In 2003, Matilda was listed at number 74 in The Big Read, a BBC survey of the British public of the top 200 novels of all time.[1] In 2012, Matilda was ranked number 30 among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a US monthly.[2]Time magazine named Matilda in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.[3] In 2012, Matilda Wormwood appeared on a Royal Mailcommemorative postage stamp.[4]
Plot
In a small Buckinghamshire village forty minutes by bus away from Reading and 8 miles from Aylesbury, Matilda Wormwood is born to Mr and Mrs Wormwood. She immediately shows amazing precocity, learning to speak at age one and to read at age three and a half, perusing all the children's books in the library by the age of four and three months and moving on to longer classics such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. However, her parents emotionally abuse her and completely refuse to acknowledge her abilities; to keep from getting frustrated, Matilda finds herself forced to pull pranks on them, such as gluing her father's hat to his head, sticking a parrot in the chimney to simulate a burglar or ghost, and bleaching her father's hair with peroxide.
At the age of five and a half, Matilda enters school and befriends her polite and compassionate teacher Jennifer Honey, who is astonished by her intellectual abilities. Miss Honey tries to move Matilda into a higher class, but the tyrannical headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, refuses. Miss Honey also tries to talk to Mr and Mrs Wormwood about their daughter's intelligence, but they ignore her, with the mother contending "brainy-ness" is an undesirable trait in a little girl.
Miss Trunchbull later confronts a girl called Amanda Thripp for wearing pigtails (the headmistress repeatedly displays a dislike of long hair throughout the book) and does a hammer throw with the girl over the playground fence. A boy called Bruce Bogtrotter is later caught by the cook stealing a piece of Miss Trunchbull's cake; the headmistress makes him attempt to eat an 18-inch (46 cm) wide cake in front of the assembly, then smashes the platter over his head in rage after he unexpectedly succeeds.
Matilda quickly develops a particularly strong bond with Miss Honey and watches as Trunchbull terrorises her students with deliberately creative, over-the-top punishments to prevent parents from believing them, such as throwing them in a dark closet dubbed "The Chokey", which is lined with nails and broken glass. When Matilda's friend Lavender plays a practical joke on Trunchbull by placing a newt in her jug of water, Matilda is blamed; in anger, she uses an unexpected power of telekinesis to tip the glass of water containing the newt onto Trunchbull.
Matilda reveals her new powers to Miss Honey, who confides that after her wealthy father, Dr Magnus Honey, suspiciously died, she was raised by an abusive aunt, revealed to be Miss Trunchbull. Trunchbull appears, among other misdeeds, to be withholding her niece's inheritance; Miss Honey has to live in poverty in a derelict farm cottage, and her salary is being paid into Miss Trunchbull's bank account for the first 10 years of her teaching career while she is restricted to £1 per week in pocket money. Preparing to avenge Miss Honey, Matilda practices her telekinesis at home. Later, during a sadistic lesson that Miss Trunchbull is teaching, Matilda telekinetically raises a piece of chalk to the blackboard and begins to use it to write, posing as the spirit of Magnus Honey. Addressing Miss Trunchbull using her first name (Agatha), "Magnus" demands that Miss Trunchbull hand over Miss Honey's house and wages and leave the school, causing Miss Trunchbull to faint.
The next day, the school's deputy headmaster, Mr Trilby, visits Trunchbull's house and finds it empty, except for signs of Trunchbull's hasty exit. She is never seen again, and the next day Miss Honey receives a letter from a local solicitor's office, telling her that her father's lifetime savings were safe in her bank and the property she lived in as a child was left to her. Trilby becomes the new headmaster, proving himself to be capable and good-natured, overwhelmingly improving the school's atmosphere and curriculum, and quickly moving Matilda into the top-form class with the 11-year-olds. Rather to Matilda's relief, she soon is no longer capable of telekinesis. Miss Honey theorises this is because Matilda is using her brainpower on a more challenging curriculum, leaving less of her brain's enormous energy free.
Matilda continues to visit Miss Honey at her house regularly, returning home one day to find her parents and her older brother Michael hastily packing to leave for Spain. Miss Honey explains this is because the police found out Mr Wormwood has been selling stolen cars. Matilda asks permission to live with Miss Honey, to which her parents rather distractedly agree. Matilda and Miss Honey find their happy ending, as the Wormwoods drive away, never to be seen again.
