Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;84hiN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;84hiN</a>

Here&#x27;s a good list of changes. Most are about removing any references to ugly or fat. But also other strange things like changing the author&#x27;s Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck, not calling people crazy, swapping screeching to annoying, removing brothers and sisters to favor &quot;siblings&quot; and using &quot;folks&quot; instead of &quot;ladies and gentlemen&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;incunabula&#x2F;status&#x2F;1626860237104857089" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;incunabula&#x2F;status&#x2F;1626860237104857089</a>

This is why supporting things like zlibrary is important.<p>One of the arguments I heard in favour of copyright was to give a financial incentive to preserve and maintain old cultural works. Lol guess that theory is out the window.<p>This entire debacle is only possible because of the publishers.

I&#x27;d be interested in hearing the most credible&#x2F;reputable sources speaking out in favor of these changes. I&#x27;ve exclusively seen commentators dunking on this (rightfully so), across the political spectrum. To be clear: I&#x27;m wondering if we can find specific people speaking up for this, not an analysis of whose side of the culture war is most culpable for it.

I&#x27;m a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I&#x27;m happy to see gay &quot;normalized&quot; in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it&#x27;s going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a third of the way through because every character was some form of LGBT or interracial or something. It made the story seem fake and unrealistic. I think editing classic books is wrong even if it is covering up something like hate or bigotry. History forgotten is history bound to repeat itself.

People will complain about political correctness, but this is just the market and intellectual property law in action.<p>In my experience, the ‘left’ doesn’t want the public sphere to become coddled and inoffensive. Advertisers and media companies do. It’s risk aversion.<p>Ideally, our shared cultural legacy would not be subject to the whims of corporate executives.

I think the current conflict (as evidenced by how headed the discussion is on this thread) is an artifact of copyright law.<p>I do not believe anyone would have any issues with creating forked&#x2F;adapted&#x2F;refreshed versions of literary works. We do it all the time. No one reads the original Grimm tales to kids because the original versions were gruesome. Many would count as horror. We tell kids adapted versions. But since they are public domain anyone can fork these works and create new versions. There is nothing wrong with updating works to reflect current cultural mores. We always did it and will continue to do it.<p>The issue is that this is done by copyright holders and the new approved version replaces the old version on the bookshelves because copyright gives them a monopoly on distribution. Unless you find it used, you will no longer be able to buy the old version. Some people want the old version because it is the version they know, it is the version they grew up with and it is the version they want to pass forward and because being a authored work (instead of folk) they want the version the author wrote with all of its cultural artifacts preserved.<p>To make the conflict clearer, imagine that once Windows 11 (or 8, or Vista) was launched, everyone on Windows 10 (or 7 or XP) would have been force upgraded to the new version and the old version would be deauthorized. Or imagine if copyright was infinite in duration and Disney bought the rights to the Grimm tales and now only the Disney versions are authorized for commercial distribution. You would simply not be able to buy the older version.<p>To me this makes it even clearer that the length of copyright being longer than the life of the author is an absurdity. Culture does not belong to anyone, it belongs to all of humanity.

So many classics hit us differently today<p>I recently read all of Ian Flemming’s James Bond novels.<p>The identification of race as correlated with strong personality and motive characteristics is pervasive, especially for the enemy in any narrative.<p>Often negative, but often positive - the enemy is always “different”, but must always be respected, never underestimated.<p>And foreign characters often team up with Bond, adding their valuable foreign angles. Bond is a cosmopolitan creature.<p>The pervasive racial and cultural contrast enhancement was clearly entertaining for a less globally aware audience.<p>Even US vs UK characteristic differences are magnified.<p>And the subtext is always “live and let live” for general populations.<p>But I would certainly talk to any young, but ambitious reading, progeny of mine about that aspect of the books

Of every change the ones to Augustus Gloop not being called &quot;enormously fat&quot; and instead being called &quot;enormous&quot; are the most jarring as his story is a moral parable about the dangers of gluttony. Even if you think such moral parables are wrong, the phrasing change isn&#x27;t simply just aesthetic, it&#x27;s fundamentally changing the story&#x27;s narrative.

