Charlie and The Chocolate Factory,
Versions and Changes
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in 1964 in the United States even though the author, Roald Dahl, was an Englishman, living in England at the time of writing and publication. That the first publication was in a foreign country can be explained by the fact that Dahl had previously lived and worked in the United States, and had maintained professional contacts there since his return to England. Indeed, atthe time when Charlie was first published, Dahl was considerably better known and respected as an author in the United States than he was in Britain. Despite this difference in fame and popularity, it is still very significant that the British edition of Charlie was not released in Britain until 1967, three years after the American publication. This was despite a notable degree of financial success, and excellent newspaper and magazine reviews in the United States.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was Dahl’s second children’s book, the first being James and the Giant Peach. James had also failed to find a publisher in Britain, but this was perhaps not quite so significant as the lack of interest in Charlie. James was popular, and did receive some good reviews, but it was not as well received as Charlie, nor did it sell as well. However, with two successful children’s books both commanding large sales across the Atlantic, and written by a reasonably well known British author, it is very surprising that British publishers were not camping outside of Roald Dahl’s door competing for the British rights. On financial grounds alone there would have been ample reason to take on the books, whatever their content. As it was, the British publishing industry displayed no interest whatsoever, and Dahl’s agent wasturned down directly by several major publishers. Treglown (pp 147-8) in his biography of Roald Dahl, discusses this lack of interest, stating that the rejections caused Dahl himself to claim that the underlying reasons for this were that British Publishers were ‘prim, stupid and snobbish’ (quoted inTreglown p148). Publishers felt that
Charlie was somewhat tasteless and was aimed at a dual child/adult audience, a feature which they seem not to have approved of.
One of the editors who rejected Charlie later stated that ‘I could see that Dahl would be popular with children, but publishing for them has to involve more than that, somehow’ (quoted in Treglown p148).Dahl had received similar criticism from his American publishers where the children’s editor for Knopf – Dahl’s own publisher – held the belief that children’s books should not be in bad taste and that they should not be aimed at both children and adults (the same objections as the British publishers) but in America Dahl was well enough known, and indeed, well enough liked by the owners and managers of Knopf to be able to publish the book much as he wanted. In England he did not have this power, and he became very disillusioned by the negative reactions of the British publishing industry. Indeed, he only finally managed to get the book published in Britain through luck and a gamblers bluff.
Dahl’s daughter, Tessa, went to school with a girl called Camilla Unwin, who borrowed the US editions of James
and Charlie to take home and read. Camilla Unwin was the daughter of Rayner Unwin, of the publishers, Allen and Unwin, the same man who, as a boy had read Tolkien's Hobbit and given the favorable review that had persuaded his own father, Sir Stanley Unwin, to publish Tolkien. Allen and Unwin soon sent a letter to Dahl expressing interest. Dahl replied with the bluff that several other British publishing houses were interested, and through this bluff gained a very satisfactory publishing deal. But the main reason for Dahl’s British publication was simply the enthusiasm for the books shown by a child, Camilla Unwin. These days the argument that a children’s book should only be oriented towards children, and should not have features directed to older or adult readers, would be laughable. Indeed, since the incredible popularity of the Harry Potter
books, it is almost preferred that books be attractive to a mixed audience. Also, to suggest that children’s books should always be in good taste would, these days, be to suggest that a huge swathe of modern children’s literature was somehow not acceptable. Perhaps this is a change brought about by Dahl’s great influence and success, but it is important to remember that these factors used to be sufficient reason to reject even books almost guaranteed to be financially successful. The modern children’s publishing industry has taken on dual- and multi-audience texts, and lack of taste to such a degree that it is difficult to imagine a modern children’s book list without them, but when Dahl was first writing for children, these were serious considerations, often more serious that the possibility of financial success.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, once actually published in Britain (in 1967),went on, unsurprisingly, to become a very popular and well selling book. There were objections to some of the content of Charlie, but this was mainly directed to the perceived tastelessness of the book, or occasionally to the very high-handed way in which Mr Willy Wonka treats other people in the book. But there was never enough serious criticism to entail any real revision to the text, and indeed, the only differences between the British and the American editions were the coins used in the story, and the word ‘elevator’ in the USA and ‘lift’ in Britain. There was however, a growing unease with the combination of the high-handed treatment of the Oompa-Loompas and the portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas as Pigmies from Africa, and this unease was reflected in the 1971 film version of the book entitled Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In the film version, the Oompa-Loompas ceased to be black, and were shown as orange skinned with green hair. Interestingly, the change in the title was also made in consideration of racial stereotypes – the name ‘Charlie’ was dropped because ‘Charlie 'was at that time a common Black-American slang term for ‘white person’, and its use was thought to be inappropriate (Treglown, 175).At the time of editing and publication of Charlie, the fact that the Oompa-Loompas were black Pigmies, imported by Willy Wonka, from Africa in packing cases, without visas, without passports, and brought in to work in a factory, paid not with money but in food and accommodation, never allowed out of the factory, and given no introduction to the new society in which they lived, had not, it seems, made anybody think of the slave trade, of white imperialism or of the social or legal problems of illegally imported cheap, bonded, foreign labor. Considering that the mid to late 60’s saw the height of the civil rights movement in the USA, with Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech being made in 1963, the year before the first American publication of Charlie, with Dr. King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year that Charlie was first published (1964), with the assassination of Malcolm X in the next year (1965), and with the assassination of Dr King himself in April of 1968, it is amazing that the racially sensitive nature of the book passed as less significant than the poor taste of having ‘rotten cabbage and fish heads’ (p 143) in a chocolate factory. Accusations that the children’s book publishing industry was at that time predominantly a closed, white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon club, with little connection to the real world would not be difficult to support.
