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At first, says, “Matilda was a wicked child who plagued her poor, kind parents and caused havoc at school, ultimately redeeming herself through helping her teacher – an early version of Miss Honey – get out of financial difficulty by fixing a horse race.” The author quickly realised his mistake and rewrote what would become his last long children’s book.Ĩ Some of Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s books were written during the most troubled years of his life The author said of his 1988 novel Matilda: “I had awful trouble with it… I got it wrong… the main character, the little girl kept changing”. “If you look closely at the pictures of the BFG, you’ll see that he’s wearing the same ones.” A few days later Dahl sent Quentin one of his own Norwegian sandals. However, after seeing Quentin Blake’s preliminary drawings, Roald Dahl didn’t think this looked right,” says. In early drafts of The BFG, Roald Dahl “described the BFG as wearing big black boots and a leather apron. In one, Charlie Bucket visited Willy Wonka’s home and fell into a chocolate mould, while in another 10 children visited the factory (rather than the five who appeared in the published book), according to.
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The first draft is also much scarier than the published book – in the original version, James meets a witch who wants to cut off his legs in exchange for magic green crystals.Ĭharlie and the Chocolate Factory went through several early drafts. James and the Giant Peach, Dahl’s first novel aimed at children, was reportedly almost called James and the Giant Cherry, but was changed because Dahl said a peach was “prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry”. Instead, Gene Wilder was cast.Ħ Some of Dahl’s most popular works underwent a number of early drafts Roald’s biographer Donald Sturrock claims that, among other things, Roald “regretted that the producers had chosen neither Spike Milligan nor Peter Sellers to play the role ”. Chocolate and empire: from the land where the cocoa growsĭahl’s famous tale was adapted for the silver screen as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, released in 1971.A brief history of how we fell in love with caffeine and chocolate.“It was then I realised that inside this great Cadbury’s chocolate factory there must be an inventing room, a secret place where fully grown men and women in white overalls spent all their time playing around with sticky boiling messes, sugar and chocs, and mixing them up and trying to invent something new and fantastic,” he wrote. While boarding there, Dahl and his classmates had been guinea pigs of the chocolate-making company Cadbury: each year, Roald and his friends would be sent Cadbury’s newest creations to test. In the decades since its publication, James and the Giant Peach (1961) has been accused of being racist – the Grasshopper declares “I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican”, for example – and in his screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) “Dahl invented the net-wielding Child Catcher, replete with common anti-Semitic tropes such as a large nose, and the dark clothing and hat associated with Orthodox Judaism.ĭahl’s anti-Semitic remarks clouded celebrations of the centenary of his birth in 2016 – the Royal Mint dropped proposals to issue a commemorative coin because Dahl was “associated with anti-Semitism and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation”.ĥ Like Charlie, Roald Dahl was himself a schoolboy chocolate-testerĬharlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in the US in 1964, was inspired by Dahl’s time at the famous public school Repton. “There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media,” he told the newspaper. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” And in an interview with the Independent in 1990, shortly before his death, Dahl described himself as anti-Semitic and lambasted the “Jewish-owned” media. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”, he said. In a 1983 interview with the New Statesman, Dahl claimed Adolf Hitler had his reasons for exterminating six million men, women and children. Despite being a beloved children’s author, Dahl held controversial views and expressed publicly his contempt for Jews and other minorities.