&quot;The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable&quot;<p>- an old Soviet joke (allegedly)

Rewriting stories for children to reflect the values and anxieties of contemporary culture has occurred forever.<p>For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’s commentators, but the book sold well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Family_Shakespeare" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Family_Shakespeare</a><p>I’m considerably less dogmatic about this than I used to be. Enid Blyton was a staple of my childhood, but do I really have to explain to my daughter why golliwogs are offensive if I want to give her a copy of the Magic Faraway Tree?

When you rewrite a book like this, does it reset the copyright? <i>Matilda</i> was set to become public domain in 2060 (70 years after Dahl&#x27;s death). With the books now owned by a corporation and essentially recreated by them, the copyright extends another fifty years.

To me, the whole point of reading imaginative fiction like Dahl’s work is that it transports you to some other place. A different world with different people in it. The author created that whole world with language, and you’re getting it through just words on a page—that has always seemed to be part of the magic to me.<p>I think we ought to respect that, and treat suggestions to “improve” old literature by “updating” the language with the same mild derision that’s useful on those loons that wanted to paint over the cigarettes in old movies

Mary Poppins and The Hardy Boys were both edited to remove things that someone decided was offensive.<p>Some of the changes to Dahl&#x27;s books look like the dumb down the language. Is that an effort to sell into a market with smaller vocabulary?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;books&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1154tr5&#x2F;comment&#x2F;j8znxo2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;books&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1154tr5&#x2F;comment&#x2F;j8zn...</a><p>Someone put a list of changes on Reddit.

&gt; “Occasionally, publishers approach us to consult Inclusion Ambassadors when looking to reprint older titles,” says Strick.<p>I depends how the ambassadors are compensated. It looks like it might be per phrase changed :-) There is an incentive then to see things that are not there and edit random bits just to point to it say “look at all these wrong phrases we fixed”. Everyone wins - the ambassadors , and those who hired them. Nobody would ever criticize or comment because that’s just inviting being labeled all sort of things.

Wow. This is so gross. I was a bit put out by the Dr. Seuss controversy a few years back, but at least in those cases, they just stopped printing the books (and, to be fair, the caricatures of various ethnic groups in If I Ran The Zoo are pretty bad).<p>It feels much more disturbing, though, to just silently update the language in the books to be more in line with modern sensibilities. Dahl was a man of his time, and as a general rule his books have good morals and values exhibited in them. They are perfect children&#x27;s books, not afraid to dip into a little darkness or to poke fun at the adults who run the world, and that&#x27;s a huge part of why they&#x27;ve been so successful and universally loved.<p>The mental attitude and sense of self-superiority it must take to feel comfortable taking the knife to something so well loved is really mind-boggling to me. I am very happy that I bought our collection of Dahl&#x27;s books before this happened.

My OH reading Roald Dahl to our daughter - in the twits she is a horrible person and it shows on her face as she&#x27;s ugly - but we contextualise this, similarly the way people treat each other &quot;that&#x27;s not a good way for a husband and wife to treat each other&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a right way to do this, but yeah - life is complex and Roald Dahl&#x27;s books show people dealing with arseholes, and often winning - the horrible people in these stories need to be horrible, but more context is helpful.

Those of us who grew up near various religious communities in the second half of the twentieth century are familiar with the edited and abridged versions of media made to be more palatable to the morals of whichever community, as well as the scandals over media which were an affront to them for whatever reason.<p>Obviously, a publisher committed to those communities and who can get the rights to do so will make a “clean” versions for them. For better or worse, it happens all the time.<p>The only news here is in whose morals are behind expressed in the edits, because we had gotten used to it just being a religion thing and forgot that secular morals can run just as puritanical.

I’m just gonna point out that this is exactly why I have a reasonably large library of printed books in editions I’ve read.

In 50 years from now, some people will pretend racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and male-dominated society never existed, because all symptoms of it will have entirely disappeared, even in classical litterature.

