflected upon the tragedy of the Victory.  If he must bring up the subject of the sea, she says peevishly, he ought to compare  her to Venus rising out of it!

Many attempts over the next two hundred and sixty years were made to find the HMS Victory and in May 2008 Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration succeeded in finding the wreck in over 300 feet of water a good 80 kilometers past the Casquets.   Two of her brass cannons were salvaged and are on display in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.  Because of the complexity of maritime law regarding salvage, it is unclear if and when the wreck will be raised from the seabed.