Despite Roald Dahl having enjoined his publishers not to "so much as change a single comma in one of my books", in February 2023 Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books, announced it would be re-writing portions of many of Dahl's children's novels, changing the language to, in the publisher's words, "ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today."[8] The decision was met with sharp criticism from groups and public figures including authors Salman Rushdie[9][10] and Christopher Paolini,[11] British prime minister Rishi Sunak,[9][10] Queen Camilla,[9][12] Kemi Badenoch,[13] PEN America,[9][10] and Brian Cox.[13] Dahl's publishers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands announced they had declined to incorporate the changes.[9]
In James and the Giant Peach, more than seventy changes were made, such as removing references to Sponge as fat (including writing an entirely new poem), changing queer to strange, removing references to skin colour (such as "his face white with horror", "looking white and thin", and the Earthworm's "lovely pink skin"), and changing Cloud-Men to Cloud-People.[14][15]
| Original text | 2023 text[15] |
|---|---|
| There were caves everywhere running into the cloud, and at the entrances to the caves the Cloud-Men's wives were crouching over little stoves with frying-pans in their hands, frying snowballs for their husbands' suppers. | There were houses everywhere running into the cloud. |
