Roald Dahl's Books Being Altered

[danny la rouge]

But in this case it appears to be the Dahl estate and publishers who are making the changes, so it's fairly obvious that they are less than keen on allowing his legacy and the income they still get from it to pass away.

In other words it's an entirely cynical move from them.

Well indeed. And I’m agin it.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But in this case it appears to be the Dahl estate and publishers who are making the changes, so it's fairly obvious that they are less than keen on allowing his legacy and the income they still get from it to pass away.

In other words it's an entirely cynical move from them.

Yes indeed, and a quick google tells me that there are plenty in the publishing world who are still keen on pushing Enid Blyton onto new generations as well. Her books still sell at a rate of 700,000 a year just in the UK! 'much loved', 'treasured', etc, etc.

 

[A380]

Danny, participation award holder of the World
The big friendly person of average height
George's NICE approved and clinically tested medicine

 

[A380]

Gulliver's travels (the uncensored version) certainly opened my 10 year old eyes...

 

[Nine Bob Note]

George's Alternative to Big Pharma and the Deep State Because He's Done His Research Unlike All You SHEEPLE!

 

[Diamond]

Philistinic safety-ism that promotes a narrow mind.

Utterly tragic that fools such as these have such power and influence in our culture.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Parents buy the same books for kids they have fond memories of reading/being read shock news

 

[Diamond]

TBH aren't these edits financially driven, to keep the books earning money in a more critical world, when otherwise they might be quietly left to die in Oxfam?

Nah - it's social competition within the publishing houses, I reckon - this is how you boost your career in these places now.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Philistinic safety-ism that promotes a narrow mind.

Utterly tragic that fools such as these have such power and influence in our culture.

Hook, line and sinker.

This is the publisher and copyright holders attempting to appeal to a wider audience not the Safety Police

 

[danny la rouge]

The Nibbleswicke Ecumenical Committee for Those of All Faiths and None

 

[Pickman's model]

Nah - it's social competition within the publishing houses, I reckon - this is how you boost your career in these places now.

says the man with no knowledge of publishing

 

[A380]

Philistinic safety-ism that promotes a narrow mind.

Utterly tragic that fools such as these have such power and influence in our culture.

No it's just private companies trying to maximise shareholder return by managing their assets innit.

ETA Artaxerxes said it first and better.

 

[Pickman's model]

Yes indeed, and a quick google tells me that there are plenty in the publishing world who are still keen on pushing Enid Blyton onto new generations as well. Her books still sell at a rate of 700,000 a year just in the UK! 'much loved', 'treasured', etc, etc.

if they were really treasured the same copies would be handed down from parents to children

 

[Diamond]

There was a recent LRB hit piece on Dahl - I think it came out just before Xmas. It was a terrible, po-faced piece of puritanical nonsense. Now I see that it was probably just laying the ground-work for these changes.

Interesting when a whole social-culture (publishing) turns on someone - just like any other aspect of UK/Anglo society, I suppose.

 

[Nine Bob Note]

Dhanny (It's Illegal to Use a Legal Name), Freeman of the Land

 

[JimW]

Utterly tragic that fools such as these have such power and influence in our culture.

A nation ground under the iron heel of the children's book publishers

 

[danny la rouge]

There was a recent LRB hit piece on Dahl - I think it came out just before Xmas. It was a terrible, po-faced piece of puritanical nonsense. Now I see that it was probably just laying the ground-work for these changes.

Interesting when a whole social-culture (publishing) turns on someone - just like any other aspect of UK/Anglo society, I suppose.

Nobody is “turning on” Dahl. His estate and publishers are simply trying to continue making money.

 

[Diamond]

Colin Burrow · The Comeuppance Button: Dreadful Mr Dahl

Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of...

www.lrb.co.uk

Here you go - reviewing a new biography that came out last summer. Took a few short months to turn him into the scapegoat-du-jour, it seems.

 

[Diamond]

That one goes further than just lamenting (i) his behaviour, (ii) the un-woke content of his books, and also just says that (iii) he's a bit shit.

Which is as about unconvincing as you can get, in my book.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There was a recent LRB hit piece on Dahl - I think it came out just before Xmas. It was a terrible, po-faced piece of puritanical nonsense. Now I see that it was probably just laying the ground-work for these changes.

Interesting when a whole social-culture (publishing) turns on someone - just like any other aspect of UK/Anglo society, I suppose.

You have that 180 degrees the wrong way round. Publishing is in reality very conservative (and not a little cowardly) and it clings to its proven best-sellers long past their sell-by date.

 

[Artaxerxes]

There was a recent LRB hit piece on Dahl - I think it came out just before Xmas. It was a terrible, po-faced piece of puritanical nonsense. Now I see that it was probably just laying the ground-work for these changes.

Interesting when a whole social-culture (publishing) turns on someone - just like any other aspect of UK/Anglo society, I suppose.

A hit piece?

I love his works and acknowledge he’s a powerful and capable story teller but he was an absolutely awful person, a poor husband, a bad father, a misogynist and held outdated and at times horrible views on other ethnicities

This is where so many of these it’s PC gone complaints go wrong, they assume that it’s some sort of plot to cancel people but it’s acknowledging and admitting that people had issues

 

[Pickman's model]

Colin Burrow · The Comeuppance Button: Dreadful Mr Dahl

Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of...

www.lrb.co.uk

Here you go - reviewing a new autobiography that came out last summer. Took a few short months to turn him into the scapegoat-du-jour, it seems.

an autobiography is a biography of oneself. the book being reviewed is not an autobiography, nor does it claim to be an autobiography. indeed, it's clearly not by roald dahl is it

 

[JimW]

And that's been news to almost no-one for decades. ETA Dahl being a shit, I mean.

