It’s not Orwellian for publishers to edit Roald Dahl, just commercially savvy

‘Roald Dahl himself agreed that his original Oompa Loompas – who in the original 1964 novel were human pygmies bought in the African jungle – could be recast as the little orange creatures with which we’re all now familiar.’ Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

Handing down beloved books to your children is one of the best things about being a parent. And so like countless others raised on Willy Wonka’s golden ticket and the BFG’s jars of dreams, of course I was thrilled to relive the Roald Dahl books with my son all over again.

On bored, rainy afternoons we copied George’s Marvellous Medicine by mixing potions from the contents of the kitchen cupboards. We made the pilgrimage to the Dahl museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, with its magical recreation of his writer’s hut and its collection of homesick letters the author wrote back from boarding school as a boy, which shed a sad kind of light on the cruel adults who stalk his fiction.