Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, began not in a writer's imagination but in a schoolboy's hands. Roald Dahl, attending Repton School in Derbyshire, received test packages from Cadbury, the chocolate company, in exchange for opinions on new products. That routine taste-test planted a seed. What questions does that seed grow into? Who were the children Dahl almost wrote but didn't? Why does a story about candy keep getting rewritten, revised, and fought over, more than sixty years after it first appeared?

• 2. Spies in the Factory

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  Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers around the 1920s, and they behaved less like confectioners and more like rival intelligence agencies. Each sent spies disguised as employees into the other's factory to steal trade secrets. The industrial paranoia this created made both companies fiercely protective of their methods. Dahl watched all of this from school, eating chocolate sent by Cadbury and imagining what lay behind those locked factory doors. It was the combination of that secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic machines inside those factories that gave him the essential tension of the novel: a factory sealed to the world, recipes worth stealing, and a villain-adjacent figure named Slugworth who embodies exactly that theft.

• 3. The Children Who Were Cut

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  In Dahl's earliest unpublished drafts, nine golden tickets were distributed, not five, and the factory tour subjected the children to far more rooms and temptations. The early roster included Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside, and Terence Roper, who overindulged in Warming Candies; Miranda Grope and Augustus Pottle, who were later collapsed into a single character called Augustus Gloop; and a boy named Herpes Trout, who eventually became Mike Teavee. A conceited child called Marvin Prune was tied to something called The Children's-Delight Room. Dahl submitted that chapter to The Horn Book Review in the early 1970s. Rather than publish it, the magazine responded with a critical essay by the children's author Eleanor Cameron, who called the novel one of the most tasteless books ever written for children. Dahl in turn replied that the classics Cameron had cited would not hold the attention of contemporary children. The "Spotty Powder" chapter, featuring a character named Miranda Piker, was first published as a short story in 1973. In 2005, The Times reprinted it as a "lost" chapter, reporting it had been found in Dahl's desk written backwards in mirror writing, in the same manner Leonardo da Vinci used in his journals.

• 4. Race, Revision, and the Oompa-Loompas

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  Dahl's widow confirmed that Charlie Bucket was originally written as a Black boy. Dahl's biographer attributed the change to a white character to pressure from Dahl's literary agent, who believed a Black Charlie would not appeal to readers. The Oompa-Loompas in the first published edition were described as African pygmies and illustrated that way. After a film adaptation was announced, the American group NAACP stated publicly that the transportation of Oompa-Loompas to Wonka's factory resembled slavery. Dahl said he found himself sympathising with that concern. In the revised edition, the Oompa-Loompas were redrawn as white and styled to resemble hippies, and all references to Africa were removed. In 2023 the publisher Puffin made more than eighty additional changes to the original text, including removing every occurrence of the word "fat," omitting most references to the Oompa-Loompas' physical appearance, removing the words "mad," "crazy," and "queer," cutting references to Mike Teavee's toy guns, and replacing phrases like "She needs a really good spanking" with "She needs a really good talking to." The 50th anniversary edition, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2014, generated its own controversy over a cover photograph taken from a 2008 French fashion shoot, showing a heavily made-up young girl. Critics described it with words ranging from "creepy" to "grotesque" and said it evoked Lolita and Toddlers and Tiaras. The publisher acknowledged publicly that people wanted it to remain a children's book.

• 5. Prizes, Critics, and Longevity

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  J. K. Rowling named the novel among her top ten books that every child should read, in a 2006 list for the Royal Society of Literature. Tim Burton, who would later direct the 2005 film adaptation, wrote that he responded to the book because it respected the fact that children can be adults. A 2012 survey by the University of Worcester found it was one of the most common books that UK adults had read as children, trailing only Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Wind in the Willows. The BBC's Big Read survey in 2003 ranked it number 35 among the nation's best-loved novels. In 2016, it topped Amazon's list of best-selling children's books by Dahl in print and on Kindle. By 2023, the BBC ranked it number 18 in their poll of the 100 greatest children's books of all time. The novel also won the New England Round Table of Children's Librarians Award in 1972, the Surrey School Award in 1973, the Read Aloud BILBY Award in Australia in 1992, and the Millennium Children's Book Award in 2000. In 2012 Charlie Bucket holding a Golden Ticket appeared on a Royal Mail first-class stamp in the UK. Not everyone agreed. John Rowe Townsend, the children's novelist and literary historian, described the book as fantasy of an almost literally nauseating kind. Ursula K. Le Guin backed Eleanor Cameron's critique by letter, writing to The Horn Book Review that her own daughter would turn quite nasty upon finishing the book.

• 6. Sixty Years on Screen and Stage

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  The first film adaptation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was directed by Mel Stuart in 1971 and starred Gene Wilder as Wonka, with music by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. Dahl was credited for the screenplay, but David Seltzer was brought in by director Stuart and producer David L. Wolper to make changes against Dahl's wishes. One critic wrote that Dahl's original adaptation was left scarcely detectable. Dahl disowned the film. It had an estimated budget of US$2.9 million and grossed only $4 million, making it a box-office disappointment at the time. Home video, DVD sales, and repeated television airings later turned it into a cult classic. Warner Bros. and the Dahl estate struck an agreement in 1998 giving the Dahl family total artistic control over a new version. The project stalled until Tim Burton signed on to direct in 2003. The 2005 film starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka went on to become the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year. A West End musical directed by Sam Mendes, with new songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and Douglas Hodge as Wonka, opened at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in June 2013 and broke records for weekly ticket sales. The opera The Golden Ticket, with music by American composer Peter Ash and a libretto by British writer Donald Sturrock, received its world premiere at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on the 13th of June 2010. An unlicensed attraction called Willy's Chocolate Experience opened in Glasgow on the 24th of February 2024 and closed within a day; actor Paul Connell, who played Wonka in the event's tours, later said his script contained fifteen pages of AI-generated gibberish. The most recent announced film, Charlie vs. The Chocolate Factory, is an animated Netflix production co-produced with Sony Pictures Imageworks, directed by Jared Stern and Elaine Bogan, with Taika Waititi voicing Wonka.