&gt; A most formidable female -&gt; A most formidable woman<p>What is the reasoning for this? Not following what is &quot;wrong&quot; in the original.

When I was little, there was a similar (but not as politically charged) push back against &quot;happy endings&quot; in child stories. And, indeed, if you read unadulterated brother Grim or H. C. Anderesen... a lot of them are really sad, but what&#x27;s more striking is that they are often a &quot;Silent Hill on steroids&quot; -- super creepy and scary.<p>Another aspect is that the morality of stories would often seem questionable nowadays. I have a collection of fairy tales from around the world, and I remember trying reading some of it to my son. Randomly choosing some Indian story about husband pressured into deceiving a bear to work for free and then stealing some pears from the neighbor&#x27;s garden. The bear was later serendipitously scared away by the the couple and received no reward for doing the chores (the bear didn&#x27;t do anything bad to them). That whole story just got weirder at every turn. I was waiting until the end, I was hoping the author would make a sharp turn and rectify all the injustice, but it just ended with the perpetrators celebrating their ill-gained profits.<p>Well, this story is from a different culture, different time... but, I also have Beatrix Potter&#x27;s collection of short stories for children (which is only some 50 years old and is definitely from the Anglo world), and uhm... I do struggle to explain some &quot;turns of the tongue&quot; used in these stories to my son. And it&#x27;s not because I don&#x27;t know what the author meant. It just makes me feel uncomfortable that the author thought that describing someone as fat was clearly intended to portray them as stupid. Or how whipping mischievous children was seen as a virtue, and that the character suggesting this be done to Ms. Muppets&#x27; kittens was the virtuous one, whereas Ms. Muppets was a lousy parent (for failing to do so) in author&#x27;s opinion.<p>I&#x27;m still against editing the old books, but I&#x27;m also against using them in the same capacity as they were originally intended. I&#x27;d rather have them as historical artefact presented with modern commentary.

This makes me happy to know that I still have all the original editions, accumulated in my childhood, on my shelf.

T.H. White&#x27;s <i>Once and Future King</i> went through several revisions (including, unfortunately, the removal of the Madame Mim fight that showed up in the Disney movie). Only to say: such edits are not unprecedented; few things are the Bible (itself a heavily-edited book).

This is truly depressing. It’s 3AM here and I can’t fall asleep. Where is this all heading? Where are we gonna end?<p>The more “minor sensitivities” we take care of in such manner, the more “sensible” things we’re gonna do to “make it right for everyone”, the more they’re gonna be needed. Such a thin skin won’t be able to tolerate not even the wind.<p>Just the other day, they were writing about replacing female with “egg-producing”.<p>Let’s erase humanity, NOT.

Unrelated. There&#x27;s an account by Dahl himself on how he goes about writing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nQkz_X1Rg60">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nQkz_X1Rg60</a><p>Sounds like he had &#x27;deep work&#x27; figured out before it was a thing.<p>Reminds of Linus famously coding in an empty room in his dressing gown.

Semi-contrarian position here - I&#x27;ve never liked Dahl, and I was always annoyed by how he was pushed on me by the literary types in early school (the same ones that wanted me to read The Great Gatsby and The Stranger eventually). But I think that those people had some goal behind pushing him, and perhaps that goal is consistent with the rewriting? Something about kids who feel like outsiders (maybe???)?<p>Very different, e.g., than Kipling or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?

I can&#x27;t wait all this woke &quot;politically correct&quot; bullshit to blow over. This is infantile, shortsighted and drives a wedge between social groups even further. More so, all this serves commercial interests serving the queer industry.

As a genuine question, what is the best way to combat things like this as an individual?<p>I will obviously choose not to buy egregious rewrites like this, but Penguin is out maybe ten bucks from my decision on that front.<p>I&#x27;ve got neither the skillset nor the bandwidth to attempt to organize boycotts or anything, and don&#x27;t have the pubic clout to call public retribution down on the publisher.<p>I&#x27;m asking because I strongly oppose such whitewashing, and it can feel demoralizing not knowing what to do about it.<p>(A perfectly acceptable answer might be that, sadly, there&#x27;s nothing one can do at an individual level.)

