| Last month, news broke that the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s children’s books had edited certain stories—including “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”—to remove language deemed problematic. The literary world erupted. Critics including Salman Rushdie denounced the alterations as censorship; many argued that the changes did little to protect kids, but that they did strip the books of their author’s signature sense of mischief and misanthropy, which have endeared his works to readers young and old for generations. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, before Dahl wrote his most famous books for kids, he contributed stories to The New Yorker. In 1959, the magazine published “The Landlady,” about an English teen-ager named Billy who arrives in Bath from London on a bitterly cold night and is directed to a cheap hotel. En route, Billy walks past a private home with a bed-and-breakfast sign in the window and feels mysteriously compelled to stop. The title character answers the door and seems remarkably eager to host him. As he enters, certain objects in the home start to strike him as strange: a pair of names in the guestbook ring a bell, though Billy can’t figure out why. A parrot that appeared alive in the window turns out to be taxidermy. “The old girl is slightly dotty,” Billy thinks about his host, but she’s solicitous and the price is right. “It is such a pleasure,” she tells him, “such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.” | 
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