Writing the novel
Dahl's initial draft for the novel portrayed Matilda as a wicked, irrational girl, her name being drawn from Hilaire Belloc's poem "Matilda Who Told Such Dreadful Lies", who tortured her innocent parents and used her psychokinetic powers to help an unethical teacher win money at horse racing. Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown went through the author's documents, including the drafts for the novel, and noted that the American editor Stephen Roxburgh at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had been instrumental in reshaping the story. It was the editor's idea to make Matilda an innocent child who loved books, with her powers manifesting as a result of abuse she endured. Roxburgh also suggested various changes to the main characters that were incorporated into the finished novel. As Dahl decided to take the manuscript to a different publishers the two had a falling out. The edited version of the manuscript was published by Puffin Books.[5] Dahl explained in an interview that he "got it wrong" at first and that the book took over a year to rewrite though he failed to mention Roxburgh's input.[6][7]
Reception
The year after the book was published, it received the 1989 Red House Children's Book Award. In 2000, it received the Blue Peter Book Award.[8] In 2003, Matilda was listed at number 74 in The Big Read, a BBC poll of the British public of the top 200 novels of all time.[1] In 2012 Matilda was ranked number 30 on a list of the top 100 children's novels published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily US audience. It was the first of four books by Dahl among the Top 100, more than any other writer.[2]Time magazine included Matilda in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.[9] Worldwide sales have reached 17 million, and since 2016 sales have spiked to the extent that it outsells Dahl's other works.[10] In 2023, the novel was ranked by BBC at no. 10 in their poll of "The 100 greatest children's books of all time".[11]
Dahl's inspiration
The "mean and loathsome" Mrs Pratchett, owner of the sweet shop Dahl frequented as a boy in Cardiff, inspired Dahl's creation of Miss Trunchbull.[12] Mr Wormwood was based on a real-life character from Dahl's home village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire.[13] The library in Great Missenden was the inspiration for Mrs Phelps's library, where Matilda devours classic literature by the age of four and three months.[14] On Matilda's love of reading books, Lucy Dahl stated that her father’s novel was, in part, about his love for books: "I think that there was a deep genuine fear within his heart that books were going to go away and he wanted to write about it."[15]
The novel was made into the film Matilda in 1996. It starred Mara Wilson as Matilda, and was directed by Danny DeVito, who also portrayed Mr Wormwood and narrated the story. The film changed the setting and nationality of every character (except Trunchbull who is played by Welsh actress Pam Ferris) from British to American. Although not a commercial success, it received critical acclaim at the time of its release, and on Rotten Tomatoes has a score of 90% based on reviews from 21 critics.[21]
Cast of Matilda the Musical performing the song "Naughty" at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., December 2015
Celebrating 30 years of the book's publication in October 2018, original illustrator Quentin Blake imagined what Matilda might be doing as a grown-up woman today. He drew images of her undertaking three possible roles: an explorer, an astrophysicist, and a librarian at the British Library.[10]
Despite Roald Dahl having enjoined his publishers not to "so much as change a single comma in one of my books", in February 2023 Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books, announced it would be re-writing portions of many of Dahl's children's novels, changing the language to, in the publisher's words, "ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today."[33] The decision was met with sharp criticism from groups and public figures including authors Salman Rushdie,[34][35]Christopher Paolini,[34] British prime minister Rishi Sunak,[36]Queen Camilla,[36][37]Kemi Badenoch,[38]PEN America,[36] and Brian Cox.[38] Dahl's publishers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands announced they had declined to incorporate the changes.[36] Following the backlash, on 23 February 2023, Puffin announced it would release an unedited selection of Dahl's children's books as "The Roald Dahl Classic Collection" because of "the importance of keeping Dahl's classic texts in print."[39][40]
In Matilda, more than sixty changes were made, including replacing references to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad with Jane Austen and John Steinbeck, removing references to skin colour (such as "turning white", "beginning to go dark red", "red in the face", and "white as paper"), removing or changing the words fat, mad, and crazy (such as changing "wobbling crazily" to "wobbling unsteadily"), removing the word madonna, and changing heroine to hero.[41][42]
'It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the sides of the abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she's learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all.'
'It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the sides of the abdomen. Judging by what your daughter Vanessa has learnt this term, this fact alone is more interesting than anything I have taught in the classroom.'
Connections to other Roald Dahl books
One of Miss Trunchbull's punishments is to force an overweight child, Bruce Bogtrotter, to eat an enormous chocolate cake, which makes him so full that he cannot move. The cook had caught him stealing a piece of cake from the kitchen. In Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes[43] one of the recipes is based on that cake. Bruce is a more sympathetic variation of Augustus Gloop (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and similar gluttons, and he is praised for finishing the cake without suffering nausea.[44] The short story The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl, released in 1966, may have been a precursor to Matilda. A young girl has power within her finger to do things to other people when she gets emotional about a cause she feels strongly about.
^ ab"The Big Read – Top 100 Books". BBC. Retrieved 16 September 2014. First of two pages. Archived 2 September 2014 by the publisher. Charles Dickens and Terry Pratchett led with five of the Top 100. The four extant Harry Potter novels all made the Top 25. The Dahl novels were Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, and The Twits.
^ abCumming, Ed; Buchanan, Abigail; Holl-Allen, Genevieve; Smith, Benedict (24 February 2023). "The Writing of Roald Dahl". The Telegraph. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
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