“Every writer should be his own censor.” Readers might be surprised to learn that this statement came from the mouth of the author Roald Dahl, in an interview given in 1989 less than a year before he died. “I don’t hold with all this ‘I’m a member of the Society of Authors’ stuff,” he went on. “They seem to think that unlike other people they have a God-given right to publish exactly what they want. All of us should exercise a degree of censorship. In my children’s books, there’s a wild degree of censorship.”
This was a characteristically hypocritical declaration from Dahl – his biographer, Donald Sturrock, writes that “almost everyone who knew him agreed that he had precious little capacity” for being his own censor. Few would agree that Dahl’s gleefully vindictive books bear the marks of censorship to “a wild degree”. At least, until recently. An investigation by the Telegraph has revealed that hundreds of changes have been made to the most recent editions of Dahl’s books, published by Puffin (the children’s division of Penguin), which edit out or rewrite potentially offensive language.
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