topics: |  fiction | juvenile

When Dahl was about fifteen, an English teacher at Repton School in Derbyshire wrote of him:

I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rdahl.htm

Perhaps he has been doing it intentionally, all along.

This all-time classic opens on a long aside where words are flipped suddenly, taking you unawares. Over two pages, Dahl goes off on a rant about how parents "become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius."

If Dahl was a schoolteacher, his reports would skewer such perceptions. This is the kind of report he would write, if he felt inclined to delve deep into natural history:

The periodical cicada spends six years as a grub underground, and no more than six days as a free creature of sunlight and air. Your son Wilfred has spent six years as a grub in this school and we are still waiting for him to emerge from the chrysalis.

This view of schoolteachers is common across Dahl works. Later in the book we shall meet ex-athlete (hammer-thrower) principal, Miss Trunchbull, who throws children out of windows ("Below the knees her calf muscles stood out like grapefruits inside her stockings.") .

Dahl is supposed to have written somewhere:

	Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy.  The adult is the enemy of the
	child because of the awful process of civilizing... [needed because] when
	it is born it is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.
		[This maybe apocryphal, doesn't appear in any of his books].

But his disdain for parents (and other figures of authority) are visible
everywhere.

In this all-time classic, he inverts the parent-child relation, and produces
parents that are loathsome (a trend we find also in Harry Potter).   Matilda's
father, Mr. Wormwood, is a crooked car salesman

	   "Sawdust", he would say proudly, "is one of the great secrets of my
	success..."
	   "I don't see how sawdust can help you to sell second-hand cars, daddy."
	[He buys cars with bad gearboxes for cheap...]
	   "all I do is mix a lot of sawdust with the oil in the gearbox and
	it runs as sweet as a nut."
	   "How long will it run like that before it starts rattling again?"
	Matilda asked him.
	   "Long enough for the buyer to get a good distance away," the father
	said, grinning. "About a hundred miles."

Attributing the quote "So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow..." to Dahl is quite certainly a hoax of the internet era...

Later it turns out, he has been dealing in stolen cars. Like the adoptive parents of Harry Potter, they eventually leave their home (and country), leaving Matilda in happier circumstances. Unlike the Dursleys who go into protective care of the Order of the Phoenix, Mr. Wormwood is forced to flee because he is about to be arrested for his crimes.

Well-spread spurious quote

A friend posted this on her facebook page as a quote from "Matilda":

	"So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices
	of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like
	ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting
	message: You are not alone." — from Matilda

Googling for the first line in quotes, found this "quote" revealed 2.3 million
results; each page claims that it is a quote from Matilda by Dahl. The sites
include heavyweight bibliophile sites such as
	* Oprah Winfrey
	* Reader's Digest
	* answers.yahoo.com


 

goodreads.com spreading this "quote".  262 book readers "like" it.

The most interesting testimony comes from goodreads.com, where this quote was 
posted and 262 book-loving people seem to have "liked" it (as of Aug 
2013, may be higher by the time you read this)..

However, my edition of Matilda does not have it, and Google Books can't
find the word "comforting" in this uncomfortably grim book, and searching for
"ships" in the text reveals only how, in her books, "She went on olden-day
sailing ships with Joseph Conrad."

While the text may have appeared in the movie, it isn't Roald Dahl.


 
This "quote" does not appear anywhere in the book with this cover.

Attributing this quotation to Dahl is quite certainly a hoax of the internet
era, an urban legend.

Excerpts

By the time she was three, Matilda had taught herself to read by
studying newspapers and magazines that lay around the house.  At the age of
four, she could read fast and well and she naturally began hankering after
books [...]

    "Daddy," she said, "do you think you could buy me a book?"
    "A book?" he said. "What d'you want a flaming book for?"
    "To read, Daddy."
    "What's wrong with the telly, for heaven's sake? We've got a lovely telly
with a twelve-inch screen and now you come asking for a book! You're getting
spoiled, my girl!"  p.12

[she eventually discovers the local library]

	The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing
	people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with
	Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with
	Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her
	little room in an English village.

 

Mr Wormwood, Great Car Dealer

Her father was a dealer in second-hand cars and it seemed he did pretty well
at it.
   "Sawdust", he would say proudly, "is one of the great secrets of my success..."
   "I don't see how sawdust can help you to sell second-hand cars, daddy."
   "...I'm always glad to buy a car when some fool has been crashing the
gears so badly they're all worn out and rattle like mad. I get it cheap. Then
all I do is mix a lot of sawdust with the oil in the gearbox and it runs as
sweet as a nut."
   "How long will it run like that before it starts rattling again?" Matilda asked him.
   "Long enough for the buyer to get a good distance away," the father said,
grinning. "About a hundred miles."
   "But that's dishonest, daddy," Matilda said. "It's cheating."
   "No one ever got rich being honest," the father said. "Customers are there
to be diddled."

