“He’s a magician! Just imagine what will happen now! The whole world will be searching for those Golden Tickets! Everyone will be buying Wonka’s chocolate cars in the hope of finding one! He’ll sell more than ever before! Oh, how exciting it would be to find one!” (24).
While still a teenager studying at the Repton School in Derbyshire, Roald Dahl witnessed some unique marketing tactics employed by companies like Cadbury chocolate. Cadbury would distribute boxes of chocolates to schools like Repton in order for them to be taste-tested by the students. It was, at once, a way for their chocolates to be reviewed, as well as an opportunity for free promotion of their products among children. At the time, Cadbury and Rowntree’s were competing with one another for dominance of the chocolate candy bar market while feverishly protecting their respective closely-guarded trade secrets (apparently, both companies were paying spies to investigate each other’s candy bars). Thus in no small way, these experiences led Roald Dahl to develop a life-long fascination with chocolate companies and they inspired him to write his celebrated third children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The book tells the familiar story of Charlie Bucket, an impoverished and often famished child who lives in a small, wooden, two-room house at the edge of “a great town.” He lives with both of his parents, as well as his four grandparents: Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine (the parents of Mr. Bucket; and Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina (the parents of Mrs. Bucket). They are all over ninety-years-old (in fact, Grandpa Joe is ninety-six-and-a-half) and they remain in bed all day long. Charlie’s father is the only person in the house with a job, he works in a toothpaste factory as a “toothpaste cap screwer.”
Now, in this town, there sits a huge chocolate factory run by the legendary inventor and confectionary genius, Willy Wonka. Wonka is a renowned named across the world. He once employed many local workers in his factory but he later dismissed thousands of them long ago due to spies stealing his trade secrets for rival companies like Fickelbgruber, Mr. Prodnose, or Mr. Slugworth (here we see the echoes of Cadbury and Rowntree’s rivalry). Ever since that time, Willy Wonka has remained entirely elusive and his factory has remained closed to the public: “nobody… ever… comes… out… and… nobody… ever… goes… in!”
“It had huge iron gates leading into it, and a high wall surrounding it, and smoke belching from its chimneys, and strange whizzing sounds coming from deep inside it. And outside the walls, for half a mile around in every direction, the air was scented with the heavy rich smell of melting chocolate” (8).
Then one day, Willy Wonka’s now-famous golden ticket ploy is announced in the newspapers: “WONKA FACTORY TO BE OPENED AT LAST TO LUCKY FEW.” Five seemingly random children will open a Wonka chocolate bar to find a golden ticket inside, permitting them the rare chance to visit Wonka’s factory on the first day of February and afterward they will be escorted home with trucks filled with candy and the promise of a lifetime supply. Over time, the five children are: nine-year-old chubby Augustus Gloop (a greedy boy), obnoxiously wealthy Veruca Salt (a spoiled-child by her parents, particularly her father who is in the peanut business), Violet Beauregarde (a rather nasty girl who chews gum all day long), Mike Teavee (a boy who does nothing but watch television all day, particularly cowboy and gangster shows), and last but not least is our benighted hero, Charlie Bucket. Notice that each child, aside from Charlie, represents a different vice –greed, gluttony, envy, and slothfulness. In a word, they are all brats. But Charlie’s golden ticket arrives at a critical moment for his family. Typically, Charlie has only been allowed a single chocolate bar each year on his birthday, but this year his bar did not contain the golden ticket. And neither did a special chocolate bar Grandpa Joe was hiding for him. Then a snowy cold moves in and the situation grows desperate with Mr. Bucket loses his job at the toothpaste factory –Roald Dahl uses this moment to offer a brief aside in which he reminds readers that “we are all a great deal luckier than we realize” (46). In many ways, this might be the moral summation of the novel. At any rate, Charlie’s luck turns around when he discovers a fifty-pence piece lying on the street. With a hungry stomach, Charlie decides to buy some chocolate. Inside his second bar, a Wonka Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, he finds the fifth and final golden ticket!
“Charlie picked it up and tore off the wrapper… and suddenly… from underneath the wrapper… there came a brilliant flash of gold” (54).