In a bid for “relevancy”.<p>What a generous description.<p>Instead of banning the books we don’t like, why not just rewrite them?

Sounds like George Lucas making all those nausea inspiring edits of the <i>original</i> Star Wars. Vandalism.

How can an editor dare changing just a comma of the original text, and keep the author&#x27;s name on the cover is beyond my understanding.

This makes me wonder: how many of the books I grew up with had already been bowdlerized?

A (perhaps) well-intentioned effort, but absolutely counter-productive to the causes that the proponents of changes like this are ostensibly in support of, namely &quot;inclusivity&quot;, &quot;social justice&quot; and the like.<p>I put them in quotes because nowadays, these words are often used as a way of smuggling in changes that are obviously ill-advised, such as revisionist editing of an author&#x27;s words decades after they were published. This is a slippery slope, and pushback letting Puffin know that this kind of thing is unacceptable should be swift and immediate.

A perspective that seems to have been snowed under so far: they&#x27;re doing this for money.<p>That is: they are investing in their existing portfolio (of stories) to improve&#x2F;sustain its value in the future. That is something that most folks here wouldn&#x27;t begrudge a private business owner.<p>Basically, the owners of the copyright predict that, on average, more readers will be willing to pay for these stories if they make changes than if they don&#x27;t - enough so to justify the investment and some anticipation of the inevitable backlash.

RewriteHistory™: so your grandkids can make your grandparents’ mistakes.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Bowdler" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Bowdler</a>

If only the copyright expired at the death of the author.

Netflix bought the books in 2021, and this is what we get.

Time to go see if the price of his books printed earlier has already jumped on eBay...

Censoring old children&#x27;s books. Yikes. This is frightening in more ways than one.<p>Besides the obvious censorship, and rewriting the past being a bad thing. I can&#x27;t wait to see what they do to &quot;Brave New World&quot;, &quot;Fahrenheit 451&quot; and &quot;1984&quot;. It&#x27;ll be ironic and sad if they burn the old unedited Roald Dahl books.<p>But also have we reached cultural stagnation, that old media still out competes new ones by such orders of magnitude ?<p>This is a huge problem, when every year we graduate more and more people wanting to be writers, artists, etc. This will only get worse with books now being written by ChatGPT and art by Dall-E&#x2F;Midjourney&#x2F;Stable Diffusion.<p>Have we reached &quot;peak multimedia&quot; content ?

I’ll say reading the books to my kids, I can see the desire for some edits to keep up with the times. I have to censor a lot with my kids. Same with calvin and Hobbes.<p>It’s not that hard to make the edits yourself though and there is value in seeing the cultural changes.<p>It’s sort of like plastic surgery on an old person. Not fooling anyone but easier on the eyes I guess.

Making some political waves is a sure-fire way to move some units, and in a year this’ll all be forgotten (hey has any publisher ever released a “classic edit” version of a book, to play both sides?).<p>I mean how much money do you expect publishers to leave on the table in the interest of preserving the version of a book you personally liked?

Hmm I thought this was going to be removing something profoundly out of touch or racist, but instead it&#x27;s weird minor revisionism, like changing Kipling to Steinbeck for some reason, and updating various benign phrases with their modern equivalents. Why not leave things written in the past the way they are?

&gt; You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth &gt;You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and stick-out teeth<p>I’m somewhat amused that wonky noses, crooked mouths, and stick-out teeth are fair game — but double chins? No, that’s fat shaming.

This is essentially discriminating non-LGBTQ+. This will just trigger retaliation further down the road. We need proper education for tolerance of all sometime around age 14+ onwards. Not going full berserk redictionary everything on the planet.

Outrageous. When the owners sell for $686 Million you know there will be all sorts of sacrilege, but you don&#x27;t think they will burn their acquisition to satisfy a few teetotal nincompoop types.

Sass business idea. A MITM proxy service for religious sect communities that doesn’t just maintain a block list of unsavory websites, but uses a LLM to transform the text of every site to be acceptable.

