Roald Dahl was an unpleasant man — a snob, a racist, a cad, and a bounder — but at least he was consistent. His books are unpleasant, too. They are also funny, not least because comedy is cruel.
Dahl’s theme was Charles Dickens’s theme, the cruelty of childhood. While Dickens wrote for sentimental adults, Dahl wrote for cruel children.
The censors have already attained the historical illiteracy they wish to impose upon the children. References to Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling have become references to Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. Neither Conrad nor Kipling was an unconditional imperialist, but Austen’s father was a trustee of a slave plantation in Antigua, and Steinbeck was a big supporter of the Vietnam War.
The technical term is “bowdlerization,” after the Victorian brother-and-sister team Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler. Henrietta Bowdler took the rude bits out of Shakespeare, mostly the cursing and sex jokes, and Thomas Bowdler published the Family Shakespeare in 1807. He spent the rest of his futile life excising the spicy scenes from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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