By Edmund King, The Open University

In early 2023, there was a worldwide flurry of news reports describing the posthumous revision of classic children’s literature and popular fiction by the British publishing industry. The story broke first on 17 February 2023, when the right-wing British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph published a story entitled “Augustus Gloop no longer fat as Roald Dahl goes PC” (Singh and Cumming, 2023). This was followed the next day by a 3000-word report entitled “How ‘sensitivity readers’ rewrote Roald Dahl.” This story was based on a systematic examination of the new editions of Dahl’s works, produced by Puffin in 2022. After a team of reporters combed through the new versions, the Telegraph announced that it “had found hundreds of changes to Dahl’s stories” (Cumming, Holl-Allen, and Smith, 2023, p. 20). Although the paper acknowledged that the books’ language and content had been revised before (during Dahl’s lifetime and sometimes by Dahl himself), it suggested that “there has never been an alteration on this scale.” The new edits, it suggested, were evidence of how “Dahl’s compelling spikiness” was now in conflict with “the hair-trigger sensitivities of children’s publishing.”

What was notable about this episode was not only its suggestion that contemporary “in-house” publishing practices were now seemingly worthy of an investigative report. It was also revealing for how the paper contextualised these practices and how it positioned them within the wider realm of politics. The new Dahl editions were the product of a collaboration between Puffin, the Roald Dahl Story Company, and the diversity consultants Inclusive Minds. Inclusive Minds in turn worked with a team of “Inclusion Ambassadors” (their term for sensitivity readers), who provided editorial feedback on manuscripts to “identify language that could be inauthentic” (Cumming, Holl-Allen, and Smith, 2023, p. 20). Commenting on the sensitivity reader’s role, Inclusive Minds co-founder Alexandra Strick told the paper that “we do think those with lived experience can provide valuable input when it comes to reviewing language to help ensure that the stories can continue to be enjoyed by all children.” Interviewed for the article, teacher and sensitivity reader Scott Evans placed a similar emphasis on accessibility. Rereading Dahl, he had been struck by the books’ offensive language and outdated slang and idioms. It was here, he suggested, that sensitivity readers could best contribute—making older language “more accessible to children” and ensuring that their “characters and content are mischievous, and not malicious, in nature” (Cumming, Holl-Allen, and Smith, 2023, p. 20).

The Telegraph’s Dahl scoop caused a publishing sensation of its own. Authors and celebrities took to social media to express their disapproval, generating quotes that content-hungry journalists spun additional news stories off in turn. “Roald Dahl was no angel[,] but this is absurd censorship,” Salman Rushdie wrote on Twitter/X in response to the Telegraph stories. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed” (quoted in Somerville, 2023). The then-prime minister Rishi Sunak issued a press statement, the actor Brian Cox compared the new edits to “McCarthyism,” and the PEN America Chief Executive Suzanne Nossel observed that: “Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used” by “those who do not share their values and sensibilities” (Forrest, 2023; Clatworthy, 2023; and Taylor, 2023). Such was the backlash that Puffin quickly announced that they were re-issuing the older versions of seventeen Dahl titles as the Roald Dahl Classic Collection. In a careful balancing act that sought to extend recognition to viewpoints on both sides of the debate, Penguin Random House’s Francesca Dow said that the controversy had “reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation” (quoted in Blair, 2023).

Subsequent news stories described how books by Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, and Enid Blyton were now being issued with revisions to remove racist or “outdated” language and new content warnings and colophon advisory statements by their current publishers (Simpson, 2023; Hall, 2023; Hardy, 2023; and Chung, 2023). Some of these changes had been introduced several years earlier without attracting any news coverage at the time. The Dahl story, however, created a template of sorts for further reporting along these lines. The question of how publishers were dealing with the questions around “relevance”—and the presence of seemingly dated or offensive material in classic texts—were now topics of debate in the public sphere. This sudden newsworthiness subjected what had formerly been an internal matter within publishing to the hostile glare of external publicity and the polarising logics of the wider culture war.

Bowdlerisation: An Historical Catchphrase

Responding to these developments, commentators turned to one word to make sense of what was going on: “bowdlerisation.” Addressing the British Book Awards in May 2023, Rushdie castigated publishers for “looking to bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming” (quoted in Banerjee, 2023). A letter-writer to the Canadian Globe and Mail, meanwhile, wrote that:

Expurgation has a long and hallowed history, including the bowdlerization of Shakespeare and Edward Gibbon, and the overpainting of genitalia in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. These episodes are now largely regarded as laughable. Whether Roald Dahl’s publisher and estate will stand on the right side of history remains to be seen, but efforts to normalize the rewriting of books may ultimately make it difficult to know anything about history at all. (Whyte, 2023, O10)