News from Axios:<p>Salman Rushdie reacted: «absurd censorship» and «should be ashamed».<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;roald-dahl-childrens-books" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;roald-dahl-childrens-books</a><p>--<p>Ok, now for the trigger of a mother of all reactions:<p>reportedly, some text was added in a paragraph of Dahl&#x27;s about hags «bald under their wigs»:<p>&gt; <i>There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that</i>

I think at this point we have to accept all types of people, even bigots, racists, homophobes and the rest.<p>That&#x27;s not to say agree with them, but accept they exist and treat their words as they are ... wholly disagreeable.<p>Leave the problematic things in books, have conversations with kids about why it is problematic and why it is goods things have changed.<p>Erasure of past issues erases in some ways the fights won.

The people who&#x27;ve done this don&#x27;t love Dahl, they just love chastising and controlling other people. Corporate HR writ large.

This is a tragedy. Over time, these &#x27;tweaks&#x27; will mean the Author&#x27;s original words are lost to the world.<p>These changes are a form of censorship and completely make a mockery of literature being Art. Can you imagine someone changing the statue David to have a bigger dick as the small dick is offensive?

Sad. Truly.

Censorship and brainwashing for what?

I think it&#x27;s actually immoral to change the works of artists without the artist agreeing to it.

Very lengthy and interesting article about politically correct rewriting of fiction works until &quot;said a spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company&quot;. If one is to denounce something, the first step would be not to indulge in the same exact wrongdoing.

I think both should be accessible but perhaps the edited version is most practical today.<p>To me this is similar to Star Wars. I enjoy watching the original trilogy as it was released, but the updated version and its FX just work better today and for today’s viewers IMO.

Reminiscent of &#x27;1984&#x27; is this tendency to bowdlerize art some people find offensive. It is literally editing the past, and it is a danger because someone is deciding what is to be edited, and it is probably not you or I.

Authors make these kind of changes all the time during their lives to. As long as we have works with rights that outlive authors, the people that exercise those rights will do this just as authors do. We might think that those heirs have less of the “good artistic sense” we see the authors themselves as endowed with, but, it is generally the author’s choice who will inherit the rights, and from there it is those heirs who choose where they are transferred.<p>Should we weaken that? Perhaps, for lots of good reasons besides preventing updates based on changing social conditions. But every weakening reduces the incentive to create, too. And, if the deposit part of copyright is working, <i>nothing is lost</i> in the changes – all are preserved. (If that’s not working, it should be fixed <i>independent</i> of whether there should be revisions to the rights situation.)

I was looking at a (new) box set of Roald Dahl books few weeks ago but thinking my 4yo is a bit too young, glad I didn&#x27;t buy it. Some? A lot? of the changes make no sense.<p>I&#x27;m gonna try find an old set of books.

Man I hope they don’t alter any of his adult short story collections

Going to be very interesting when Huck Finn gets this treatment.

we&#x27;re living in an age of censorship so extreme I could have never foreseen for it to be possible in a (nominally) democratic, consensual government

Reminds me of Curious George. In the original The Man in the Yellow Hat is a hunter that captures George after shooting his mother for sport.

The changes all look fine to me, and many of them probably make me more likely to continue reading Dahl books to my kid.<p>I mean, none of the old language would stop me in my tracks but it adds up. There&#x27;s plenty of options and I&#x27;m always picking the ones that I find the best, in many cases having a bunch of outdated language will cause me to pick something else next time.

He&#x27;s not <i>accused of</i> anti-Semitism, he <i>labelled himself</i> an anti-Semite.

I once came upon a 19th century book of fairy tales, and found out the versions we are familiar with have been hugely altered for the sake of 1) brevity 2) being less dark and gory. Like, the original little red riding hood ATE her own grandma and drunk her blood. So nothing new here.

books should be left alone even if they&#x27;re offensive

Louis CK’s jokes about Tom Sawyer come to mind.

