Posted on 02/17/2023 7:07:09 PM PST by GrootheWanderer
Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa-Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.
The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.
The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.
References to physical appearance have been heavily edited. The word “fat” has been removed from every book - Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may still look like a ball of dough, but can now only be described as “enormous”.
In the same story, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer “tiny”, “titchy” or “no higher than my knee” but merely small. And where once they were “small men”, they are now “small people”.
Passages not written by Dahl have also been added. In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
“Boys and girls” has been turned into “children”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People and Fantastic Mr Fox’s three sons have become daughters.
Matilda reads Jane Austen rather than Rudyard Kipling, and a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now works as “a top scientist”.
One of Dahl’s most popular lines from The Twits is: “You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams.” It has been edited to take out the “double chin”.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
“How dare you remove books from the children’s library!”
You’re doing the same thing by removing “objectionable content”
Gee, I wonder how they’re going to handle the inconvenient fact that Dahl was a virulent anti-semite?
Oh, I forgot. That actually gives him street-cred in the “woke” community these days, a-là Roger Waters.
Aren’t they fat shaming Augustus Gloop?
Insanity continues to be taken to new heights and then thrown over the edge.
These people are stupid and crazy.
They aren’t liberals.
Just some cult-driven literary vandalism. Nothing to see here.
I hope someone waits for the copywrite to end and then publishes originals.
Is Roald Dahl still alive? He probably sold the rights to his books.
R_____ is rolling over in his grave.
It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
A number of 'The Times' which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
I guess the original version will not be available, and be traded samizdat.
Don't worry, any hints of anti-semitism will also be removed. The Witches was thought to be anti-semitic, and it's being rewritten.
He's dead, but the author's estate inherits the copyrights.
But the author's estate likely agreed to the changes.
Dennis Wheatley was a popular English occult novelist, whose books no longer hold modern views on race. They were recently republished with changes "with the permission of the author's estate."
I remember reading his book, The Satanist (1960), in the early 1980s. I was surprised that it contained a passage in which the heroine was described as "having any normal white woman's aversion to sexual relations with a colored."
The characteristics of the villains was deliberate, to both make them somewhat revolting, and to make them reflect their flaws. Removing that neuters the story.
Damned Bowdlers!
Bowdlerizing classics to appease their massive egos.
What a bunch of Nazis those people are.
Hey, Puffinhead:
Oompah, loompah, doopity do
They will eventually come for you, too
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