The Author
On previous occasions, we have talked about Roald Dahl. This time,
I wish to focus only on how he created Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, the book was extremely
successful; within a month, its first edition was sold out in the United States
and Great Britain. It has been translated in 32 languages.
However, after being published, Roald Dahl has been accused
of racism with regard to the Oompa-Loompas. In the first edition of the book,
the Oompa-Loompas are described as pygmies brought directly from Africa, and
they are also illustrated as such in Faith Jacques’ drawings. As a result of
the critics, the book was re-edited in 1975, this time with illustrations by
Quentin Blake, and the Oopma-Loompas are now white, with brown hair and they
come from an imaginary land called Loompaland.
The version I possess was published by Alfaguara Juvenil in
2003, and it contains the original illustrations drawn by Faith Jacques, and
the original text about he Oompa-Loompas.
We could say that this story has an autobiographic theme,
just like many other of Dahl’s works. Roald Dahl had sad childhood memories about
everything that was related to school, due to the strict British educational
system. In Boy: Tales of Childhood, one
of the author’s autobiographical books, Dahl himself enters the famous Repton Public School in Derbyshire, at the age
of thirteen. This school was very close to the Cadbury factory, which produced chocolate
and sweets. In that time, there was a strong rivalry between Cadbury and the Rowntree
chocolate company, both of which had restricted access to their factories in
order to avoid espionage, just like Willy Wonka does in the book. Cadbury used
to send samples of their sweets to the school where Roald Dahl was studying, and
ask for the children’s opinion about their products. These memories, together
with Dahl’s broad imagination, got him to create this wonderful book.
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