‘There’s more than one way to burn a book,’ wrote Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The case of Roald Dahl, one of the best-known children’s authors of the twentieth century, having a number of his classic books rewritten, is a powerful example of just how true that is today. 

The publisher hired a team to revise and remove all language they deemed offensive. This culminated in extensive alterations being made to some of the writer’s most famous books, as revealed in the report in the Telegraph which broke the story. Puffin brought in sensitivity readers to pore over Dahl’s words and make hundreds of changes to his work—in some cases, adding new passages to justify the author’s use of descriptive adjectives. For example, in The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs now includes the line, ‘There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.’ In other cases, they are simply erased. The sentence, ‘There was something indecent about a bald woman,’ has been removed entirely. These are just two examples of the 59 edits made to just one of Dahl’s books. 

For almost seventy years, Dahl’s stories have enchanted generations of children. The characters he created are some of the most memorable in all of children’s literature. This is partly because he employed a simple literary device: ‘good’ = ‘handsome’, ‘bad’ = ‘ugly’. In his surreal, bifurcated world, Dahl equates physical and moral beauty, evoking the darkly comic tradition of such literary heavyweights as Evelyn Waugh. As Dahl writes in The Twits, ‘A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.’ Part of the pleasure in reading his books was in picturing the many imaginative ways in which he described dispatching the villains. The feeling evoked in reading about their downfall was a kind of gleeful sadness. And Dahl always made sure the good guys were the final winners. 

A majority of the edits have been made to Dahl’s descriptions of the characters’ physical appearance. The word ‘fat’ has been removed from every new edition. For example, Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now ‘enormous’, and Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach is ‘tremendously flabby’ when she used to be ‘terrifically fat’. Meanwhile in The Twits—my all-time favourite childhood story—Mrs. Twit is no longer ‘ugly and beastly’, she is just ‘beastly’. 

Numerous references to gender are also gone. In The Witches, ‘chambermaid’ is now ‘cleaner’, while a woman’s likely profession is changed from ‘cashier’ to ‘top scientist’. It does not stop there. Any reference to race, indirect or otherwise, is gone. We now have a situation where a character turns ‘quite pale’ instead of ‘white’, while Mr. Twit’s monkeys no longer speak a ‘weird African language’, just an ‘African language’.

Dahl is no longer with us—he died in 1990. As such, he did not live to witness the impact that political correctness would have on literature. But novelists are not the only ones who have caught the attention of sensitivity readers. Fiction’s new moral guardians have now taken aim at the world of cookery books.

Last year, The Times reported that Jamie Oliver uses ‘teams of cultural appropriation specialists’ to review his recipes in an attempt to make sure they do not ‘offend anyone’. His ‘empire roast chicken’, which the chef said you can eat with your hands, along with his ‘punchy jerk rice’, were both previously deemed offensive to the Indian and Caribbean communities. In 2018, Labour MP Dawn Butler took to Twitter to voice her opinion. The former shadow equalities minister tweeted, ‘Your jerk rice is not ok. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’ Initially, the Essex-born chef did the right thing and defended himself, telling Hello! magazine (as reported in the Daily Mail) that ‘authenticity’ was a word that should be used ‘very carefully as most of the things we love…are not what we think they are.’ But the damage was done. By supposedly stealing other people’s cultural heritage for commercial gain, Oliver’s critics were basically accusing him of a bizarre form of culinary colonialism. 

I would argue that Oliver uses ‘cultural appropriation specialists’ nowadays in order to be financially successful. Shielding your work from offence is the latest way to signal your right-on credentials. And it is a big business. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers command six figure salaries. Get their approval, and the world is yours – they will even open the door for you. Cookery books are one of the most difficult industries to break into in the publishing world. In 2020, 5,000 cookbooks were published; of these, only one-tenth, (556) sold over 100 copies. The ‘Naked Chef’ has sold more than 48 million books. After his chain of Italian restaurants collapsed, Oliver would seem to be trying to protect his empire. (No chicken pun, I promise). 

With the possible exception of ‘cultural appropriation’, there is no phrase more idiotic in the politically correct lexicon than ‘lived experience’. Yet within just a few years, this meaningless shibboleth has come to dominate the world of literature. 