The references to “bowdlerisation” in contemporary commentary testify in turn to the long cultural memory of the early nineteenth-century British family Shakespeare editions edited by Thomas and Henrietta Maria Bowdler and the expurgated versions of classic texts that they inspired. Texts of this sort were designed to be read aloud in an upper middle-class “family circle,” enabling parents to supervise their children’s reading and direct their cultural development (Grenby, 2011, pp. 236–8). The potential that “offensive” content had to disrupt these occasions could be a source of intense anxiety. As the Edinburgh Review put it in 1821,

Now it is quite undeniable, that there are many passages in Shakespeare, which a father could not read aloud to his children—a brother to his sister—or a gentleman to a lady:—and every one almost must have felt or witnessed the extreme awkwardness, and even distress, that arises from suddenly stumbling upon such expressions, when it is almost too late to avoid them, and when the readiest wit cannot suggest any paraphrase, which shall not betray, by its harshness, the embarrassment from which it has arisen. (Anon, 1821, p. 52)

The aim of these editions was not only to guard against potential embarrassment when reading aloud, however. It was also to enable the gendered formation of sensitive and cultivated younger readers—boys who would, as the editors of the Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare later put it, develop a “taste for home and home-pleasures” alongside more traditionally masculine pursuits, and girls who would go on to “cultivate … polish and grace” (C. and M. Cowden Clarke, 1864–69, vol. 3, p. ix). These books were on one level consumer items. There was a demonstrable market value in a Shakespeare edition that could promise to shelter readers—especially female readers and children—from the less “respectable” parts of the canon. However, they combined this consumer value logic with an overarching moral logic. The family reading circle these editions helped produce represented a kind of enclosure, screened off from obscenity by editorial intervention. It reflected strong normative assumptions about the superiority of contemporary British middle-class culture and the threat posed to manners—and to children’s education—by exposure to “low” forms of language or models of behaviour associated with lower social classes and a less cultivated national past.

Contemporary usages of the word “bowdlerisation” do not usually place this phenomenon within its specific context in publishing history. Instead, the word usually functions as a kind of catchphrase. It becomes, in other words, a “catchy” piece of language that helps to “crystallize an issue” and “spark a response” (Gupta, 2022, p. 171). Like other catchphrases, however, it is also what philosophers term a “thick concept.” It not only describes a phenomenon; it also contains a normative dimension that tells us immediately what to think of it (Talisse, 2019, p. 15). As with certain other contemporary historical catchphrases—we could think here of the “paranoid style” in contemporary right-wing discourse, where “woke” staff in liberal institutions are always on the cusp of implementing “full communism”—part of “bowdlerisation’s” “thickness” lies in its morally coded historical resonances and associations. What we might call the “historical catchphrase” (of which “bowdlerising” is an instance) represents a kind of shorthand or snippet-version historicism, enabling the catchphrase user to discredit a contemporary practice by identifying it with a problematic episode from history.

Typifying the use of the historical catchphrase, The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant extrapolates from the new Dahl editions to conclude that “Too many custodians of Britain’s cultural riches seem to despise them …The offence-taking class are no progressives; but the heirs to the 17th-century Puritans and [public decency campaigner] Mary Whitehouse” (Grant, 2023). For their users, these historical analogies crystallise anxieties about the emergence of new reading cultures, new beliefs, and new sensibilities. They are responses to what Christian Lorentzen calls the new “zero-sum mentality … when it comes to writers’ posthumous reputations,” a mode of “popular criticism” which views the literary canon “as an object of potential cleansing rather than expansion” and asks “whether this or that author or volume should be cancelled” on moral grounds (Lorentzen, 2022). Typically taking place online (whether on social media platforms or specialist “book talk” sites like Good Reads), this type of popular cultural criticism reflects the fact that books and authors now exist in a “real-time reputation economy” due to the all-seeing, interveillant, and always-on nature of digital communications. An author’s reputational stocks can now collapse overnight due to what they say on social media or damaging new revelations about their private lives (King, 2022, p. 715). The controversies now embroiling the authorial reputations of Alice Munro and Neil Gaiman are only the most recent examples of this trend.

However, as Grant’s rhetoric indicates, critical interventions of the “Telegraph-story type” do not take these new cultures of social capital as contemporary phenomena in their own right. Instead, they seek to disqualify them outright as resurgences of an outmoded and discredited past, in effect mirroring the logic of cancellation. These sorts of anxious responses do not only attach themselves to sensitivity reading. They also extend to other phenomena, such as trigger warnings and new captions and signage in art galleries and museum collections. All of these phenomena are in effect “tagged” as inherently illegitimate by connection with an episode from popular historical memory—McCarthyism, puritan iconoclasm, or Victorian prudery. The historical analogy suggests the return of an oppressive or outmoded set of past values, which are (as the Globe and Mail’s correspondent implies) simultaneously “laughable” (in their antiquatedness) and threatening (in their potential to exit history and abruptly re-enter the present moment).

