Whether it's sanitising Dahl or Dickens, don't tamper with history

Called the “classic collection”, it will feature 17 works, including such favourites as James and the Giant Peach, The Twits and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You know, the ones that children absolutely love, in part because they are so rude and, in places, downright nasty, not to mention hilarious.

Who would ever have imagined that the word classic, more commonly used to denote conservatism from another age – think twinsets or vintage Bentleys – is now the label for Dahl’s riotous, occasionally outrageous and unfailingly fizzing imagination?

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That Puffin has had a rethink is doubly ironic. When it employed sensitivity readers to highlight offensive words and phrases in Dahl’s stories – thereby kissing goodbye to “fat”, “ugly”, “hag” and adjectives such as white and black – it was trying to avert what it feared might be an adverse public reaction to Dahl’s gleefully non-PC work. The result was not just bland and patronising but – far worse – completely tone deaf.

Take a passage in The Witches, for example. Even though the witches wear wigs, Dahl wrote, “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.” The revised Puffin sentence reads: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Now, Puffin has been forced to contend with real fury rather than an imaginary outcry, thereby prompting a 180-degree rethink. That the strength of outrage about what is viewed as the desecration of Dahl’s work reached as far as Buckingham Palace has been revealing. This backlash has not been the response of reactionaries railing against the notion of inclusivity. It is a heart-felt defence of literature that is already on the shelves, and an attempt to preserve, respect and reflect on what has gone before.

Naturally no author submitting a book today, whether for children or adults, would expect to get away with some of the language Dahl used. If they tried, it would immediately be edited out to reflect the very different sensibilities and heightened cultural awareness of the 21st century. Nor could anybody argue with that.

Keeping contemporary literature abreast of current thinking and terminology is one thing; applying such standards retrospectively, be it to Dahl or Dickens, is an entirely different proposition. It is, in effect, tampering with the historical record.

Because how are we to know how people once thought and expressed themselves if we are forever updating their words to suit a modern mindset? And what would happen to a writer like John Buchan, almost every page of whose novels would need revision to eradicate sexism, antisemitism or colonialism?

In the bid to update literary works for a modern audience, what would happen to an author writing from a time and place like John Buchan? (Image: Getty)

The sight of a publisher swiftly backtracking on a poor decision was heartening. Whether this will signal a broadening of minds and stiffening of backbone elsewhere in the publishing firmament, however, remains to be seen.

Puffin’s dread of falling foul of the sensitivity police is only one example of the ways in which new titles that reach bookshops are filtered so as not to offend. Despite living in a country that prides itself on the democratic right to free speech, it seems that publishers are increasingly self-censoring their lists to avoid being pilloried or cancelled.

In the wake of the Dahl debacle, Queen Consort Camilla urged a gathering of writers at the palace “to remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or your imagination”.

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The group she addressed included bestselling novelists Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and Philippa Gregory. For mainstream authors like these, who represent a ringing till for their publishers, there is little need to fear the dreaded sensitivity pit opening like a bear trap beneath their feet.

That is not the case, however, for others who, through no fault of their own, can find themselves on the wrong side of the tracks. Take the historian Professor Nigel Biggar. He was commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a history called Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, in which he argued that some historians had previously overstated the case against the empire.

When he submitted the manuscript his editor was enthusiastic: “This is such an important book.” Some months later a Bloomsbury executive emailed to inform him that “conditions are not currently favourable to publication”. Pressed for more detail, she added: “we consider that public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book”.

Biggar was quickly picked up by William Collins instead, but not all authors are that fortunate. Certain subjects, clearly, have become too hot to handle, not worth the reputational risk. Anything that might bring a legal action from a Russian oligarch, for instance.

Another such case, or so the author certainly believes, is the journalist Hannah Barnes’s expose of the Tavistock Clinic, Time to Think. She says it “scared off” 22 publishers before Swift Press – who also publish the controversial poet Kate Clanchy – accepted it.

Yet dozens of rejections for a manuscript is not unusual. It might have been as much about the limited market for such a subject, or fear of litigation, as because the book was deemed counter to current orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, as publishers increasingly employ sensitivity readers to comb through manuscripts rooting out problematic passages – watching out for cultural cliches, unconscious bias, unacceptable or outdated language – there’s no doubt that we are now in a state of heightened alertness. Such a climate is guaranteed to make many authors self-censor before setting a word on the page.

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If you can hear applause in the wings, however, that will be the ghost of Thomas Bowdler. Nobody would more warmly have endorsed “improving” a writer’s texts. His life’s work, published in 1818, was The Family Shakespeare, intended to make the bard’s plays acceptable for children.

On publication, the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s morals wrote “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakspeare [sic] some defects which diminish their value…” Need I say more?