charlie and the chocolate factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is a children's book by British author Roald Dahl, and is generally considered his best-known work. The adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric candymaker Willy is considered to be one of the most beloved children's stories of the 20th century.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin in 1967. The book was adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1972.

Plot overview

The book tells the story of a poor young boy, Charlie Bucket, who lives in poverty in a small home, with his parents and his four bedridden grandparents. Charlie is a bright, kindhearted boy who loves his family despite their shared hardships. Apart from his family, his greatest love in life is chocolate. Due to his family's extreme poverty, however, he only receives a bar once a year on his birthday.

Near to Charlie's house is the largest chocolate factory in the world, owned by Mr. Willy Wonka.

Wonka is the largest and most inventive and innovative producer of chocolate, producing all kinds of wonderful and delicious sweets, including some sweets that seem impossible (such as ice cream that never melts or chewing gum that never loses its flavour). He also creates a huge castle for Indian prince Pondicherry entirely out of chocolate, which melts shortly afterwards. As related by Charlie's Grandpa Joe, due to corporate espionage that came close to ruining the Wonka factory, Wonka closed his factory entirely, then later reopened it using mysterious never-seen workers.

After many years of this arrangement, Wonka, in a surprise move, decides to re-open his factory to the public, by initiating a lottery. Five Wonka Bars are sent out into the world which carry Golden Tickets hidden under their wrapping. Each ticket will admit the finder and one member of his/her family into the factory for a guided tour by the chocolate maker himself. A frenzy of chocolate-buying sweeps the globe. The winners of the first four tickets eventually prove to be a gluttonous pig-like boy called Augustus Gloop, a spoiled brat called Veruca Salt, a compulsive gum chewer named Violet Beauregarde and a television-obsessed little boy called Mike Teavee. As this happens, the poverty gripping Charlie's family tightens relentlessly.

By a near miracle, and at the very last second, Charlie manages to find the last Golden Ticket. Grandpa Joe rises from his bed, and the two of them enter Willy Wonka's factory along with the other winners, where they encounter Wonka's many wondrous confectionery creations - including some prototypes which cause rather hair-raising side effects. Additionally, Wonka reveals to his guests that his mysterious factory workers are the "Oompa Loompas" - a group of pygmy-sized people from the nation of Loompaland who agreed to become Wonka's workforce because of his ability to supply unlimited quantities of their greatest delicacy, the cacao bean (the raw ingredient in chocolate). Through the book, they regularly break into spontanteous verse en masse to comment on the misbehaviour of the other children and its deleterious effects.

All four of the other Golden Ticket winners do indeed misbehave and one by one end up in bizarre, near-fatal predicaments which require removing them from the tour. Augustus Gloop drinks from Wonka's chocolate-mixing river, falls in and is sucked up by a glass pipe leading to the Fudge Room. The tight squeeze through the pipe renders him skinny. Violet Beauregarde tries an experimental piece of three-course-dinner gum, which causes her to turn blue and then swell up into a very large blueberry, requiring her to be sent to the juicing room to be squeezed back into her normal dimensions (although her blue face is permanent). Veruca Salt is thrown down a garbage chute by squirrels trained to find and dispose of "bad nuts". Her mother and father, attempting to rescue her, are thrown down the chute as well. Later all three of them reappear covered in garbage. Mike Teavee is miniaturized by a television camera designed to deliver sample chocolate bars by TV and is thereafter sent to the gum-stretching room to be restored to his normal size (but the process is overdone, with Mike becoming a very skinny giant in the end). Each of the children pose as an allegory for the various vices found within the personalities of children in those days. Charlie is clearly outlined as the ideal child, humble, kind, and "unspoiled."

The four other children seem to represent four of the seven deadly sins (Augustus to Gluttony, Violet to Pride, Veruca to Greed, and Mike to Wrath), Charlie could also arguably be said to represent Envy.

At the end of the story, it is revealed that the lottery was a ploy for Willy Wonka to choose his successor. As the last Golden Ticket winner left standing, Charlie inherits the factory and goes on a trip in a flying glass lift with Willy Wonka and Grandpa Joe, the story continuing in the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

Cultural Impact

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, due to its overwhelming success and two film adaptations, has become a cultural reference point in modern society, despite having been written over forty years ago. This cultural significance is reflected in the creation of an actual confectionary brand named after Willy Wonka, as well as the international recognition of the story and its characters. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is a well-known story about a little boy who is down on his luck. One day Charlie finds a few coins on the street and buys himself a chocolate bar. A contest is going on at the time for Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. Anyone who finds a golden wrapper in their bar will win a trip into the factory. With a stroke of luck, Charlie unfolds the wrapper and finds the shiny gold paper. Escorted by his grandfather, Charlie is introduced to the magical factory and all that it contains, including being introduced along the way to Willie Wonka's evil competitors.

Furthermore, the term "golden ticket" has since come to mean a treasured guarantee of something special and exclusive.