In recent years, sensitivity readers have become the most talked-about people in publishing. Essentially, freelance copy editors are hired by publishers to review new manuscripts in an attempt to ‘cancel-proof’ new works of literature. They are paid to read books that portray characters that exist outside the ‘lived experience’ of the author. For example, the white Canadian author Paul Carlucci had a publishing deal fall through after a sensitivity reader made a series of objections to his portrayal of an Indigenous character from the Canadian Odawa nation. Carlucci felt that the increasing list of objections would have ruined the character development and narrative flow of the novel, telling The Sunday Times, ‘I got their notes—and they were ridiculous… If I’d followed this advice I would have portrayed an 1830s Canada that is more racially just than it is today. It would have been sanitised.’

Sensitivity readers are a modern version of a centuries-old problem. These self-appointed censors are not a new phenomenon. Literature has had a long and bloody relationship with the written word.  

When William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, it revolutionised the world of literature. It helped spread ideas and opinions wider and faster than ever before. The response from successive English monarchs was to control it. Long before Orwell, they realised that he who controls language has power. Henry VIII established Crown licensing of the press in 1529. It meant nothing could be published without the express permission of the Star Chamber—a network of judges and privy councillors. Anything critical of the Crown or the Church could be branded treason or seditious libel.

Fifty years after Caxton, William Tyndale printed an English version of the New Testament in Germany. When he brought it to England in 1526, it was immediately proscribed. Ten years later, he had not yet finished his translation of the Old Testament when he was captured in Antwerp, before being tried, strangled and burnt at the stake for the crime of heresy. Yet just three years later, Henry VIII split from Rome and founded the Church of England, thereby giving his approval for an English text.

In 1663, John Twyn was hanged, drawn and quartered at what is now Marble Arch for printing—not writing—a book justifying people’s right to rebel against injustice. The system of Crown licensing finally ended in 1695. All it took were the deaths of a few revolutionaries and a passionate plea from John Milton, set against the backdrop of a protracted civil war. Give me liberty or give me death!

As history has shown, our relationship with the state has often been bloody, especially when we have fought so hard for our civil liberties. But it is not just the state that imposes top-down collective control over our right to speak freely. Censorship can often come from other, less abstract relationships much closer to home. A lighter touch was required. Think less iron fist, more velvet glove. 

When we reach the 18th century, we enter a new, less violent era of censorship. In 1779, Frances Burney wrote a play called The Witlings. The comedy satirised modern society. Despite this, it was not performed or printed for almost two hundred years. It was censored and suppressed by what she called her ‘two daddies’, her father, Dr Charles Burney, and her ‘elderly friend and literary censor’, Samuel Crisp. Censorship had found a new home in Georgian high society. 

Henrietta (known as Harriet) and Thomas Bowdler found themselves, somewhat ironically, contributing to the English language when they edited The Family Shakespeare in 1807. They went through some twenty works of the Bard and removed all ‘words and expressions…which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ The practice became so widespread that it led to the creation of a new verb: ‘bowdlerise’, that is, to alter and remove offensive language from a literary work – thereby reducing its creative impact. 

As censorship became acceptable among the upper middle classes, it also increased in frequency. It was still going strong last century; James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turned 100 last month, was banned in the United States before Joyce finished writing it. Meanwhile, in 1960, the Old Bailey—a court normally reserved for the most serious cases of murder and violence—found itself presiding over the ultimate crime of words: giving offence. Penguin Books was put on trial for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was eventually acquitted. Yet there is a tragic irony to all this. Puffin is a subsidiary of Penguin Books. Some sixty years after the Lady Chatterley debacle, Puffin is now doing a similar thing to Roald Dahl – proving that we have not learned anything from history. 

Contrary to popular opinion, Dahl has not been ‘cancelled’: the original text will continue to be published, after a climb-down by Puffin. But that misses the point. The fact that the publisher at first simply tried to replace the originals, and the public outcry against this move, shows how much we take freedom of expression for granted. The censorship of all art, literature, painting and music is an attempt to eradicate the past and impose a single, politically driven narrative on history. Worse, giving someone permission to do this is nothing short of cultural vandalism. It shows a profound ignorance of history and a tragic misunderstanding of liberty that fewer and fewer of us seem to share. Such ignorance is what led to Edward Colston’s statue being tipped into Bristol harbour. 

