Bowdler’s Children: How Publishing Makes Its Past Disappear

Publishing can explain its inheritance or it can make it disappear. It keeps choosing disappearance.

Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare, expanded under his name in 1818, removed from the plays everything a gentleman could not read aloud to his daughters. Of course we revisited the 'read aloud to his daughters again in the 1960 obscenity trial for Lady Chaterley's Lover . Barrister Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury to consider the morality of the novel:

Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

Historically, ruling classes, religious authorities, and governments and publishers have controlled text access to maintain social order, protect religious orthodoxy, and suppress political dissent or to just remove inconvenient words or people.

Shakespearean Characters by Shirley Salariya

Thomas Bowdler thought he was doing Shakespeare a kindness, the language disagreed. Two centuries on, his surname survives only as a verb for the timid mutilation of another person's work, and no one has ever used it to praise. Publishing reached its verdict on quiet rewriting a long time ago. That is worth holding in mind, because publishing now does the same thing again, at scale, and files it under care.

2023 Puffin Reissued Roald Dahl

In February 2023 Puffin reissued Roald Dahl with the rough edges sanded off. Augustus Gloop was no longer fat but enormous. Mrs Twit was no longer fearfully ugly. The Oompa-Loompas, once small men, became small people. The Witches acquired a new line reassuring readers that there is nothing wrong with a woman wearing a wig. The word fat was taken out of every title on the list. Louise O'Neill made the sharp point in these pages that fat is not the problem - it is a description, like tall - and that the problem is only ever the moralising of it, the use of a fat character as shorthand for greed or cruelty. Changing fat to enormous does nothing about that. It removes a trigger word and leaves the machinery intact. Which tells you what the exercise is really for.

Meanwhile in France...

The same instinct was at work across the Channel. Between 2015 and 2018 the entire Martine series was rewritten for French children - vocabulary simplified, whole paragraphs cut, Martine Little Mum reissued as Martine Babysits Her Little Brothers so that no one need think about gender roles. French editions of the Famous Five were combed over too, with Anne reassigned from dolls to teddy bears. The reviser's stated aim was to let the language age gracefully and to lower the reading age. One French house, Flammarion Jeunesse, declined the whole project and said its texts had not changed since the editors were children themselves. That is not negligence, that is a position, and a braver one than the rewriters'.

Unaltered Text in Print as a Classic Collection

Here is the detail that gives the game away. Within days of the Puffin edits, Penguin announced that it would keep Dahl's original, unaltered text in print as a classic collection, while Puffin sold the sanitised version alongside. Two editions, if the original text were genuinely unfit for a child, you would not keep it on sale in a handsomer jacket for the adult who wants it - you would withdraw it. Keeping both means the edit was never protection. It was product management, and the company behind it had shown the same reflex two years earlier, when it apologised for Dahl's antisemitism by posting the apology where almost no one would find it - several clicks down, under a corporate sub-heading, mentioning neither Dahl nor antisemitism by name. The apology was full and serious. Its placement was not, explanation technically performed; disappearance actually achieved.

An Inheritance it Finds Embarrassing

That is the choice underneath all of this, faced with an inheritance it finds embarrassing, a publisher can explain the book or it can make the awkward part disappear. Explanation costs money and exposes the house to argument. Disappearance is cheap, and it photographs well. Publishing keeps choosing disappearance, and disappearance is the corrosive choice, for a reason that is almost never said aloud.

A demeaning line in an old book is not only an offence, it is also evidence. Blyton's golliwogs, the original Oompa-Loompas - whom Dahl first wrote as black pygmies shipped out of the African jungle, and later revised himself, to de-Negro them, in his own word - Agatha Christie's 1939 mystery, since retitled And Then There Were None: each is a record of what a particular time was content to print. Take the record out quietly and you do not undo the harm, the harm was done, in the world, decades ago. What you delete is the proof that it happened.

This is the part the sensitivity edit never reckons with, if you erase the prejudice from the page, you also erase the evidence that anyone ever had to fight the predudice in so many forms. The people who objected - who wrote the letters, who picketed, who lost work and sometimes a great deal more to change what a culture would casually print about them - were fighting something specific. Remove the specific thing from the record and their fight loses its object - the child who reads the laundered edition is left to assume there was never anything to oppose, that the past was always as tidy as the present pretends to be. Sanitising does not honour the people who shifted those attitudes. It writes them out, by deleting the conditions that made their work necessary, this is progress eating its own birth certificate.

A Craft Objection

There is a craft objection too, and as someone who spent a working life making books I feel it keenly, a book is a witness. An edited classic sold as the original is a false witness - a forgery in the plain sense, an object passed off as something it is not. The reader who picks up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory believes they are reading Dahl. They are reading Dahl with a committee standing behind him and no note to say so. You can no longer read the period through the book, because the period has been retouched out of it. We would not accept this from a gallery. We accept it from a publisher only because the publisher owns the copyright and the gallery does not own the painting.

Not Only the Words

And it is not only the words that get rewritten, the credits go too, a biography dates a book - illustrated by someone who trained in the 1970s, first written by an author whose other titles are long out of print - and dating is fatal to a relaunch that needs the property to look new. So the life notes are quietly dropped, not for any fault in them, but because age is bad for the repackaging, especially if a publisher is trying to present old books as new. This falls hardest on exactly the people least able to answer it. The authors, illustrators and series creators of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s built their working lives before an online presence was a condition of the job. Many have no website, no searchable trail, nothing running in parallel to the printed page. For them the credit in the book was not one record among many, it was the record. Remove it and there is nothing left to find.

A New Editor credited?