The reason of Wonka closing the factory from the public (spies from other candy companies were coming in and stealing secret recipes), the many complicated machines found throughout the factory, and how closely guarded the recipes were, were all inspired from actual life occurrences. At the age of thirteen Roald Dahl worked for Cadbury, a chocolate maker, and was amazed by all the machinery that took part in making candy. Also, there was a perpetual rivalry between Cadbury and Rowntree (England's two biggest chocolate makers of the time), who ended up sending spies into each other's factories to steal the other's secret recipes. As a result of this, all recipes for both companies were heavily guarded.[1]

Rooms

There is a selection of themed rooms in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory which highlight a certain product or product development. Children on the tour meet an ironic, somewhat disturbing calamity in many of the rooms. A good example of this is the famous Chocolate Room. Everything in the room is edible, including the grass. It has a chocolate waterfall that mixes the chocolate to a perfect texture. There are pipes that move the chocolate to different points within the factory. Augustus Gloop falls into the chocolate river and is sucked into a pipe that goes to the Fudge Room.

Other rooms which are predominantly featured are the Inventing Room where Violet Beauregarde turns into a blueberry and is moved to the Juicing Room. The Nut Room is where Veruca Salt is thrown down the garbage chute with her father. The Television Room is where Mike Teavee shrinks and he is stretched out in the Chewing Gum Stretching Room.

Book revisions

Responding to criticisms from the NAACP, Canadian children's author Eleanor Cameron, and others for the book's portrayal of the Oompa Loompas as dark skinned and skinny African pygmies working in Wonka’s factory for cacao beans, Dahl changed some of the text, and Schindelman replaced some illustrations (the illustrations for the British version were also changed). This new version was released in 1973 in the USA. In the revised version the Oompa Loompas are described as having funny long golden-brown hair and rosy-white skin. Their origins were also changed from Africa to fictional Loompaland.

Portrayals of Chinese characters in the sequel that some might consider stereotypical have not been rewritten.

The Lost Chapter

A resurfacing of a chapter intended to be in the book which featured Miranda Piker, a character who was going to be in the original story appeared recently. The chapter dealt with implied cannibalism and was cut due to the character's grotesque fate. The chapter is titled "Spotty Powder," and was cut by the publishers of the book. Miranda Piker's traits were that of a tattle-tale or a school marm. When Wonka introduces to them a candy that will make one temporarily sick so that they can miss school that day, Miranda and her father who is a school head master argue that it is wrong. Their downfall is their insistence that they must stop this candy, spotty powder, from being made. They carelessly go into the room in which Wonka makes this candy.

Two screams are heard and Wonka reveals that the candy wouldn't work if he didn't put a few head masters in the mix ever so often. He reassures Mrs. Piker that her husband and daughter are not actually dead. However, it is later suggested in the Oompa-Loompa song that she would be better now that she was edible.

The controversy was not seen until recently when the chapter was discovered and published. The chapter has been said to be chilling when the Oompa Loompas reveal her fate.

Spotty Powder can be seen here.

Derivations

See also: Differences between the book and film versions

The book was filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. It has also been produced by Swedish Television as an animated series with still animations narrated by Ernst-Hugo Järegård. Another film version entitled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, was released on July 15, 2005. Both film portrayals are fairly faithful to the original story, yet add some new material. The Burton film in particular greatly expanded Willy Wonka's personal backstory. Both films likewise heavily expanded the personalities of the four "bad" children and their parents.

There is also a line of candies in the United States, Australia and Canada that uses the book's characters and imagery for its marketing. They're made in Brazil, by Nestlé, but not sold there.

On July 11, 2005, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory video game was released for the Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, and Windows PC by developers Backbone and High Voltage Software and publisher 2K Games.

On 1st April 2006, the British theme park Alton Towers opened a family boat ride attraction themed around Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, based on the book. The ride features a boat section where guests travel around the chocolate factory in bright pink boats on a chocolate river. The final stage of the ride, guests will enter one of two glass elevators where they will join Willy Wonka as they travel the factory, eventually shooting up and out through the glass roof.

Awards

• New England Round Table of Children's Librarians Award (USA 1972)
• Surrey School Award (UK 1973)
• Millennium Children's Book Award (UK 2000)
• Blue Peter Book Award (UK 2000)

Editions

• ISBN 0-394-81011-2 (hardcover, 1973, revised Oompa Loompa edition)
• ISBN 0-87129-220-3 (paperback, 1976)
• ISBN 0-14-031824-0 (paperback, 1985, illustrated by Michael Foreman)
• ISBN 1-85089-902-9 (hardcover, 1987)
• ISBN 0-606-04032-3 (prebound, 1988)
• ISBN 0-89966-904-2 (library binding, 1992, reprint)
• ISBN 0-14-130115-5 (paperback, 1998)
• ISBN 0-375-81526-0 (hardcover, 2001)
• ISBN 0-375-91526-5 (library binding, 2001)
• ISBN 0-14-240108-0 (paperback, 2004)
• ISBN 0-8488-2241-2 (hardcover)

External links

• Official Roald Dahl Website