Rewriting Roald Dahl: The impact of textual revisions to <i>George’s Marvellous Medicine</i> in the light of sensitivity reading

Publishers are increasingly employing sensitivity readers to assess and advise on potentially problematic content in authors’ manuscripts, either pre- or post-publication. In this article I provide an analysis of the impact of making changes to an author’s already-published manuscript, with a view to determining whether sensitivity reading actually works to reduce potential hurt and offence to readers. My case study is of Roald Dahl’s short novel for children, George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981). I compare the original version of the novel with a revised version published in 2022. I focus on answering four questions: (i) What proportion of the original text has been revised in the 2022 edition?; (ii) What are the functions of the textual revisions?; (iii) Are the revisions primarily to narration or to non-narration (e.g. dialogue)?; and (iv) Are the revisions successful in reducing potential hurt or offence to readers? To answer these questions, I begin by cataloguing the changes made to the revised text and quantifying the nature of these. I then identify eight types of revision. My results suggest that while the underlying aims of sensitivity reading may be laudable, in practice the revisions to Dahl’s manuscript do little to reduce the potential for hurt and offence. In some cases this is because the changes made to the 2022 text have been applied inconsistently. In others, it is because to remove problematic issues would necessitate altering the plot and narratological structure of the novel as opposed to making minor amendments to the language of the text.