There are signs of a pushback. Later this year, Carlucci’s novel will be published by Swift Press, a new, independent publisher specialising in cancelled authors and books that other publishers will not touch. Swift Press sold 100,000 books within the first nine months of 2021. Scrolling through its list of authors, one notable name stands out: Kate Clanchy. Sensitivity readers censored her Orwell prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Despite the prize, the book caused controversy after critics accused her of using racial stereotypes and ableist language. She eventually parted company with her original publisher, Picador, and had the book reissued by Swift.

Roald Dahl was a wonderful writer whose books have now sold in excess of 250 million copies worldwide. Children love them because they are drawn to the surreal and the grotesque. For them, to see authoritarian adults in all their physical and moral hideousness can have a certain rebellious charm. Dahl’s writing can be a means of catharsis.

Children quickly learn the difference between literal and other interpretations of words. As such, Puffin’s attempted censorship is an insult to both their creativity and sophistication. With these edits, children are being taught not to see the ugliness, the strangeness and sometimes even the horror of the world around them – to pretend it does not exist. That is a story truly more sinister than anything Dahl could create. 

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The threat of nuclear war has loomed above the horizon again recently. In the circumstances, it is perhaps worth reminding oneself why it would still be a very, very bad idea. The Freethinker has put together a brief list of books, a film and a song that imagine, in particularly compelling ways, how nuclear war or a similar catastrophe might come about, and what it would be like – or, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the disaster at Chernobyl, how it actually was.

One of the traditional themes of the arts is the disastrous consequences that might arise when human inventiveness is combined with human irrationality. But can the creative imagination help to forestall the apocalypse? As Virgil put it in the first century BC, ‘my poems are as effective against the weapons of war as doves are against an eagle.’* And that was long before mutual assured destruction was a thing.

The images accompanying this list are taken from a 1963 Home Office leaflet entitled Civil Defence Handbook No. 10: Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack. As discussed by David Welch in Protecting the People: The Central Office of Information and the Reshaping of Post-War Britain, 1946-2011 (British Library, 2019), the handbook was produced in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis by a state that wanted to reassure the population, without necessarily being able to imagine what such a catastrophe would be like. The graphic designs, in black, red and grey, are simplified and almost appallingly restrained. ‘Remember fall-out’, its pages warn in an ineffectual mantra. Keep calm and carry on?

~ Books ~

Hiroshima, John Hersey (1946, republished with a new final chapter in 1985). Link here

This book, by the American journalist John Hersey, records the memories of survivors of the first atomic bomb to be dropped in anger – on Hiroshima in southern Japan, on 6th August 1945. (Nagasaki followed three days later.) Somewhere between 90,000-146,000 people, mostly civilians, are estimated to have been killed by ‘Little Boy’, as the bomb was somewhat tastelessly nicknamed.

Hersey used a narrative style to bring alive the interwoven stories of six survivors: a clerk, a physician, a tailor’s widow, a German Jesuit priest, a surgeon and a pastor. The story starts with the ‘noiseless flash’ that occurred at the moment of impact. It then traces the subsequent carnage, as described by its witnesses: the schoolgirls trapped under a fence and singing the national anthem until they died of suffocation, or the victims of radiation burns whose ‘skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces’.

One striking effect of the flash produced by the bomb on impact was to imprint ‘shadows’ cast by one building on another. There were even places where ‘vague human silhouettes’ were discerned on the concrete and stone that remained, whether of a ‘man about to whip his horse’, or a painter ‘in the act of dipping his brush into his paint can’ – just as, in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii two thousand years earlier, the ash preserved the shapes of a running dog or a mother cradling her child.

Hersey then turns to the after-effects, including psychological trauma and the debilitating radiation sickness that the survivors all experienced in different ways, including hair loss, wounds that refused to heal, and petechiae – ‘hemorrages about the size of grains of rice, or even as big as soybeans,’ that appeared on the surface of the skin. Above all, the hibakusha, or ‘explosion-affected persons’, as the bomb survivors became known, were prone for months and years afterwards to ‘a nagging weakness and weariness, dizziness now and then, digestive troubles, all aggravated by a feeling of oppression, a sense of doom…’.

All this from a ‘primitive’ nuclear bomb, much less powerful than those paraded today before admiring crowds in Russia, China or North Korea, or lurking, presumably, in American submarines.

Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954). Link here

Set in a near-future where an ‘atom bomb’ has exploded, Golding’s classic imagines what would happen to children – or to any survivors – without the structures of civilisation to impose some sort of order. A plane with a group of boys headed to safety crash-lands on a desert island. We hear nothing about the England they have left or the effects of the bomb, except what one of them heard from the pilot: ‘They’re all dead.’ The new land seems like a paradise, but the boys, or most of them, degenerate bit by bit into savages, first painting their faces, then killing a pig with crude spears, and finally hunting each other.

At the end, with the island burning like an inferno around him, Ralph, the last more or less humane boy left standing, weeps helplessly ‘for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart,’ and the murder of his ‘true, wise friend called Piggy’ – the most intelligent of the boys but a physical weakling who, without the protection of adults, has become a victim of the others’ violence.

On the Beach, Nevil Shute (1957). Link here

World War III has happened. Thousands of nuclear bombs have been dropped across the northern hemisphere, sending up a vast cloud of radioactive dust that has killed all human life there and is now drifting gradually and relentlessly southwards. The plot traces the reactions of a group of people near Melbourne as they await its arrival: a naval officer and his wife, Peter and Mary Holmes, and their baby daughter, along with an American submarine commander, an unstable young woman, and a scientist. As the towns of northern and central Australia go ‘out’ one by one, each of the survivors retreats into their own fantasy world to try to bear the unbearable.

Just before they all die, Peter and Mary wonder whether the all-out war could have been avoided. But as Peter puts it, ‘if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it.’ The only hope, he speculates, might have been education or through the newspapers, but in the event they, too, failed. As the cloud of fall-out moves closer, the family start to experience radiation sickness. Peter injects the baby with government-supplied cyanide, and then he and his wife lie down and take theirs together.

Shute’s prose style is all the more devastating for being direct and unadorned. How could human life end? This is how.

When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs (1982). Link here

Briggs had achieved fame for The Snowman (1978) and his two Father Christmas graphic novels (1973, 1975). His story about a nuclear attack on Britain, published a few years later, effectively exploited the cognitive dissonance produced by using the same familiar, comfortable style of cartoons for a deeply uncomfortable subject.

Jim and Hilda Bloggs, a retired, working-class couple living in the countryside, are going about their everyday lives when it is announced over the radio that the ‘international situation’ is ‘deteriorating and an ‘outbreak of hostilities’ is due to take place in three days. ‘It looks as if there’s going to be a War, dear,’ Jim says to his wife, almost casually. ‘Well, we survived the last one,’ she says, ‘we can do it again.’ The book plays on this contrast between the bombings of World War II, which is all of the couple’s experience of conflict, and nuclear war, which they are fatally slow to comprehend.

When he hears the broadcast, Jim cycles off to buy bread, but it is all sold out. ‘There seems to be some sort of panic purchasing,’ he tells his wife, innocently. As this remark suggests, the couple – like everyone else – are totally unprepared for the consequences of the explosion. They try to follow the instructions in leaflets provided by the authorities, but these turn out to be almost laughably inadequate. For instance, Jim stores drinking water in bottles, but they are shattered by the blast.

The story is interspersed with shadowy pictures of a warhead, a group of bombers, and a nuclear submarine. Briggs emphasises the strangeness that such ‘distant’ scenes should be able to destroy the everyday life of people thousands of miles away. While Jim follows the news as best he can, Hilda has little interest in international politics. As Jim says, ‘it’s all very complicated, ducks.’ He imagines that the responsibility lies with committees, who ‘have loads and loads of meetings and thus Arrive at Decisions.’ Neither of them really understands why nuclear war should happen; but then, Briggs implies, can there be any rational explanation?

Even when, after the explosion, they discover there is no water, no electricity, and all the countryside around the has been razed to the ground, the couple preserve a tragically naïve optimism, almost to the end, that they will be rescued. As Jim puts it, ‘the Govern-mental Authorities have been aware of this eventuality for years, so Contingency Plans will have been formalated long ago.’

Inevitably exposed to radiation, their faces become greener; Hilda’s hair starts falling out; Jim’s gums start to bleed; and they are wracked by thirst. Their last resort is to shroud themselves in paper bags and crawl into their useless fallout shelter, where, alone and dying, they pray to God, or someone.

Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, Svetlana Alexievich (1997, revised 2013). Link here

This book chronicles the Chernobyl explosion of 26th April 1986 in Ukraine, close to the border with Belarus, and its aftermath. It uses Alexievich’s distinctive technique, somewhere between reportage and dramatic monologue, of piecing together the past through the voices of its survivors. The story is all the more harrowing for being told through the experiences of ordinary people whose lives were ruined all at once, with no warning either of the meltdown of the reactor itself or of the radiation sickness that would follow.

For Alexievich, ‘the accident at Chernobyl was the gravest technological catastrophe of the twentieth century,’ and serves as a warning for the future. Previously, she argues, humanity’s main sources of ‘horror and dread’ were from war. But with the advent of nuclear technology, whether weapons or reactors, ‘the history of disaster has begun.’ Faced with the empty, contaminated ‘Zone’ around Chernobyl, we can no longer feel confident that ‘life will be beautiful’ forever.

Svetlana Alexievich’s works examine the history of the former USSR by delving deep into the memories of those who lived through it. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.

The Book of Revelation (c. 1st century AD). Link here

It is a curious fact that one of the earliest visions of worldwide catastrophe – the original apocalypse – can be found in the New Testament. ‘Love is patient, love is kind,’ Paul says in I Corinthians, ‘it always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’ Yet the whole moral basis of Christianity is defined by reference to the end of the world and the destruction of everything that humans have made. It is the ultimate revolution, the ultimate assertion of power by a hostile force. In a world of atomic bombs, the account of the Doomsday by John of Patmos sounds strangely familiar:

‘And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. …

‘And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain…’ (Rev. 16.1-3, 8-10)

According to the author, the destruction of the wicked world was, in true revolutionary spirit, to be followed by the creation of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’. It’s the sort of attitude that induces people to blow themselves up, commit mass suicide, or generally despise this world. Unfortunately, outside the realms of mysticism or fiction, new worlds to replace it are in short supply.

~ Film ~

Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Director: Stanley Kubrik. Link here

If On the Beach should be required reading for anyone with an interest in humanity’s survival, Dr Strangelove should be required watching. Stanley Kubrik’s black comic masterpiece traces the gripping, hilarious and terrifying story of what happens when a US general goes rogue and decides to launch a nuclear strike against the USSR. Unfortunately, the Russians have invented a ‘doomsday machine’, which will automatically set off further nukes around the world in response to any American attack.

Peter Sellers, one of the great comic actors of the twentieth century, plays three roles: an RAF captain, a Nazi-turned-nuclear-weapons-expert, and the US president. As Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) tries to launch his attack, the safety procedures kick in one by one, but not soon enough to prevent an insane air force major on one B-52 bomber, played by Slim Pickens, from flying beneath the Russians’ radar and riding on the back of a warhead down to his doom – and everyone else’s.

Kubrik’s choice to film in black and white rather than technicolour makes the movie seem almost like an old-fashioned newsreel, and thus much more like something which could happen than mere fantasy. After the ‘doomsday machine’ is detonated, the film ends with clips of real nuclear explosions taken from US footage of tests in the ’40s and ’50s. The distinction between what has happened and what might happen, between a test run and the real thing, comedy and apocalypse, may be only a matter of chance.

~ Song ~

Twenty Tons of TNT, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (1967). Link here

‘I have seen it estimated
Somewhere between death and birth,
There are now three thousand million
People living on this earth;
And the stock-piled mass destruction
Of the nuclear powers that be
Equals for each man or woman
Twenty tons of TNT.’

So begins one of the few serious songs by the most civilised of entertainment duos, whose repertoire was usually so light-hearted and playful. Flanders and Swann employed a very simple, almost chant-like melodic structure, sustained by an ominous drumbeat, to emphasise the starkness of the prospect. The ‘legacy’ of ‘twenty hundred years of teaching’, of ‘Plato, Buddha, Christ and Lenin’, and all human culture, would equally be reduced to ‘twenty tons of TNT’.

That was in 1967: today, the calculation might be different. If there are more than twice as many people today, there is doubtless also far more than twice as great a tonnage of nuclear weaponry just waiting to be set off, whether by megalomaniac, fanatic or chance. ‘Ends the tale that has no sequel’ – and that would be that.

*sed carmina tantum / nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia quantum / Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas (Ecl. IX.11-13).

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