I hate the world were in now

Then its not Roald Dahl

This is sickening

It turns out that Dahl was a real antisemite, to me that is more of an issue: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2020&#x2F;dec&#x2F;06&#x2F;roald-dahl-family-apologises-for-his-antisemitism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2020&#x2F;dec&#x2F;06&#x2F;roald-dahl-fam...</a>

Well this is Orwellian. Good job &quot;liberals&quot;.

<i>Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered... Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.</i> - George Orwell

I have this recurring thought with each instance of this neo-puritanism I come across. It feels like society is losing patience for all things human. I sense contempt, almost hatred for the very things that unite us as living beings and separate us from computers. We&#x27;re not perfect. We live in both place and time. We are born prejudice and survive prejudice. We form opinions through experience. We&#x27;re practical, functional. We look out for ourselves, our family, our tribe, our community. Rather than fight or deny these tendencies, how about we acknowledge them and make society better by working within our humanness.<p>It seems like in it&#x27;s attempt to encourage inclusivity and sensitivity, in many cases wokeism has pushed us in the opposite direction. If we aren&#x27;t drones that have received the latest OTA update we are not accepted in society.<p>Also, altering the text of an author of yore to be more socially palatable for the times is pathetic, wrong, and more importantly a missed opportunity for education. These books were written in a time and place. If need be, let&#x27;s talk about how and why the text, subjects and themes are different or maybe even out of place in today&#x27;s society. Bowdlerization is lazy.<p>They could&#x27;ve added a great foreword that explains these things and kept the original text.

This is fucking outrageous!<p>This is precisely the sort authoritarianism that I was taught to fear around the time I first read his books. Editing old books to comply with the current regime was one of the things that the bad guys did. That was one of the things our ancestors fought against in two world wars.<p>What would Ronald Dahl say about this? How would you feel if they did this to your writing long after you are gone?<p>Erasing Rudyard Kipling? WTF did he do wrong? His poetry was inspirational to me, as a child.<p>Good people cannot allow this to go unchallenged.<p>Edit: forgive me for expressing emotion.

When people talk about “woke”, this is exactly the kind of thing they are talking about.<p>People on the left are apoplectic about banning books for kids, yet here they are literally rewriting them. That is every bit as bad as what they claim is happening with banning books.<p>The worst edits IMO are the ones just marked <i>removed</i>

&gt; These school people hate literature. It stands for everything that they stand against. A work of literature comes from one, solitary mind, not from the consensus of a collective. It is an unequivocal assertion that <i>this is so</i>. It abides, or it dies, but it will not negotiate. It comes before us neither as a supplicant nor a defendant, but as a judge. It cares nothing for our favorite notions or our self-esteem. And it offends in us what most deserves offense–petulant sectarian touchiness, facile social supposition, and especially smug self-righteousness. Thus it is that the educationists’ literature is not the real thing. They must abbreviate it, or amend it, or–and this is their usual practice–elucidate it, lest their students fail to appreciate correctly its relevance to “the issues being examined.” And should the work at hand have nothing to do with the issues <i>they</i> want to examine, they must concoct an “instructional material” and call it Jack and the Beanstalk.<p>-- The Underground Grammarian<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcetext.com&#x2F;grammarian-newslettersv06-html&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcetext.com&#x2F;grammarian-newslettersv06-html&#x2F;</a>

&gt; In Matilda, a mention of Rudyard Kipling has been cut and Jane Austen added.<p>Burning books was at least honest.

&gt; Language evolves. Few would defend retaining the “n-word” in contemporary publishing, or any number of other outdated racial slurs which bring the modern reader up short and do not add to the text. But where does sensible pruning give way to unnecessary tinkering?<p>Perfect example of the slippery slope. It started with racial slurs and here we are.

