Ed Johnson-Williams' microblog

I'm having a great time reading Charlie and the Chocolate factory to my son at bedtime at the moment. He was given it by someone for a recent birthday. He loves it and I love it (which can't be said for all stories for young children).

This evening I remembered that there had been a lot of discourse recently about rewording Roald Dahl books for inclusiveness or whatever and loads of people thought rewording his books was somewhere on the scale of 'a bit unnecessary' through to to 'an attack on freedom of expression'. I couldn't quite see what the problem was at the time.

So I checked the frontmatter and sure enough this is the 2023 reworded version. I read the book multiple times as a child. I've seen the original movie multiple times. We're over halfway through and I honestly had no idea this wasn't the original text just from reading the book. It's still great. Kids (or at least one of my kids) still love it.

There's still assumptions in there about business, labour, and intellectual property that a Marxist would take issue with I'm sure. But any concerns that editing the original would make the story unenjoyable are way off.

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