The candy shopkeep prevents Charlie from instantly getting swindled by a mob of people attempting to buy the ticket from him. He orders Charlie to race straight home where he breaks the news to his jubilant family. “IT’S THE FIFTH GOLDEN TICKET, MOTHER, AND I’VE FOUND IT!” (57). It is then decided that Grandpa Joe will join Charlie (interestingly enough, Charlie was given the opportunity to bring “one or two” attendees; why not bring along another member of the family?)
The first day of February just so happens to be the following morning, and so at 10 o’clock sharp, as promised, Willy Wonka’s huge iron gates are slowly opened and out of the factory pops Willy Wonka, himself, donning a black top hat, a tail coat made of plum-coloured velvet, bottle green trousers, pearly grey gloves, and a pointed black goatee. With twinkling eyes, Willy Wonka frolics and skips about as he leads the children and their families into his secret world of wonders. “Welcome, my little friends! Welcome to the factory!” (71).
“All the most wonderful smells in the world seemed to be mixed up in the air around them – the smell of roasting coffee and burnt sugar and melting chocolate and mint and caramel and lemon peel…” (74).
Unlike Gene Wilder’s iconic portrayal of Willy Wonka in the classic 1971 film, the Willy Wonka of Roald Dahl’s original novel is less sardonic and more eccentric, energetic, and excitable. All throughout the text, he is seemingly unfazed (or unwilling to listen) when children or adults ask him poignant questions. He seems to be alight with all manner of exuberance. He is often described as “dancing up and down,” giggling, playfully joking, and hopping about like a child.
Once inside the factory, the tour group is led underground through a maze of corridors to the “the nerve centre of the whole factory, the heart of the whole business!” (77).
“Mr Wonka opened the door. Five children and nine grown-ups pushed their ways in – and oh, what an amazing sight it was that now met their eyes! They were looking down upon a lovely valley. There were green meadows on either side of the valley, and along the bottom of it there flowed a great brown river. What is more, there was a tremendous waterfall halfway along the river – a steep cliff over which the water curled and rolled in a solid sheet, and then went crashing down into a boiling churning whirlpool of froth and spray. Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling!” (79).
Here, they find an entirely edible world –even the grass is a minty sugar Wonka calls “swudge.” We also meet the Oompa-Loompas for the first time. They are from Loompaland, where they lived in treehouses surrounded by jungles of fantastical beasts. They are lovers of cacao beans, and are general-purpose jokesters and singers of songs, little men who wear deerskins, and little women who wear leaves, while their children wear nothing at all. They are Wonka’s workers who replaced humans when Wonka grew concerned about spies inside his factory. Wonka keeps the factory at a warm temperature for the Oompa-Loompas, who are used to a hot climate. Throughout the tour, Wonka regularly summons them for aid by clicking his fingers three times (unlike the use of the flute as featured in the 1971 film).
From here, Augustus Gloop cannot resist drinking from the chocolate river (despite Wonka’s warnings) and he soon falls into the river entirely before being sucked up by one of Wonka’s tubes. Next, the group boards a large pink viking-style boat with oars powered by the Oompa-Loompas as they sail down the chocolate river and arrive at the Inventing Room – a “most important room” filled with boiling pots and machines, where new inventions like the everlasting gobstopper are developed –“you can suck it and suck it and suck it and suck it and it will never get any smaller” (an Ooompa-Loompa has apparently been testing it by sucking for at least a year and still hasn’t lost any flavor). There is also hair toffee which grows various kinds of hair children. Wonka also shows a new brand of gum he is developing which tastes like a three-course meal of tomato soup., roast beef, baked potato, and blueberry pie and cream, but alas, Violet Beauregarde, being a lover of gum, cannot resist the temptation to try it. So she ignores Wonka’s warnings and snatches it in her moth wherein she tastes a wonderful three course meal but then starts turning blue and purple and swelling to an extraordinary size –“Violet, you’re turning violet, Violet!” (114). She is soon rolled off to the juicing room by Oompa-Loompas who sing a little moralistic song about her failings.