Figure 1. Oompa-Loompas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , First US Edition 1964, p72, Illustrations by Joseph Schindelman
Figure 2. Oompa-Loompas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, First British Edition1967, p60, Illustrations by Faith Jaques
Figure 3. Oompa-Loompas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Revised US Edition1973, p72, Illustrations by Joseph Schindelman
Figure 4. Oompa-Loompas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Revised British Edition1973, p60, Illustrations by Faith Jaques
Eleanor Cameron In 1973 the Oompa-Loompas were changed in the book as well as in the film and were re-written and re-illustrated to become creatures with a ‘rosy-white’ skin color (p101 (all page numbers from the British paperback edition)), with ‘golden- brown’ hair (p 102), and to come from a fictional and largely fantastical land called Loompaland’ (p 93), a land of which Mrs Salt, a teacher of Geography, can confidently say ‘there is no such place’. The change in the way the Oompa-Loompas were portrayed is commonly thought to have been initiated by a critical essay written by Eleanor Cameron for the October 1972 edition ofHorn Book Magazine. Cameron’s essay certainly resulted in an enormous flood of letters to the editor, both in favour of Dahl, and against him, and was even powerful enough to result in a letter replying to her criticisms from Dahl himself. In the year following Cameron's essay both Dahl’s American and his British publishers released revised editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1973).
Standard sources discussing these changes make clear that Cameron’s essay, and the resultant heightening of awareness of the possible sensitive nature of both the text and the illustrations was the prime incentive for the changes. Treglown states: But Dahl’s publishers got at least part of the message: that to those concerned with bringing up children in a racially-mixed society, the Oompa-Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
appeared in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown’ hair and ‘rosy-white’ skin. Treglown p188 In fact, Treglown, and other commentators on the editorial changes in Charlie may be slightly mistaken. Charlie was reissued in a revised version, and indeed, both the illustrations and the text were changed to remove the racial background and the physical origins of the Oompa-Loompas, but it is likely that these changes were already in the pipeline before the publication of Cameron’s article. In a letter to the editor of the
Horn Book in October 1973, Doris Bass, speaking for Knopf, Dahl’s American publishers, states of the new edition that the decision to make changes came from ‘Mr Dahl, his editor and publisher’ and that the changes were made in order to be ‘sensitive and responsive to the changes in consciousness over the past decade’ (Bass, Horn Book,1973, Oct.). The changes made were only in relation to the Oompa-Loompas race and origin – nothing else was changed. Now, although the timing suggests that thesechanges might have been made as a direct result of the Cameron article, it is more likely that the changes came from discussions made during the making of the first film version of
Charlie.
Especially so, since the film version actively changes these aspects of the Oompa-Loompas, whereas Cameron’s article, although it criticizes Dahl for being tasteless, and for the domineering nature of Willy Wonka’s character, does not specifically criticize the racial stereotypes, or the imperialistic overtones of the text. Also, if we consider more closely the timing of the changes, Cameron’s article was published in October 1972, and the revised editions were released in the early summer of the following year. It is very unlikely that new editions could have been planned, executed and printed in such a short period of time, especially as the new hardback editions were published simultaneously in Britain and the USA, and simultaneously with the first softback editions in both the USA and Britain, and were timed to coincide with the release of the sequel to
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator . Cameron stirred the pot, but the decision to make changes and the decisions about what to change came from, as Bass says, ‘Mr Dahl, his editor and publisher’, and the changes were almost certainly underway before Cameron wrote her article. The importance of Dahl himself in the re-editing process is made clear by the fact that changes were made simultaneously in both the British and American editions of Charlie, since Dahl himself would have been the main point of connection between these two publishing houses. Indeed, some commentators on this change see it as a specifically American change, and fail to mention the British change at all:
A discussion of the changes made to Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The changes were made in order to avoid possible racism in the presentation of the Oompa-Loompas as black African Pigmies. The changes actually made in the text are
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