"Everything which is not forbidden is allowed" or is it?

"When he was at school, Roald Dahl received terrible reports for his writing - with one teacher actually writing in his report, 'I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means.'"

I haven't seen the source material but I'll trust Penguin Australia on this one. It's deliciously ironic and adds light heartedness to a subject that has been debated in the mainstream press with great passion this week.

The facts as reported by The (English) Daily Telegraph are:

• Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
• Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.

The commentators are divided, more or less into two camps:

• The publisher is merely using commercial common sense and updating classics to maintain relevance (and therefore sales) to millennial parents
• The publisher is being a heavy handed revisionist, and this is a sinister example of creator / enabler turned suppressor

"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship" wrote Salman Rushdie at the start of the week, thirty years after his own dreadful experience in the wake of "The Satanic Verses" being published - ironically enough - by Penguin. For those of a youthful disposition the details of "The Rushdie controversy" are covered well in the link below:

Some have likened Puffin's actions to Orwellian dystopia - "he who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past." In "1984", Winston Smith is required daily to falsify historical reporting and change old newspaper articles. This is done in order to allow the oppression and misery caused by present day events to be manipulated to fit the false narrative of a caring and successful society, with the result of keeping the population not only quiet, but happy:

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.

So what to make of it all? I spoke to my 13 year old daughter (who had to be reminded who Roald Dahl was, presumably because he doesn't have a TikTok account) about it this week. She's grown from child to young adult (gulp) during this fantastic period of social change, when the concepts of inclusivity and respect for difference have grown so quickly and profoundly. She has no decades old conditioning to unlearn, she just "is".

She argued (I'm paraphrasing) that some of the words being used aren't particularly helpful when teaching children how to think of, and behave towards, others. If "Fat" becomes "enormous" and "ugly and beastly" becomes "beastly", well that's completely reasonable. I happen to agree with her that it is "just probably easier" if these words aren't part of these children's books. I wouldn't be happy if I heard someone I cared about being called "fat" or "ugly". I said to my daughter that I do feel that leaving those words in is a teaching and a learning opportunity. Just because something that's not inclusive is written in a children's book, that doesn't mean we can't take that opportunity to discuss it and agree that we don't hold ourselves to those standards.

References to Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling are removed from a sentence in "Matilda" and replaced with Austen and Steinbeck:

• Old: “She went on olden day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.” becomes
• New: “She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck.”

Austen and Steinbeck in. Hemingway and Steinbeck stay where you are, Kipling and Conrad you're out. You may do your own research and draw your own conclusions to establish why some believe that these authorial inclusions and exclusions can be considered problematic.

The issue here of course is contained in the title to this article - a principle of law that states that for individuals, if it's not expressly illegal it must be legal, and for companies if it's not expressly legal it must be illegal. So if you're going to knock some stuff out because it's not inclusive, you have to be super careful about what you leave in.

I believe the intent behind this publishing decision is good and kind and decent - we are trying to teach ourselves, and future generations, to be kinder, more inclusive, more tolerant. Some of these books use descriptors, words, names, labels - that generally we would consider to be at best unhelpful and at worst hurtful. By calling attention to the presence of something unhelpful / hurtful in content as widespread and mainstream as this is, a useful and productive bookmark is created about where we have come from and where we need to be. A debate is also started which allows the conversation to take hold, all good things.

But does it make sense unilaterally to revise the work, to alter the words, to delete them from history? I'm not sure it does. I understand that this makes these particular texts "a safe place" for anyone picking up the revised edition, but what message does it send about every other text that has not been revised?

I think it's a shame to lose the learning opportunity, to reflect with our children that just because it used to be ok for someone else to use those words, doesn't mean it's ok for us. For children who never lived through that change, like my daughter, it provides a context to them that they may not otherwise have - this is where we came from, this is where we are headed, and this is where we are presently.

We've all made mistakes in our past, behaved in ways we're not proud of, hurt people we loved, acted in ways we wouldn't want to repeat. But does airbrushing those events from our own history of ourselves help to prevent future repeats? I would argue if anything it's likelier to create compounding behaviour into the future.

The thing is though - if it's got us all talking, and leads to one more parent reading one more book to their child, it's almost certainly a good thing.

Oh, and one final piece of deliciousness to top off this recipe for confusion and controversy that I have just read - The French have no plans to update Dahl's content. Zut alors!

ps I'm now 53 days of sobriety and counting - and this is article number two. Ahead of my second writer's group this Saturday, I wrote two short pieces this week (probably more like character outlines than stories to be honest), if you are interested and would like to read them I'd love some feedback - send me a DM if you're keen and I'll email them to you.