Back in my callow youth I bought a book Podkayne of Mars that ended in a debate between the publisher and Heinlein. I think the publisher ending was better, but it also just wasn’t a very good story, and I think it was one of the things that led me to be more sceptical of the “genius of great artists”. Anyway I’m not going to be too fussed about bowdlerized Dahl; I suspect the books were never as good as my memory makes them.
Jeet Heer has a good take on this (full thread worth reading):
The fundamental question is: Are Dahl books literature or are they merely pedagogical (teaching kids to read) and commercial (ways for Disney et al to make money)? If it’s literature, then we shouldn’t be changing, just like we’re not changing the problematic parts of the Merchant of Venice. If it’s just to teach kids how to read and to make money, then…who cares? If it’s literature, then we’d better be fixing copyright laws as well, or else commercial interests will be destroying the art to make a buck (we need to fix copyright laws anyway, so…).
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I’ve read many of the books to my kiddos over the years. Some were great (James and the Giant Peach), some were almost unreadable (the Glass Elevator).
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I don’t think my kids every had a problem with the macabre elements of Dahl’s fiction. Making an evil old grandmother disappear worked just fine for them.
But eventually (without even having read The Witches) we did need to have a talk about how the evil people were so frequently women.
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If you’ve ever read Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, you’ll instantly recall a single sentence
There was no reason for him to put it in there
It has nothing to do with the rest of the book
Some editor, somewhere, in the future or the past, should, or should have, taken it out 
I’m sure it is, it would be surprising if it wasn’t to be honest, my point is that Heathcliffe and Mr. Rochester, in the original texts, were Black men.
White culture didn’t read the texts that way, but that is how they were written. I don’t know if Moby Dick was consciously gay, but it was very difficult to read it any other way for me as a modern reader.
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I don’t think it bothered my son - it bothered me.
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Funny how our own understanding of the world informs how we interpret texts!
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Ahab was totally obsessed with that big, white Dick.
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I can’t remember enough about rochester tbh but I always thought with Heathcliffe she went above and beyond to make it clear he was ethnically ambiguous in a way that made him not quite white passing. Like iirc basically every character who talks about him comments on his skin being outright dark, his eyes being black, his hair being very black and him appearing foreign… it’s strange to me that anyone could try to read that as “he’s a white guy but he has brown eyes and brown hair” and reading him that way kind of interferes with the plot. Racial tension is integral to his character and the way his character interacts with the rest of the characters.
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My take as well. As a child I grew up reading mostly very old books from foreign countries because archaic media sticks around sometimes for multiple generations. I tend to think it’s ok for kids to see it for themselves uncensored and make what they want of it. When it falls out with them then it’s time to embrace new authors with new ideas and ways of talking.
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