These critiques share something of the Bowdler period’s anxiety about the contaminating potential of the cultural past. History looms as a problem even as these defenders seek to protect an aspect of historical popular culture from present-day alteration or critique. At the same time, however, some of the recent defences of sensitivity reading in children’s literature display a similarly anxious orientation to literary and cultural history. Sensitivity reader Scott Evans’s comments on Dahl straightforwardly equate “outdated language” with “offence,” and suggest that the appealing “rebelliousness” in Dahl’s stories could easily slip into a now unacceptable “maliciousness” as cultural norms change (Cumming, Holl-Allen, and Smith, 2023, p. 20). Moreover, there is no sense in his comments of any distinction between his own personal sense of what counts as “offence” and “malice” and a general statement of truth.

For those who object to what they call bowdlerisation, it is above all attitudes and orientations to texts—forms of labelling or commentary and attempts to control or restrict the circulation of books—that appear threatening. For these observers, content warnings and sensitivity reading represent the uncanny return of certain older, overtly censorial approaches to literature. They seem like mechanisms to make a text conform to current values, or to perhaps define those works that no longer seem congenial to contemporary sensibilities out of the field of literature altogether. For those who defend sensitivity reading, on the other hand, even relatively recent popular literary and cultural artefacts need to be continually assessed and audited for potential harm, according to the logic of the real-time literary reputation economy. Through a form of what Ian Hacking terms “semantic contagion,” exposing children to now “problematic” concepts or modes of behaviour via their textual representation in “outdated” texts might, it is believed, model or transmit now-deprecated ways of thinking and being to new generations of impressionable minds (Hacking, 1995, p. 257). For both groups, the values embodied in the literary past have come to present a perhaps intractable problem for the present.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the revival of old ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jean Baudrillard remarked on what he saw as the “mass resurgence of fossils and relics” that these conflicts involved. “What is stupendous,” he wrote in The Illusion of the End, “is that nothing one thought superseded by history has really disappeared. All the archaic, anachronistic forms are there ready to re-emerge, intact and timeless,” like frozen mammoths eroding from the permafrost. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” in the wake of the Cold War was also then “the end of the dustbins of history.” With the arrow of time’s forward propulsion neutralised, there were no longer any conceptual facilities for the disposal of “defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas” (Baudrillard, 1994, pp. 76; 26–7).  All would continue to circulate indefinitely in the postmodern cultural and political space, undergoing endless processes of recycling and re-emergence.

The rise to prominence of the historical catchphrase, alongside the new vogue in academic discourse for (over)-using historical analogies to describe contemporary politics (Steinmetz-Jenkins, 2023), speak to a similar sense that the past has begun to intolerably pervade and crowd out the present. Sensitivity readers seek to put away, “dustbin”-style, the “dead concepts and fossilized ideas” that (to their minds) an overly nostalgic publishing industry continues to transmit via “classic children’s literature” when new, more relevant and contemporary texts might be preferable. Those who resist the newly intensified urge to “tidy” or “cleanse the canon”—the process of scanning the cultural past for use-by dates and clearing away any old or potentially embarrassing stock from the display shelves—perceive these acts as being themselves unwelcome re-emergences of Baudrillard’s “defunct ideologies” and “bygone utopias.” Both trends are simultaneously responses to and symptoms of the same profound ambivalences about the relevance of history, and with it, the fear that certain seemingly outdated ideas, ideologies, and slogans might have the power to leave the page and violently re-emerge, mammoth-like, in our present.

“All literature,” Mark McGurl has recently written, “is children’s literature at its core” (McGurl, 2021, p. 17). In saying this, he is making a different observation than critics such as Kate Clanchy, who argue that assumptions about harmful content once limited to the sphere of children’s and young adult (YA) publishing are now expanding to encompass fiction editing more generally (Clanchy, 2023, p. 2). McGurl’s point is that we as readers continue to look to texts in our adult lives that can satisfy the serial appetite for books laid down by our memories of childhood reading—the routine consumption of the same books (or kinds of books) repeatedly. It is these emotional investments that may explain why news of the recent revisions to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton books struck such a chord with many adult readers. Programmes to “update” texts to make them “accessible” to new generations of readers inevitably come up against the role that these books play in cultural and collective memory. The desire for these texts to be constant and unchanging testifies to our need to imagine an unbroken line of connection linking our childhood and adult reading selves.

Image insert: solarisgirl, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons