-Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
The latest victim of the Extreme Umbrage Brigade is of course Roald Dahl or, more specifically, his children's books. Dahl himself has been looked at askance for years- the dude seems to have been more than a little antisemitic. But he didn't put that stuff in his kids books... James and the Giant Peach is hardly Mein Kampf... and if you're going to toss out every author who had dicey personal views, well, there's not going to be much left to read. I mean, I love Pygmalion but have no illusions about George Bernard Shaw's crap politics.
I personally have no sentimental childhood attachment to Dahl's books; I didn't read them as a child. We didn't have any copies at home, our rural school had a rather limited library, and there was no public library in our community. The school eventually got at least some of Dahl's books because I remember a few of my younger siblings reading them, but I never really became acquainted with any of his works until I was reading them with various nephews and nieces. I've never even seen either of the Willy Wonka movie adaptations, though I did on one occasion see the film version of Matilda. So when I object to Dahl's books having every word that might be deemed offensive to someone, somewhere edited out, it is on principle, not some great affection for the man or his tales.
People have been sharing the altered parts of various books online this week; not only are the reasons behind the edits offensive, the edits themselves are objectively terrible as well. Take the example below:
The supposed adults responsible for this ridiculousness have either forgotten what it was like to be kids, were the prissiest children ever born, or just want to ensure that today's youth don't have the joy of reading that earlier generations enjoyed. And make no mistake, the politically correct edits are about the adults not the kids, because kids eat this stuff up. To my mind it's also a form of censorship if you change a book into something so prosy, dull, and badly-worded that no one wants to read it. And that's another thing: these are Roald Dahl's books, written as he chose to write them. It's downright insulting and disrespectful to his body of work to change his words to something so anodyne, mealymouthed, and forgettable. These days there are a lot of things which compete for kid's attention; the last thing we need is for children's literature to be so sanctimonious and stultifyingly boring that they avoid it like the plague. Also, it's time to stop teaching kids that they're so emotionally fragile that they can be victimized by a fictional description of a fat lady with a double chin. And to stop telling them that the proper response when they're offended by a book is to have said book- or at least parts of it- removed and destroyed. That's how we ended up with these idiot sensitivity readers to begin with. If a parent thinks a book is inappropriate for their children to read then they can certainly choose to not let them read it. If a child is reading a book which they don't enjoy, they have the very sensible option of putting it down and finding something else to read. Neither of these things requires the author's words to be edited and rewritten, thereby dictating to others what they are allowed to read and enjoy.