Fat, ugly and flabby are among the hundreds of words that have been removed from Roald Dahl’s children’s books so the stories “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”.
Publishers have made a string of changes to Dahl’s work, primarily around language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race. They have also inserted sentences into the books which were not written by the author.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, Augustus Gloop is described as “enormous” rather than “fat”.
In The Witches, 59 changes were said to have been made, the publication said. One paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”