Roald Dahl, Ted Hughes and the postmodern inquisition

On the third day after his cancellation, Ted Hughes rose again. Having published a spreadsheet listing his possible association with ‘wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence’, the British Library backed down, making a public apology to his widow and withdrawing ‘unreservedly’ the reference ‘to a distant ancestor’.

A natural first response to this decision would be to welcome it as a sensible step, particularly given that the ‘ancestor’ in question had died almost 300 years before his birth, probably lost money on his involvement with the Virginia company, wrote a pamphlet decrying slavery, and, perhaps most importantly, died childless and celibate – raising certain intriguing questions about how the Library’s researchers believe reproduction works.

And once that initial reaction has faded, a second response might be to ask what, exactly, is going on over there. A sane institution does not begin the task of ‘becoming an anti-racist organisation’ by crawling through the family trees of dead poets to find previously unknown reasons for offence.