James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass
Elevator; The Witches; The BFG; The Giraffe
and the Pelly and Me; Danny, the Champion
of the World; Matilda; George’s Marvellous
Medicine; The Twits, Fantastic Mr Fox;
The Enormous Crocodile; Revolting Rhymes; Boy
AMID THE CONTINUING DRIFT TOWARD SOME VERSION of realism, then, how are we to place the dominant writer of children’s fiction of his age? Roald Dahl couldn’t, on the face of it, have cared less about representing the real lives of children back to them. He succeeded, instead, in nourishing their imaginative lives by piling magic on fantasy on absurdism. Here were window-cleaning giraffes, potions that caused disagreeable old women (and blameless chickens) to swell to many times their ordinary size, toeless witches, seafaring peaches, magic fingers, and glass elevators that shoot into outer space. Between, roughly, the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), Dahl enjoyed a quarter of a century of ascendency. By 1968 Charlie alone had earned Dahl more than a million dollars in royalties.
Like so many children’s writers, Dahl mined his own childhood – be it greed for sweeties, tobacco-stinking Scandinavian grandparents or the “mean and loathsome” old sweetshop owner who inspired Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull. There is a demonic energy to Dahl’s work, a directness of address and a linguistic fizz that instantly captivates its intended audience. The voice of the books is almost anti-literary: it’s a storyteller’s voice, an oral performance on the page. The reader is a disciple or a co-conspirator.
He was clear about what children liked: “They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.” (He might have added: they love practical jokes and fart gags and violence.) Dahl had an unerring sense of the basic and extravagant appetites of children, perhaps because his own inner child was so near the surface. He loved inventions and ingenuity and silliness. And he empathized intensely with children chafing under the authority of lazy, cruel, thwarting or inconsiderate adults, their agency limited, and wanting more. The most basic form of this is appetite for food. Can there have been a more feelingly written passage in all his works than the one in which he describes how Charlie Bucket eats the chocolate bar he gets once a year?
Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvellous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it. Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month.
Here is a child’s-eye view, an intensity of sensual focus, that reminds me of Stephen Spielberg’s trick of shooting E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with the camera at the height of an eightyear-old. The passage not only sets up Charlie’s archetypal child’s yearning to become less powerless, to have access to treats that are ordinarily out of his reach – but it wraps the meaning of the chocolate bar in a penumbra of familial love. The whole family saves up their money so that, once a year, Charlie can get a taste of chocolate.
As his life story shows, Dahl himself was prey to strong appetites – for fantasy, for adventure and intrigue, for food (especially chocolate), for power over others and the freedom to act, for the affirming love of family, and (which did not come out in his children’s books but was a theme of his bawdy novels and short stories for adults) for sex. The critic Kathryn Hughes talked of his “grandiosity, dishonesty and spite.” His first wife, Patricia Neal, talked of his conviction that “although life was a two-way street, he had right of way.” That he was not an especially nice guy, and the ways in which he was not an especially nice guy, may have been part and parcel of what made him so effective a writer for children. He had a child’s id.
He was a vain, bullying, entitled man – though one of hugely impressive productive energies; in a speech at his daughter’s wedding he declared, oddly for a writer, “action is always better than words” – and he was a spoilt boy. His older sister Astri and his father Harald died in close succession when Dahl was a little boy, leaving him the adored only son in a household of women. He was nicknamed “Apple” for the position he held in his mother Sofie Magdalene’s eye. He didn’t get in much trouble, as a child, when he was caught tying pillows round his baby sister and shooting at her with an air rifle. His relationship with his mother seems to have been the most sustained and respectful relationship he ever had with a member of the opposite sex.
“Boy” (as he titled one of his two memoirs) hated and never forgot the attempt to curtail his freedoms that his schooldays at Repton represented. Authority figures were viciously caricatured – one master was, he wrote to his mother, “a short man with a face like a field elderberry”* – and even libeled: he was to claim that a future Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, had given a savage beating to Dahl’s best friend for no good reason.† He bridled at the proprieties of the expat set when he worked for Shell in what was then called Tanganyika as a young man. He wrote one hostess off as “a frightful old hag who weighs 19½ stone (and is proud of it) and looks like a suet dumpling covered in lipstick and powder.”‡
The high point of his life, as he looked back on it, was the action he saw serving in the Second World War. Dogfighting – he had five confirmed kills in action over Palestine and Greece – was, he later said, “in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life.”§ He suffered lifelong pain from injuries sustained when he crashed a plane into the Egyptian desert in 1940. Typically, he mythologized the incident. He ditched through inexperience and overconfidence, and likely only survived thanks to another pilot coming to his rescue. But at various times he claimed to have been shot down, and nowhere in his accounts of the incident did the other pilot get a mention.