&gt;At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces. Squealer, temporarily stunned, was sprawling beside it, and near at hand there lay a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint. The dogs immediately made a ring round Squealer, and escorted him back to the farmhouse as soon as he was able to walk. None of the animals could form any idea as to what this meant, except old Benjamin, who nodded his muzzle with a knowing air, and seemed to understand, but would say nothing.<p>&gt;But a few days later Muriel, reading over the Seven Commandments to herself, noticed that there was yet another of them which the animals had remembered wrong. They had thought the Fifth Commandment was &quot;No animal shall drink alcohol,&quot; but there were two words that they had forgotten. Actually the Commandment read: &quot;No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS.&quot;

Honestly the most depressing thing I have read today. I loved these books as a hyper young boy that struggled in school. Reading his books was an escape and help foster in me a love of reading.<p>What kind of a dystopian nightmare society thinks it’s a good idea to alter works after the fact :(

<i>The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works. These are the first new editions since the deal, but the review began before the sale</i><p>Didn&#x27;t know this, and why am I not surprised.

They left in wonky nose, crooked mouth, and stick out teeth, but took out the reference to fat? That&#x27;s wild.<p>The fat is arguably the only fixable thing, or at least the cheapest. You can&#x27;t &quot;just stop eating so much&quot; and fix a wonky nose or stick out teeth.<p>Calories aren&#x27;t magic and hard to fathom.<p>Normalizing being overweight is going to kill a lot of people early.

Historically, the kinds of people who engage in such naked acts of demoralisation don&#x27;t end up on the &#x27;right side of history&#x27;.

I&#x27;m a non-native English speaker. What&#x27;s wrong with screeching?

Contempt and patronization of modern human intelligence.

I can think of nothing worse to authors than having their work being altered by other people according to their agendas.

And of course this gets flagged. HN is very strange sometimes, sometimes even worse than the loathed reddit mods (or maybe it&#x27;s just the overly-american audiance here). Maybe if this gets posted a Github gist with the changes alone it won&#x27;t get removed?

I normally don&#x27;t care about this stuff... and it seems like a &quot;nothing issue&quot; but it really feels like someone is smoothing off the edges of classic works here.<p>All those changes culminate in an overall reversion to the mean (ordinary). Ordinary is boring... its story books. Shaving off attributes for the sake of what, exactly?

Can&#x27;t really see what all the fuss is about. They shouldn&#x27;t have made the changes, no doubt, but they&#x27;re all pretty insignificant. Publisher&#x27;s exert significantly more influence when the author is alive and writing the book in the first place. The only one that ticks me off is that they added a &quot;dedication to doctors&quot; to one of the books.

As a parent I continuously made changes when reading to my children. Some old language became problematic, and the reading became a struggle over mean ways of saying things. They can read that themselves, once they learn to read. Then they can ask the questions.<p>Until then reading time was for the fun story, not a dive into racism or body shaming.<p>My point being, it&#x27;s nothing new.

Media changes, art is reshaped by new generations. Roald Dahl is dead, the rights to his books have been sold and people are updating them to keep them relevant. This happens to translations (as an example) all the time as the popular lexicon changes. This is how media and art stays relevant. The world changes. The owners of the books have a vested interest in modifying them to continue to be relevant. The tweaks have not impacted the heart of the story, so why do people care? Other than a knee-jerk reaction to &#x27;wokeness&#x27;.

IMHO, as long as the original remains available, it&#x27;s fine.<p>Changing with the times for the sake of relevance and sales is the the right of the copyright owners. Preventing them from modifying the text would be akin to preventing renovation of old apartment buildings by new owners.<p>That said, I do think it is important to be reminded of how authors viewed the world in the past. We should be reminded, at least tangientially, that governments of the past colonized and recall the lessons learned from that practice. I.e., let&#x27;s not forget and be destined to repeat what came to be loathed.

While some of this is questionable the removal of the word &#x27;fat&#x27; is an important one.<p>&#x27;Fat&#x27; should not be used in kids books as a derogatory, or at all frankly. Fat is an incredibly important and necessary part of a healthy diet and should be treared accordingly. Training people to think of fat in the antiquated notions of bad cardiogy isnt useful.<p>So while this may have been a move centered around &quot;body positivity&quot;, it serves and higher purpose.

The alternative is what the Seuss estate did: remove the books from print entirely.<p>As a friend of mine said about the Seuss books, if you cannot understand why this is being done, you are part of the problem.