“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” – A Victorian Fairy Tale
Off and on, I’ve been thinking about Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
A few years ago, it came to light that, according to Dahl’s widow, “His first Charlie that he wrote about was a little black boy.” This comes as some surprise to those who know the history of the novel, since the Oompa-Loompas were “pygmy Africans” in the first edition, and remained imported slave labor in all subsequent editions and adaptations.
The writer of the linked Guardian article seems to think that making the Oompa-Loompas orange-faced and green-haired somehow erases this fact, but come on now. Regardless of whether they’re a real people, the very premise of importing an entire population into your factory as labor is colonialist as can be, and coding them with uniform physical features is both racist and racialist.
This in itself is nothing new, but lately I’ve been reevaluating these parts of the text in light of the news that Charlie was originally black. The Guardian, predictably, only cares about Dahl’s reputation, but we should take it further. How does a black Charlie change our reading of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory itself?
Charlie was black, and the Oompa-Loompas were also black. Narratively and thematically, what do these two facts say in conjunction?
Suddenly, a lot of pieces fit together more tightly than they ever did before.
It’s a story about the Faustian bargain that a person of minority status must often make with the powers that be—powers that trace their lineage back to empire.
Art by Quentin Blake, Roald Dahl’s official illustrator