 

[Pickman's model]

That one goes further than just lamenting (i) his behaviour, (ii) the un-woke content of his books, and also just says that (iii) he's a bit shit.

Which is as about unconvincing as you can get, in my book.

your never-to-be-published book

 

[danny la rouge]

A hit piece?

I love his works and acknowledge he’s a powerful and capable story teller but he was an absolutely awful person, a poor husband, a bad father, a misogynist and held outdated and at times horrible views on other ethnicities

This is where so many of these it’s PC gone complaints go wrong, they assume that it’s some sort of plot to cancel people but it’s acknowledging and admitting that people had issues

I didn’t know Lyn, but it’s long been known Dahl was a terrible person.

(You edited, making me look [even more] weird).

 

[Pickman's model]

Colin Burrow · The Comeuppance Button: Dreadful Mr Dahl

Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of...

www.lrb.co.uk

Here you go - reviewing a new autobiography that came out last summer. Took a few short months to turn him into the scapegoat-du-jour, it seems.

a few short decades perhaps - this from 2016: The dark side of Roald Dahl

 

[andysays]

Philistinic safety-ism that promotes a narrow mind.

Utterly tragic that fools such as these have such power and influence in our culture.

By fools such as these, do you mean the estates of famous but now dead authors and their publishers?

 

[Artaxerxes]

I didn’t know Lyn, but it’s long been known Dahl was a terrible person.

(You edited, making me look [even more] weird).

Mwuhahaha.

Yeah I’ve known he was a shithead since I was at least 14 if not a bit earlier. So that’s well over 20 years

 

[belboid]

Well Diamond has shown us why it's an excellent idea to alter the books. Just to fuck off idiots like him.

For everyone else, who really gives a shit? Some dead bloke is having some off his books ever so slightly amended, like loads before. So what? It's not like they're taking every instance of 'not' from the 10 commandments. It just doesn't really matter.

 

[hitmouse]

I thought that LRB article was pretty reasonable and fair-handed? It's not exactly a one-sided hatchet job.
Here's Burrow on Dahl's writing:

Dahl at his best had something. He could be extremely funny: the Big Friendly Giant, who gets confused over words, says Nicholas Nickleby is by ‘Dahl’s Chickens’. He could write a mean vivid short sentence. But his key skill was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible. His children’s books are as packed with threat and as top-dressed with sugary allure as the Child Catcher in his screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’ or ‘goonswaggle’ to make the mixture effervesce – often seems to be pushing out of view very nasty things that it doesn’t want fully to acknowledge. The way his tales for adults can underlie the children’s books is one aspect of this ability to keep the nasty stuff just out of sight. But Dahl himself was just as weird a mixture of plain truths and dark secrets. Every account of his life remarks on his impossible blend of emotional bottled-upness and aggressive disinhibition. He never spoke about the death of his daughter, but that wasn’t because he was a quiet soul. In an episode that Dennison chooses not to relate, he was thrown out of the Curzon House Club in 1979 after holding forth about the number of Jews in the club.

The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) of 1982 is by some distance his best book, because it has a different relationship with the unspeakable. It has oodles of charm and always keeps fear in view. In it the children of England and Europe are being eaten at night by horrible giants ‘as big as bumplehammers’, who in their hairy, toothy awfulness were perfect material for the pen of Quentin Blake.

And the conclusion:

All these characters – the ingenious Willy Wonka, the delightful poaching dad in Danny, the Champion of the World, the family-loving Fantastic Mr Fox – were idealised self-portraits of Dahl, the unfaithful husband and emotionally distant father who wanted to think of himself as saviour of all and master of the mighty wheeze. He knew himself well enough to keep hidden the things that he needed to keep hidden in order to make fiction.

It’s easy to be hard on him for doing this. But through all the bullshit and bravura attending his stories about his time in the RAF, and despite the many anecdotal distortions of his life in his autobiographies, Boy (1984) and Going Solo (1986), he knew what it was to live in the shadow of death, and knew grief that never went away. Talking big and bold around the gut-dissolving fear of crashing out of the air was what pilots did, and wrapping bluff and cheery talk around horror and spinning it into yarns was more or less what Dahl spent his life doing...
The emotional horror that he doesn’t want to confront is covered over by bluster.

Towards the end of Dahl’s last book, The Minpins, posthumously published in 1991, Little Billy takes one of his final rides on a swan’s back – he’s growing up and getting too big to fly anymore. The swan flies him into a ‘huge gaping hole in the ground’, and below him ‘Little Billy could see a vast lake of water, gloriously blue, and on the surface of the lake thousands of swans were swimming slowly about.’ There’s no explanation of what this vision is or means, because ‘sometimes mysteries are more intriguing than explanations.’ But it is a throwback to the wartime story ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’, in which the pilot sees row after row of planes gliding off into the light and ‘saw spread out below me a vast green plain. It was green and smooth and beautiful; it reached to the far edges of the horizon where the blue of the sky came down and merged with the green of the plain.’ A vision of calm and collective death stands in for a pilot’s individual terror. Cheerful visions beneath which you can always see something like horror.

Basically just saying he was someone who was often a shit in his personal life, which seems to be undisputed, and that his work was complicated and informed by grief and trauma while still being entertaining and accessible for children?