Roald Dahl, JK Rowling and Dr Seuss: Language police to the left, book-banning zealots to the right

In 1807, Thomas Bowdler and his sister Harriet published the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, a collection of the playwright’s works that dispensed with “every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind” and removed “many speeches in which Shakespeare has been tempted to ‘purchase laughter at the price of decency’.”

The Family Shakespeare is no longer in general circulation, but the verb that the Bowdlers unwittingly bequeathed to the English language remains as useful as ever. This week’s controversy over new, bowdlerised editions of Roald Dahl’s classic childrens’ books shows how the impulse to protect the supposedly vulnerable from the pernicious effects of reading the wrong sorts of words is on the rise again. Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman have added their voices to the general outrage at the extent, the crudeness and the sheer stupidity of alterations made at the behest of “sensitivity readers”.

The story is grist to the mill of the wokeness-gone-mad brigade, but a little common sense is required. Language is mutable – in early editions, the Bowdlers’ book was called The Family Shakspeare – and adjustments have often been made to take account of cultural and political changes. No one bewails the renaming of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little N*****s or particularly mourns the departure of the gollywogs from Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. (It helps that neither is much read these days.) In some cases, the original text becomes just too rancid to accommodate. Don’t expect to see gala screenings of DW Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation any time soon, despite its foundational status in the history of cinema.

[ Yes, Roald Dahl sometimes got it wrong. But it isn’t up to us to make it right ]

And the glee with which the political right pounces on these cases is only matched by its hypocrisy. Kevin McCarthy, the most senior elected Republican in the United States, is happy to post a video of himself reading Green Eggs and Ham in protest against the decision to withdraw some Dr Seuss titles (not including Green Eggs and Ham). But he’s unconcerned by the current rampage through school libraries by members of his own party seeking to cleanse them of any books that contradict their beliefs about race, gender or sexual orientation.

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None of that should be allowed to obscure the worrying implications of the Dahl story, which lifts the lid on the gatekeeping processes which have been put in place recently in the publishing industry to enforce standards of propriety that are as strict as anything seen in the Victorian era. If sensitivity readers are willing to bowdlerise a pre-existing well-known author to this extent, what is going on behind the scenes with new work and new writers? What heterodox thoughts or inappropriate words are being excised to protect the 21st-century version of “the religious and virtuous mind”?

Children’s and young adults’ literature has become one of the most hazardous conflict zones in the current culture wars

Hemmed in by hypersensitive language police on the left and book-banning reactionary zealots on the right, children’s and young adults’ literature has become one of the most hazardous conflict zones in the current culture wars. That brings us inevitably to the other big books story of the week, the release of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, an eight-part podcast series which promises to explore the Harry Potter author’s position as a focal point for current bitter arguments over gender and sex.

Only two episodes have been released so far, and they focus on Rowling’s journey from struggling single parent to multimillionaire publishing phenomenon, along with the cultural context of the late 1990s, when her books first stormed the bestseller lists. The series’ narrator, Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the ultra-intolerant Westboro Baptist Church, appears to be setting out to explore why Rowling became such a potent hate figure, first for conservative evangelicals alarmed by her “Satanic” novels, and now for trans-rights supporters angered by her refusal to accept the idea that gender identity can be separated from physical sex.

[ Roald Dahl: ‘Children only read for fun; you’ve got to hold their attention’ ]

We’ll see how persuasively all this is woven together in future episodes. So far, the podcast’s greatest strength is its access to the author herself. Rowling speaks candidly about her experience of marital abuse and the often negative impact of unexpected global fame. She has intriguing things to say about celebrity fandom and what it’s like to have your life threatened; she’s refreshingly contemptuous of the idea that she might be concerned about her “legacy” in the wake of current controversies.

One wonders whether the Harry Potter series would have made it past today’s gatekeepers. (It barely got published in the 1990s because editors in their wisdom considered its boarding school setting too old-fashioned for modern children’s tastes.) What’s most concerning is the chilling effect this pincer movement of intolerance may be having on future Dahls and Rowlings who might dare to “purchase laughter at the price of decency”.