Handing down cherished publications to your little ones is just one of the very best aspects of being actually a moms and dad. Therefore like numerous others brought up on Willy Wonka’s gold ticket as well as the BFG’s bottles of aspirations, naturally I was actually enjoyed experience the Roald Dahl publications along with my kid around once more.

On worn out, stormy mid-days our company stole George’s Marvellous Medication through blending remedies coming from the components of the cooking area cabinets. Our team created the tour to the Dahl gallery in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, along with its own wonderful relaxation of his article writer’s hut as well as its own selection of lonely characters the writer created back coming from boarding college as a kid, which dropped an unfortunate type of lighting on the terrible grownups that track his myth.

I know, at that point, why his author Puffin’s selection to upgrade guides with help from a level of sensitivity audience has actually led to such outcry; why it leaves behind numerous timeless grownups experiencing certainly not simply striped, yet ethically determined for adoring all of them initially. As well as I recoiled in addition to every person else at the tin-eared re-rendering of the Vermin’s tune coming from James as well as the Titan Mango, through which Auntie Spiker – when “lean as a wire/and as dry out as a bone tissue, merely drier” – is actually ploddingly abided belong her brutish sis as “a lot of the same/and is entitled to one-half of the blame”.

Everything stated, am I surprised that the Dahl realm – as well as it’s pretty the realm, along with Netflix procuring the civil rights coming from the article writer’s level for a great £500m in 2021 – would certainly transfer to secure its own financial investment? Perform I discover it Orwellian that soon you’ll discover the authentics merely in charitable organization outlets? No, certainly not immensely.

The writer Salman Rushdie, that knocked the “silly restriction” of Dahl, appropriately concentrates on the wider guideline that modifying cannot become suppression. But this looks more like a hardheaded business decision to protect those Netflix rights and avoid Dahl sharing the fate of the equally beloved Dr Seuss, some of whose titles were dropped in the US after being deemed culturally insensitive. Given his own famously antisemitic views, Dahl has always, perhaps, been a high cancellation risk, and the books themselves were starting to show their age compared with modern children’s titles. They’re fighting for space in a market of politically conscious millennial parents and school libraries whose inclusivity policies might in future make them think twice about a book like The Witches, whose demons hide their tell-tale bald heads under wigs.

So now children will be reminded that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that”, which doesn’t on reflection seem the end of the world, if it’s to avoid upsetting a child whose mum has lost her hair to chemotherapy. The thrilling nastiness that children love about Dahl isn’t completely expunged, but the range of things he may be nasty about is narrowing.

Mrs Twit remains beastly, but no longer ugly. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, spoilt Veruca Salt is still spoilt and Mike Teavee still screen-obsessed; but greedy, doughy Augustus Gloop is now somewhat awkwardly “enormous”, certainly not fat. (The f-word is one of many familiar playground taunts now frowned on in primary schools to discourage bullying; I still remember my then six-year-old breathlessly reporting that someone was in big trouble for using the “i-word”, which turned out to be “idiot”). That “fat” can’t now be employed as a lazy synonym for hateful, or that schools now are infinitely kinder and gentler places than Dahl’s sadistic-sounding prep, is wholeheartedly a good thing. Yet these cultural shifts do create an unmistakable gap between today’s under-10s – the actual audience for children’s books – and nostalgic adults, which seems increasingly hard to bridge.

Should publishers even try? On Radio 4, the children’s author Philip Pullman reeled off a string of brilliant modern writers who might get read additional if Dahl’s texts were left to grow old as their author intended, as well as thus to drop naturally down the bestseller lists. Increasingly, publishers face the same dilemma over children’s classics as ageing female actors do over their faces: get some “work” done and remain contenders, or graciously fade away.

As with plastic surgery, the ideal sensitivity edit is one readers barely notice, but which just makes everything feel fresher. Dahl himself agreed in the late 1960s that his original Oompa Loompas – who in the original 1964 novel were actually human pygmies bought for cocoa beans in the African jungle – could be recast as the little orange creatures with which we’re all now familiar. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is less gratuitously offensive for dropping the N-word from the title, but no less gripping. The current West End production of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird is, if anything, richer for the addition of a scene in which the idealistic white lawyer Atticus Finch is taken to task by his Black maid Calpurnia, after failing, despite his best efforts, to save a Black man from the electric chair. It’s a beautifully judged intervention by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who adapted the novel for the stage, letting the story move with the times but without taking liberties.

Unfortunately, not every sensitivity reader is a Sorkin, and whoever rewrote the Centipede was no Dahl. If there is a moral to this story, it’s possibly less political than literary: come for a classic, as well as you’d really better not miss.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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