Roald Dahl

[Anita Bensoussane]

I was reminded of this thread last night when reading some poetry.

I've often thought that the characters in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory hark back to the characters in cautionary verse penned by writers like Heinrich Hoffmann (Der Struwwelpeter, 1845, known in English as Shockheaded Peter) and Hilaire Belloc (Cautionary Tales for Children, 1907). The poems show children who are badly-behaved/disobedient/careless/foolish getting their comeuppance in extreme ways, e.g. a girl who plays with matches is burnt to death, Rebecca's habit of slamming doors leads to her being squashed flat, and a boy who runs away from his nurse is eaten by a lion.

The verse typically relies on a strong rhythm and rhyme-scheme, and a darkly comic tone. It's deliberately subversive, scary and grotesque, but many children (myself and my own children included) absolutely love that kind of thing. The poems poke fun at the overly-earnest moral tales that young readers were typically presented with at the time, parodying them playfully while also making use of the wildly exaggerated style of another popular genre - nonsense verse.

It seems likely to me that Roald Dahl was influenced (either consciously or subconsciously) by Heinrich Hoffmann's 'Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar' ('The Story of Soup-Kaspar') when he created Augustus Gloop. Kaspar has been renamed Augustus in English, with the poem going by the title 'The Story of Augustus who would not have any Soup':

Augustus was a chubby lad;
Fat, ruddy cheeks Augustus had;
And everybody saw with joy
The plump and hearty, healthy boy.
He ate and drank as he was told
And never let his soup get cold.

But one day, one cold winter's day,
He screamed out - "Take the soup away!
Oh, take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup to-day."

Next day, now look, the picture shows
How lank and lean Augustus grows!
Yet, though he feels so weak and ill,
The naughty fellow cries out still -
"Not any soup for me, I say:
Oh, take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup to-day."

The third day comes; oh, what a sin!
To make himself so pale and thin.
Yet, when the soup is put on table,
He screams as loud as he is able -
"Not any soup for me, I say:
Oh, take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup to-day."

Look at him, now the fourth day's come!
He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum;
He's like a little bit of thread'
And on the fifth day, he was - dead!

Roald Dahl's Augustus also starts off as "a chubby lad" (or rather more than chubby, actually!) but is greatly altered by the end of the book - though he does survive, unlike Hoffmann's character! The surname "Gloop" rhymes with "soup", and also puts me in mind of Gelett Burgess's Goops and How to Be Them:

The Goops, they lick their fingers,
And the Goops, they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth,
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
The Goops, they talk while eating,
And loud and fast they chew;
And that is why I'm glad that I
Am not a Goop - are you?

Surely Roald Dahl would have revelled in verse of that kind!

More recently, the series of books Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids by Jamie Rix (1990s) was turned into a cartoon TV series for ITV (early 2000s). Rix's tales are very much in the tradition of Hoffmann and Belloc, with children who misbehave meeting a sticky end, e.g. 'The Spaghetti Man' is about a boy who won't behave at the dinner table so a mysterious 'Spaghetti Man' carts him off to a factory where he's turned into lasagne. There's even a story based on the Famous Five, called 'The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping', which kills off the children! I wrote about it back in 2007:

viewtopic.php?p=25519#p25519

The grotesque and the horrific are part and parcel of such tales, making it incredible that any reader would take offence, in such a context, at simple descriptive words such as "black", "white" and "fat"! I haven't heard of Hoffmann and Belloc being altered, or Jamie Rix for that matter, and I don't see any need to meddle with Dahl either. I only hope that people will vote with their wallets/purses and buy the originals, leaving the expurgated editions to rot on the shelves!

[Judith Crabb]

I enjoyed this post very much Anita. I confirms what I have believed for a long time - we readers live double lives. Not only do we look in the past for explanations as to why we and our relatives and friends are as we are, but literature takes on nuances and meanings when we understand where its coming from, too.