August Glop this again”very fat“and not only”very large“; Mrs. Twit takes on a whole collection of adjectives (“very ugly and beast“) and Oompa-Loompas leave gender neutrality as “little people” and reclaim their lost masculinity as “little boy“…

Publishing house Puffin, of the Penguin Random House group, has succumbed to the storm of criticism waged in the UK by politically correct rewriting of Roald Dahl’s short stories and will again publish 16 titles in their original versions in their Classics Collection.

An “updated” version —with questionable adjustments so as not to injure readers’ sensitivities for reasons of weight, mental health, gender or race — will also be available in bookstores, but at least children and non-children will be able to choose between texts. original or decaffeinated ‘Matilda’, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and ‘The Big Kind-hearted Giant’.

“We’ve taken into account the cultural debates that are taking place and people will be able to vote for their preferred version of Dahl’s story,” Penguin Randon House publisher Tom Weldon wrote in a letter to his staff. “Sometimes, decisions can be challenging and uncomfortableand this is one of them.”

The announcement came hours after the empress herself, Camila, asked writers to reject any kind of censorship: “Please be faithful to your callingand is not prevented by those who wish to curtail freedom of expression or limit their imagination”.

The ‘corrections’ of Dahl’s irreverent appearance to adapt it to a ‘awakened’ culture have been harshly criticized by writers such as Salman Rushdie, who publishes in the same publisher: “Roald Dahl is not an angel, but this is censorship nonsense: The Puffin Book and its heirs should be ashamed.”

The idea to update Dahl’s text actually came from his grandson Luke Kelly, when he was leading the Roald Dahl Story Company (RSDC), as revealed Daily Mail. Text revisions started quietly in 2020 and peaked in April 2022, with the company selling the equivalent of 417 million euros to Netflix”.

That same year, the family publicly apologized for the frequent anti-Semitic comments of Dahl, who died aged 74 in 1990. And specifically for his statements to New Statesman in 1983 when he said: “There is a trait in the character of the Jewish people that gives rise to hatred. There’s always a reason why the ‘anti-something’ ends up appearing. Even bastards like Hitler didn’t vote for them for nothing.”

“The best, and the absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help us remember the lasting impact of words“, can be read on the portal dedicated to the author. To Nadia Cohen, author The Real Roald Dahlefforts to improve his texts included in a family-sponsored campaign to wash his name and continue to capitalize on his productions.