When Puffin Books decided to expurgate its 2022 run of Roald Dahl’s collected stories, one pernicious stereotype escaped the publisher’s crack team of sensitivity readers: the scheming used-car salesman.
Matilda is home to a defining example of the trope. The wunderkind’s dad, “a small ratty-looking man whose front teeth stuck out underneath a thin ratty moustache”, earns a bent living shifting clapped-out bangers whose speedometers he winds back with an electric drill and gearboxes he fills with sawdust. These, Mr Wormwood says, are the “trade secrets” to con customers, who only exist “to be diddled”.
In a display of saintly self-restraint, the National Franchised Dealers Association – the “voice of automotive retailers” in the UK – did not step into this front in the culture wars to ask why the damaging depiction hadn’t been edited out.