Missing Chapter of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Published

Posted on August 30, 2014

Roald Dahl's classic children's tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been print since 1964 and has been turned into three feature films. Now a new chapter of the book has been discovered and published. The chapter, from an early draft of the book, features two disobedient little boys who get into a lot of trouble in a room full of vanilla fudge.

The missing chapter was thought to be too intense and subversive for English children to read in 1967. It had already been cut from the American version in 1964. The missing chapter was found after Dahl's death. It was meant to be chapter five of the book. Charlie Bucket and his mother (it was his grandfather in the final version) and the children head into the Vanilla Fudge Room. So what happened in this chapter that got censors so bent out of shape?

The room features a giant mountain of fudge where the nine children (in the final version there are only five children) climb the mountain and eat fudge. Most obey Wonka when he tells them not to get on the carts at the bottom of the mountain that move on tracks. But two little boys, Timmy Troutbeck and Wilbur Rice, are rude to Wonka, disobey their parents and jump into the carts carrying fudge. The carts disappear into the Pounding and Cutting Room where the carts are tipped out and the fudge (and bratty children) are pounded into the floor then cut into pieces.

Wonka tells the boys' upset parents that there is a wire strainer to keep children from being pounded and cut into fudge which has always worked before, so far as he knows. The workers in the factory (who are not yet called the Oompa Loompas) sing a lovely little song about their deaths: "Eight little children, such charming little chicks. But two of them said 'Nuts to you', and then there were six." The chapter also mentions the grisly fate of two other children who didn't end up in the final version of the book.

You can read an excerpt from the lost chapter with new illustrations by Quentin Blake at The Guardian.