The real solution here is dead simple.
: all of them. All these books have moments in them that are a little sticky for modern readers, and that you can contextualize for children, if you want to. I think, from experience, that even small children are capable of understanding something like “In the past, more people thought it was OK to be rude about people who were different from them, but now we don’t do that because it’s upsetting/unfair/wrong.
Listen: Roald Dahl was a shitbag. This is known. In an infamous 1983 interview, he said that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. Maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews..” He was, by some accounts, a more general racist, a misogynist, a bully. I understand the publisher’s impulse to look at these works, which bear marks of the views of their author, and want to try to buff them to a higher shine under the gaze of the contemporary world.
But what’s happened here is more extensive, and much less obvious in its merit. What Puffin has actually done in this case is a mess. For instance, Augustus Gloop will be “enormous” rather than “fat.” This performs no sensitivity purpose, because the characterfat. Much of his strand of the plot revolves around this fact. And even taking the word “fat” out at all implies that fat is an insult in and of itself, rather than a descriptor of one possible body type.
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