Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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The story of young, poverty-stricken Charlie who wins a marvellous chocolate factory is timeless and celebrated, having been made into two feature films: one starring Gene Wilder and the other starring Johnny Depp. Dahl’s original story is one that should sit upon every child’s bookshelf.

Charlie is a poor boy from a very poor family who, though sheer good luck, finds one of Willy Wonka’s coveted golden tickets that will grant him access to the sweet-maker’s factory for one whole day. For Charlie it’s a dream come true, but it becomes so much more when he and four other children take the tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

It appears that I’m on a bit of bender with childhood classics and –to be honest- while Roald Dahl was one of my favourite authors growing up, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not my favourite book. It may well be the closest thing to a modern Grimm fairytale that we have and, indeed there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the Roald Dahl book that teaches lessons and frightens children into behaving. A story centring on children that harbours some very dark undercurrents, it’s another book where Dahl indulges in social commentary about the rearing of children. 

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Like Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t afraid to point the finger of blame on the parents of horribly behaved offspring, but it goes one step further in ensuring its messages of etiquette and general manners. Each badly behaved child in this book meets a fairly horrid demise, each one with a rather grim ending ranging from cannibalism to incineration, but the horror of the story remains relatively well hidden by Dahl’s simple language and fairytale structure. 

His use of the traditional fairytale structure masks the story’s darker moments very well and his wonderful language and ability –along with Quentin Blake’s illustrations- to create such loathsome and disgusting characters makes the story very vivid with images straight out of a daydream.

Despite it’s many dark and twisted moments, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an undeniable children’s classic!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was written by Roald Dahl in 1964 and first published by in Great Britain by Allen & Unwin in 1967.