He came to writing for children late – and in part out of frustration that his career in adult fiction had somewhat stalled. He’d had early success in post-war Washington (he was seconded from the air force as an assistant air-attaché to the British embassy) with a whimsical 7,000-word fable about the “gremlins” that sabotaged RAF planes. He was courted by Walt Disney for the film rights, invited to a lot of fancy parties, and – having secured his golden ticket to American high society – spent his energies on committing adultery with rich women he didn’t much like, and espionage.
Indeed, he was in his mid-forties by the time his first children’s book appeared in print, and in a letter while he was expecting his first child he offered a sneering view of the genre: “I can see it all. Nursery books for Knopf. Once upon a time there was a dear little bunny…” Dear little bunnies appeared nowhere in his work. Indeed, looking at the arc of publishing history, you could see Dahl’s success as having put a severe dent in the dear-littlebunny market.
Nevertheless, if their set-dressing is gaudier and nastier than that of their predecessors, the structure of the stories is in some respect the same. The books conform to the time-honored pattern of taking their child protagonists out of one world and putting them into another, secret, magical world. They travel behind the gates of the chocolate factory, or to the land of the BFG (an uncommonly sunny entry in his oeuvre), or above the clouds on a peach carried by seagulls, or enter the demented school environment of Crunchem Hall. Or they discover a secret world behind this one, the subterranean world of Fantastic Mr Fox or the differently subterranean world of the poacher in Danny, the Champion of the World. These are all worlds in which the children can be the centers of their own stories, in which they can act – as Danny does in the thrilling night-time drive toward the end of that latter book.
Adults in Dahl’s books, with very few exceptions (Danny’s father, the grandmother in The Witches, Miss Honey in Matilda) are not just distant or irrelevant: they are untrustworthy, foolish, or vicious. The writer Michael Rosen has argued that this was by design: “Dahl knew what he was doing, remarking that we both love and hate our parents, even if we don’t admit it to ourselves.”*
Even leaving aside the vicious tang of Dahl’s personal antisemitism – “Even a stinker like Hitler,” he wrote, “didn’t just pick on them for no reason” – his work, more than that of many other writers for children, has made adults uneasy. Critics and librarians have frequently thought it vicious or vulgar. Ursula K. Le Guin complained that exposure to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had made her daughter “quite nasty.” Even the NAACP took a dim view of that book’s racial stereotyping of Oompa Loompas; though that is to ignore the startling fact that its protagonist was, in an early conception, to have been black.
Humphrey Carpenter, in a glancing mention in Secret Gardens, calls Dahl’s work “amoral” – which seems to me to get it almost exactly wrong. Dahl’s work is fiercely moral; but it is moral in a way that would horrify milquetoast Anglicans or herbivorous liberals. There’s not a bit in it of turning the other cheek. It is an Old Testament morality – or, perhaps, a Calvinist one – which divides the world into goodies and baddies and takes a limitless and openly sadistic relish in the physical punishment of the wicked. As Dahl put it: “I’m afraid I like strong contrasts. I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good.”
That is surely exactly what makes children find Dahl so attractive: his morality is as capricious and self-serving as the worldview of a child. There’s not a lot of turning the other cheek in the average eight-year-old. Children love revenge. Dahl’s writing provides a fantasy world in which their imaginative proxies have the power to take it, and permission to revel in it. Instead of preaching to children, as “improving” children’s writing has from time to time been anxious to do, or even expanding their sympathies by introducing a literary sense of moral shading, Dahl’s books gleefully pander to those very atavistic instincts.
That is not the only way in which Dahl’s work seems to look backward rather than forward. Tonally, there’s a distinct flavor of Hilaire Belloc’s macabre Cautionary Tales (1907) or Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter – two gleefully arch send-ups of moralizing work for children. Dahl himself had memorized by heart the whole of Cautionary Tales by the age of nine. He’s on record as having disdained Swallows and Amazons as “too soft.” And couldn’t his whangdoodles and hornswogglers and snozzwangers – or his encyclopedic explanations of the physical characteristics and social behavior of witches or flesh-eating giants – be refugees from the wilder corners of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History? A child’s inner map of his or her environment, after all, is always bordered with misty patches across which might be inscribed:
“here be dragons.”