Next the group is quickly led past a dizzying array of rooms with signs reading things like “eatable marshmallow pillows,” “lickable wallpaper for nurseries,” “whips – all shapes and sizes,” “hot ice cream for cold days,” “cows that give chocolate milk,” “square sweets that look round” (a pun of little square sweets with faces that actually “look round” the room), “fizzy lifting drinks” cured by burping (notably Charlie and his Grandpa do not partake contra the 1971 classic film version, which Dahl incidentally despised due to David Seltzer’s uncredited script rewrites), and lastly the nut room (which is filled with trained squirrels measuring nuts). Here is where they lose Veruca Salt when she tries to snatch a squirrel (this is slightly different from the room with giant geese who lay golden chocolate eggs as featured in the 1971 film). But, of course, Veruca is instantly attacked by dozens of other squirrels who mistake her for being a giant nut and they toss her down the rubbish chute which is headed straight for the incinerator –her parents soon go toppling down the rubbish chute after her. Once again, the Oompa-Loompas offer their cautionary song before heading off to find her amidst the rubbish.
From here, the group speeds along on a rocket lift that can actually zig-zag from left to right. They pass extraordinary things like a mountain of chocolate, a lake of caramel, a rock candy mine (10,000 feet deep), cokernut-ice skating rinks, cavity-filling caramels – no more dentists, toffee trees for planting out in your garden, invisible chocolate bars for eating in your classroom, magic hand-fudge – when you hold it in your hand, you taste it in your mouth, and rainbow drops – suck them and you can spit in six different colours, and so on. Until they arrive at a room where they wear goggles and watch as chocolate can be broadcast onto television and then pulled directly off the television set and eaten. However, Mike Teavee (being obsessed with television) cannot resist the chance to transport himself onto television. However, it significantly shrinks him to a tiny size. Thus, Oompa-Loompas are summoned once again for their little song so they might help stretch Mike back out to a normal size using another candy machine.
At the point, Willy Wonka realizes that Charlie has won! He, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe pile into Wonka’s entirely “glass lift” powered by sugar which bursts out into the sky over the town. Far down below, they spot the other four children: Augustus Gloop who was squeezed thin in the tube, Violet Beauregarde who is still purple in the face, Veruca Salt who is covered in rubbish, and Mike Teavee who has been stretched thin (but likely faces a promising future career in basketball). Willy Wonka then turns to Charlie and offers him the whole factory to run when he’s old enough. Wonka doesn’t have any children of his own and he cannot trust an adult with his candy factory so he promises to gift it all to Charlie. Elated, Charlie suddenly remembers his family back home and he wonders if they will be able to join him at the factory. Wonka then sends his glass lift across town as it crashes into Charlie’s house. The rest of his family members are then reluctantly and fearfully snatched up into the glass lift where they are whisked away to live at the factory for the rest of their days with Charlie where they will never go hungry again.
It is a delightful end to simply wonderful children’s novel. The great irony of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that it warns of the dangers of moral excesses while at the same time taking place inside a giant chocolate factory where every child’s greatest fantasy can be indulged. However, vices are shown to be unsatiating in the long run, as the Oompa-Loompas frequently tisk-tisk the parents who allow their children to turn out as ugly as Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee. Throughout the book, the Oompa-Loompas serve as a kind of ancient Greek chorus for readers. They are moralistic messengers who guide us through the plot in song and remind us of how we should be thinking about these characters. In the original edition of the book, Dahl was accused of racism for describing the Oompa-Loompas as essentially African pygmies, but after criticism from the NAACP and other related groups in which the Oompa-Loompas were described as resembling a form of slavery, Dahl agreed with the critique and revised his book to make the Oompa-Loompas appear more akin to hippies. Since then, beginning in 2023, there were further efforts to censor, sanitize, and revise Dahl’s books by a group of “sensitivity readers,” which for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, included deleting references to “fat” children and “crazy” gadgets inside the factory and so on. Personally, I can understand Dahl’s good-faith efforts to improve his novel while he was still alive, but the latter attempts to expurgate his works post mortem are utterly without merit. Luckily, the effort was mostly abandoned as I understand it.
Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Puffin Books, a division of RandomHouse (first published in the US in 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf).
With wonderful illustrations by Quentin Blake. Roald Dahl dedicated the book to his son Theo.