What do the Young People Think? Responses to the Censoring of Roald Dahl.

Abstract

In 2022 and 2023, children’s publisher Puffin released a set of Roald Dahl children’s titles significantly revised to take account of the sensibilities of contemporary readers. The announcement was met with widespread opposition, with high-profile writers including Salman Rushdie having their say on the matter. Following the overwhelmingly negative media-led response, which almost entirely characterised the revision as censorship, the publisher changed tack: it would retain the revised versions under the Puffin imprint, but also offer for sale the ‘classic’ versions under the Penguin imprint. In all the media coverage, young readers themselves were not consulted, or if they were, their responses have not been made public. There appears to be very little published empirical work with young readers themselves, on this specific issue or on censorship of children’s literature more generally. Since Dahl is one of the best-selling and simultaneously most-attacked writers of literature aimed at children, we wanted to investigate the views of young readers on the censorship of children’s literature, focussing on this recent re-writing of Roald Dahl books. To that end we conducted eight discussion workshops with 73 teenage students in three UK schools. We report on our findings and conclude that these young readers display a high level of insight and sophistication in their understanding and analysis of the censorship debate overall, and the censoring of Dahl in particular.