His breakthrough work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, resembles nothing so much as a medieval morality play or a Restoration comedy of humors, in which each of the child visitors to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory embodies a particular vice. Some of these vices are traditional Christian ones – gluttony in Augustus Gloop, covetousness in veruca Salt – and some spring from the canon of Dahl’s own disgust at modernity; vulgar, gum-chewing violet Beauregarde, or the square-eyed Mike Teavee.
Each of them, in Dantean style, receives a punishment appropriate to their crime – and each such episode is crowned by a choric interlude in which the Oompa Loompas sing a song commemorating, without much regret, their fate (“veruca Salt, the little brute,/ Has just gone down the rubbish chute”). The children are retrieved and restored before being sent home – but that has a cursory feel to it. Nobody – not the reader, not Willy Wonka, not Roald Dahl, probably not even the too-saintly Charlie Bucket – shows any sign of much caring if Augustus drowns in chocolate or violet spends the rest of her life as a human blueberry.
Nobody mourns the cruel aunts Spiker and Sponge, flattened by the giant peach as it makes its escape from their hilltop garden. Nobody thinks twice about the genocidal program set out in the closing pages of The Witches. And young readers positively cheer when – in the immortal few lines from Revolting Rhymes (1982) – Red Riding Hood does for the wolf: “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. / She whips a pistol from her knickers. / She aims it at the creature’s head / And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.”
Goodies are goodies, in Dahl, and baddies are baddies. It’s very medieval. Physical deformity goes hand in hand with moral deformity. Witches are bald and toeless. Miss Trunchbull snorts and radiates heat and marches about like a stormtrooper. Mr and Mrs Twit are grotesque because they are unpleasant: “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” Being fat – to which Aunt Sponge, Augustus Gloop and Farmer Boggis in Fantastic Mr Fox among many others bear witness – is also a sure sign of moral failure in Dahl. When in 2023 it emerged that Puffin had reissued Dahl’s works in a new edition combed by “sensitivity readers” to remove racist, sexist, ableist, and fat-shaming language there was the predictable culture-wars ding-dong; but little remarked was the larger problem, which is that if you take the nastiness out of Roald Dahl you’re removing something absolutely fundamental to the success of the stories.
The anarchy and grotesquerie evoked by Dahl’s prose found a perfect expression in the electrically expressive lines of the illustrator Quentin Blake. Blake and Dahl join the partnerships of Tenniel and Carroll or Rackham and Barrie in the pantheon of the English nursery bookshelf.* It’s easy to forget, so closely is their work associated, that Dahl was halfway through his career before he started his relationship with the illustrator. The two men were brought together in the late 1970s, when Dahl’s publisher Tom Maschler asked Blake to supply illustrations for the picture book The Enormous Crocodile (1978).
Their working partnership continued until Dahl’s death in 1990, and he ended up also illustrating editions of all the works that preceded their meeting. The standard edition of any Dahl book, these days, will come with Quentin Blake illustrations (even, and perhaps incongruously, Dahl’s single foray into something like realism, Danny, the Champion of the World). Blake’s vision of the BFG – with his saucer-like hairy ears, wrinkled face, vast hands and gigantic Norwegian sandals (Dahl sent Blake one of his own as a model) – is at least as important to the character’s iconicity as any of the author’s words.
Dahl’s success is, I think, a rebuke to the idea that children’s books must be nice. Children, he insisted after a century of conventional wisdom framing them as innocents in a world of adult wickedness, are not nice. He saw the potential for cruelty in children – not just teenage delinquents – and he spoke to it. In that, he has more in common with the dirty realists across the pond than it might at first seem.
* Sturrock (ed), Love from Boy, [p].
† This was badly wrong. The boy in question was beaten after Fisher had left the school; and it was for sexually molesting a younger child. When the mistake was pointed out, Dahl refused to correct the passage in later editions of the book.
‡ Sturrock, op. cit.
§ Dahl, Going Solo, [p].
* Michael Rosen, “Roald Dahl: my hero,” Guardian, 31 August 2012.
* That David Walliams has had many of his children’s books illustrated by Quentin Blake seems to me to be a very naked declaration of his publishers’ intent to position him as an heir to Dahl.