[Matilda's mother: dyed platinum blonde]
She had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appears to
be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out.  27

Superglue in the nose

[After Matilda has rimmed dad's hat w superglue and it has stuck to his
head.]
   Matilda said, "There's a boy down the road who got some superglue on his
finger without knowing it and then he put his finger to his nose."
   Mr. Wormwood jumped, "What happened to him?" he spluttered.
   "The finger got stuck inside his nose," Matilda said, "and he had to go
around like that for a week.  People kept saying to him, 'Stop picking your
nose,' and he couldn't do anything about it.  He looked an awful fool." 34

In came Mr. Wormwood in a loud check suit and a yellow tie.  The appalling
broad orange and green check of the jacket and trousers almost blinded the
onlooker.  50

[AM: ??Luddite tendencies in Roald Dahl:]
[Matilda has just multiplied 14 x 19 = 266.  Ms Honey does it on paper to
confirm.
Ms Honey: Try to tell me exactly what goes on inside your head when you get a
   multiplication like that ... you seem able to arrive at the answer almost
   instantly.
Matilda: I . . . I . . . I simply put the fourteen down in my head and multiply it
   by nineteen.  I'm afraid I don't know how else to explain it. I've always said to
   myself that if a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn't I?
Ms H: Why not indeed.  The human brain is an amazing thing.
Matilda: I think it's a lot better than a lump of metal.

You choose books, I choose looks

   "Now look at me," Mrs. Wormwood said.  "Then look at you.  You chose
books. I chose looks."
   Ms Honey looked at the plain plump person with the smug suet-pudding
face... "What did you say?" she asked.
   "I said you chose books and I chose looks.  And who's finished up the
better off?  Me, of course.  I'm sitting pretty in a nice house with a
successful businessman and you're left slaving away teaching a lot of nasty
little children the ABC. " 98

Hammer-throwing Amanda

 

... she lunged forward and grabbed hold of Amanda's pigtails in her right fist and
lifted the girl clear off the ground. Then she started swinging her round and
round her head, faster and faster and Amanda was screaming blue murder and the
Trunchbull was yelling, "I'll give you pigtails, you little rat!"

"Shades of the Olympics," Hortensia murmured. "She's getting up speed now just
like she does with the hammer. Ten to one she's going to throw her."

Bruce Bogotter steals a cake

[Trunchbull to Bruce Bogtrotter:]
	You wanted cake! You stole cake! And now you've got cake! What's more,
	you're going to eat it! You do not leave this platform and nobody leaves
	this hall until you have eaten the entire cake that is sitting there in
	front of you!  Do I make myself clear, Bogtrotter? Do you get my
	meaning?"

	The boy looked at the Trunchbull. Then he looked down at the enormous
	cake.

 
Bruce Bogotter has to eat the enormous cake...

The newt in the glass

[Lavender has secretly put a newt in Mrs Trunchbull's water jug]
     The Trunchbull was sitting behind the teacher's table staring with a
mixture of horror and fascination at the newt wriggling in the glass. Matilda's
eyes were also riveted on the glass. And now, quite slowly, there began to
creep over Matilda a most extraordinary and peculiar feeling.  The feeling was
mostly in the eyes. A kind of electricity seemed to be gathering inside
them.  A sense of power was brewing in those eyes of hers, a feeling of great
strength was settling itself deep inside her eyes. But there was also another
feeling which was something else altogether, and which she could not
understand. It was like flashes of lightning. Little waves of lightning
seemed to be flashing out of her eyes. Her eyeballs were beginning to get
hot, as though vast energy was building up somewhere inside them. It was an
amazing sensation. She kept her eyes steadily on the glass, and now the power
was concentrating itself in one small part of each eye and growing stronger
and stronger and it felt as though millions of tiny little invisible arms
with hands on them were shooting out of her eyes towards the glass she was
staring at.

    "Tip it!" Matilda whispered. "Tip it over!"

    She saw the glass wobble. It actually tilted backwards a fraction of an
inch, then righted itself again.
    She kept pushing at it with all those millions of invisible little arms
and hands that were reaching out from her eyes, feeling the power that
was flashing straight from the two little black dots in the very centres of
her eyeballs.
    "Tip it!" she whispered again. "Tip it over!"
[eventually]
    And then, very very slowly, so slowly she could hardly see it happening,
the glass began to lean backwards, farther and farther and farther backwards
until it was balancing on just one edge of its base. And there it teetered
for a few seconds before finally toppling over and falling with a sharp
tinkle on to the desktop.  The water in it and the squirming newt splashed
out all over Miss Trunchbull's enormous bosom. The headmistress let out a
yell that must have rattled every window-pane in the building and for the
second time in the last five minutes she shot out of her chair like a
rocket. 166

her mouth was opening and shutting like a halibut out of water and giving out
a series of strangled gasps.

"Did you know", Matilda said suddenly, "that the heart of a mouse beats at
the rate of six hundred and fifty times a second?" 231





links:

There are an enormous number of people who LOVE this book, and there are an
enormous number of webpages on it.  However, I particularly liked this
beautifully done page at tygertale, on Miss Honey's Cottage:
* http://tygertale.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/miss-honeys-cottage-from-roald-dahls-matilda/
including the following:
 
at ms. honey's cottage.

Do illustrations spoil the ending?

The illustrations by Quentin Blake, are of course, superb.  At one point
Dahl is supposed to have said of Quentin:
	There’s no one to touch him.  He has a magical gift of drawing a character on
	the page exactly as you imagined it.
		magicalgrammar.com

Normally, illustrations don't tell the story, though they may sometimes
move the tale ahead.

But in Dahl, the illustrations often give away the punchline.

After the newt glass spills over, one is not sure it's Matilda; in the
experiment by Ms. Honey, one isn't sure if the empty glass will topple or
not, but the illustration spills the beans (p.175).

Still, it does not detract from the power of the story... one is waiting to
read how it goes.