In its place the new edition often carries a fresh line - a new editor, a production credit - and it is worth asking plainly what those names did. Preparing a reissue is real work and deserves its acknowledgement; I have no quarrel with a line that says, honestly, this edition was made ready by such a person. The quarrel is with the substitution, the editor of a reprint did not commission the book, did not shape it, did not bring it into being, fact check; that was done decades earlier by the people now absent from the page. Credit an editor on the reissue of a finished book and you have staged a small chicken-and-egg puzzle with a known answer. The book came first, the editor came to a thing already made, there is no real question of which precedes which, only the pretence of one, useful because the pretence lets a late arrival stand where the originator stood. To strike out the originators and leave only the reissue's housekeepers is to falsify the record in both directions at once - the makers who did the work vanish, and a career is quietly built on a foundation that was never its own. On other people's shoulders, with the shoulders airbrushed out. The remedy, here as everywhere in this argument, is addition rather than subtraction: keep the makers, keep their lives on the page, and add the new hands beneath them. Explanation would cost a publisher a few lines and a moment's candour about a book's age. Disappearance costs a maker their whole presence in the only place it survived.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988

The law that ought to stand in the way of this barely stirs. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 grants a right to be named as the maker of a work, but in publishing that right is faint by design: it must be asserted before it takes effect, it can be signed away in a contract, and it is hedged with exceptions that happen to fall across much of the illustrated and reference work where credit matters most. Compare the screen. A film director arrives on every print of the film with a credit the industry treats as untouchable, backed by custom as much as by statute. The person who devised a book series, or drew it, or shaped it into something a house could sell, has no equivalent standing, and the role that sits behind a whole list - the originator, the deviser, the maker of the thing in the first place - the Act does not recognise at all. Publishing creators are not under-protected by accident. They are under-protected because the law was written as though their work had no author worth naming.

Authors are Dead and Cannot Object

It is sometimes said that the authors are dead and cannot object, so where is the harm. That is the argument for leaving the work alone, not for altering it. The dead cannot consent to the rewriting either. The integrity of a finished book, and the reader's right to the actual words, do not lapse with the writer's pulse - though under our law the moral right that should defend them very nearly does, which is a structural failure I have written about before and will again. And yes, texts have always been cut and abridged. But an abridgement announces itself. Retold for younger readers is honest. A silent rewrite sold under the original title and the author's own name is not an adaptation. It is a substitution.

The Alternative

So what is the alternative, not preservation in aspic; some books really are past saving, and the honest course - let them go quietly out of print, rather than launder them to keep the licence earning. For the rest, explanation: annotate, introduce, trust the context to a foreword and the judgement to the reader. This is harder and slower than find-and-replace, which is exactly why it is not done.

There is a cost to publishing it prefers not to count, every reissued, sanitised, frictionless old title takes a place on the list and a line in the budget that might have gone to a new writer and a new illustrator with something of their own to say. Recycled property, buffed for the present, is cheaper and safer than a debut. The edit is not only a small dishonesty about the past. It is a quiet vote against the future.

All of this - the quiet edit, the dropped credit, the law that shrugs - is the low, manual version of something now arriving at scale. We are at the earliest stage of machines that take in the work of authors and illustrators, digest it, and spits it out - again with no name attached and no trail back to a maker. Creative fracking and erasure used to need a meeting and a red pen, soon it will be the ordinary condition of production. A publishing culture that cannot keep one creator's name on the reprint of their own book has no answer at all to a world in which anyone is an author or an artist after a handful of prompts, and in which the question of who made a thing has been engineered to have no findable answer.

The Record of Authorship

The record of authorship is never worth more than at the moment authorship becomes cheap and universal - and that is precisely the moment publishing has chosen to let the record go. The reprint editor's borrowed credit and the machine's anonymous output are the same move at two speeds: the maker taken out of the made thing.

Bowdler thought he was protecting his readers, he was protecting himself, from the discomfort of explaining a great writer to his own family. The modern edit protects a balance sheet from the discomfort of explaining a profitable author to the present. In each case the work is made smaller so that no one need do the harder thing, which is to speak to a child as though they could understand. Publishing can explain its inheritance, or it can make it disappear. It keeps choosing disappearance, we should keep Bowdler's name to hand for when it does.

Balderdash!

There is a word from Shakespeare's own day for what is left when it does. Balderdash, in the 1590s, meant an adulterated drink - milk struck into beer, a frothy and faintly sickening mixture of things with no business in one glass; only later did it come to mean nonsense. What the modern editors hand us is balderdash in both senses at once - an adulterated text, the original cut with something foreign, that no longer means what it meant. They have watered the wine and sold it as the vintage. Bowdler, for all his timidity, never pretended the curdle was Shakespeare entire; his title page declared the cuts. His heirs make theirs in silence, and pass the result off as the thing itself. That is the whole distance between explaining a book and making it disappear.

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David Salariya is an author, illustrator, designer and publisher. He has been chased by an elephant, stood on the edge of Victoria Falls, had books published in more than thirty-five languages, seen one series sell more than six million copies - and one book sell seventy-two.

He founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989, creating and publishing children’s books through imprints including Book House, Scribblers and Scribo. The company was named Independent Children’s Publisher of the Year by the Independent Publishers Guild. David originated, developed or published series including You Wouldn’t Want to Be…, Timelines, Spectacular Visual Guides and A Very Peculiar History and more than other sixty series.

David writes about the history of books, how they are made, sold, misjudged, rescued, redesigned, erased, remaindered, remembered - and occasionally composted. The books he created over a period of thirty years are being "refreshed" and republished by Bonnier UK's Hatch Press "where good things grow".