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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's book by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin in 1967. The book was adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1972. Dahl had also planned to write a third book in the series but never finished it.

The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products. At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.

Plot

The story revolves around a poor young boy named Charlie Bucket born to a penniless, starving family. His two sets of grandparents reside in their children's dilapidated, tiny house and lead a bedridden existence, and Charlie is fascinated by the universally-celebrated candy factory located in his hometown owned by famous chocolatier Willy Wonka. His Grandpa Joe often narrates stories to him about the chocolate factory and about its mysterious proprietor, and the mysteries relating to the factory itself; how it had gone defunct for years until it mysteriously re-opened after Wonka's secret candy recipes had been discovered (albeit no employees are ever seen leaving the factory).

Soon after, an article in the newspaper reveals that Willy Wonka has hidden a Golden Ticket in five chocolate bars being distributed to anonymous locations worldwide, and that the discovery of a Golden Ticket would grant the owner with passage into Willy Wonka's factory and a lifetime supply of confectionary. Charlie longs for chocolate to satisfy his hunger and to find a Golden Ticket himself, but his chances are slim and word on the discovery of the tickets keeps appearing in various news articles read by the Bucket family, each one discovered by far going to self-centered, bratty children; an obese, gluttonous boy named Augustus Gloop, a spoiled brat named Veruca Salt, a record-breaking gum chewer named Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee, an aspiring gangster who is unhealthily obsessed with television. Charlie continues to grow in emaciation day by day, and is given money from his granfather to buy chocolate and winds up discovering a dollar in the snow on his way to the corner store. Charlie uses the money to purchase two Wonka bars and winds up discovering a Golden Ticket in one of them, much to the shock of the shopkeeper and his family.

The following day, the discoverers of the Golden Tickets gather at Wonka's factory and are welcomed inside by the candy maker himself, who gives them a tour through his whimsically-designed factory. There, they learn of the unseen workers behind the re-opening of the factory; small, orange-skinned elfin beings known as Oompa-Loompas, who work in exchange for caocao beans. However, while touring through a room designed as a meadow made of candy, Augustus Gloop is sucked through a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate, resulting in his elimination from the competition. Not long afterward, Wonka unveils a product he's working on; chewing gum designed to replace any need for cooking or daily meals, which is stolen by Violet Beuregarde. However, because Wonka still needed to perfect the candy, she winds up inflating into a giant blueberry that must be juiced immediately, resulting in her elimination, and before long Veruca Salt is eliminated after falling down a garbage chute with her parents while trying to snatch one of Willy Wonka's specially-trained squirrels used for selecting the nuts baked into Wonka bars after being dismissed as a "bad nut." Soon, Wonka reveals one of his confectionary products in development; chocolate bars that can be transported to customers via television, which quickly captures Mike Teavee's interest. He escapes to test out the device on himself, only to be shrunken to an inch tall so that his original height must be restored by a taffy pull. Charlie remaining the only child who has not been eliminated, he has won the contest and the legendary prize mentioned before as a result; the position of heir to Willy Wonka's factory. A thrilled Charlie rides in Wonka's glass flying elevator to deliver his family to the factory from their little home, no longer having to worry about poverty.

Main rooms

There are four main rooms that the tour goes through, losing one child at a time. They pass many other rooms but don't go in.

The Chocolate Room

The Chocolate Room is the first room the group enters. It is said that everything in this room is edible: the pavements, the bushes, even the grass. There are trees made of taffy that grow jelly apples, bushes that sprout lollipops, mushrooms that spurt whipped cream, pumpkins filled with sugar cubes instead of seeds, jelly bean stalks, and spotty candy cubes. The main icon of the room is the Chocolate River, where the chocolate is mixed and churned by the waterfall, but must be untouched by human hands. Willy Wonka proclaims, "No other factory in the world mixes its chocolate by waterfall." Pipes that hang on the ceiling come down and suck up the chocolate, then send it to other rooms of the factory, such as the Fudge Room as Augustus Gloop is sucked into that pipe after falling into the river while drinking from it. Augustus is disqualified from winning the chocolate factory because of his inability to control his gluttony. Wonka had an Oompa-Loompa take Mrs. Gloop to the Fudge Room to look for her son. Also, there is a boat that is operated by Oompa-Loompas which takes the tour on a Chocolate River Ride.

The Inventing Room

The Inventing Room is the second room that the tour goes through. This room is home to Wonka's new—and still insufficiently tested—candies, such as Everlasting Gobstoppers, Hair Toffee, and Wonka's greatest idea so far, Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum. This candy is a three course dinner all by itself, containing, "Tomato soup, roast beef, and blueberry pie." However, once the chewer gets to the dessert, the side effect is that they turn into a giant "blueberry." This happens to Violet Beauregarde after she rashly grabs and consumes the experimental gum. Violet is disqualified from winning the chocolate factory because of her inability to control her boasting and pride. Violet is subsequently taken to the Juicing Room so that the juice can be removed from her immediately. The tour then leaves the Inventing Room.

In the 1971 film, the Inventing Room was working on Exploding Candy.

The Nut Room

After an exhausting jog down a series of corridors, Wonka allows the party to rest briefly outside the Nut Room, though he forbids them to enter. This room is where Wonka uses trained squirrels to break open good walnuts for use in his sweets. All bad walnuts are thrown into a garbage chute which leads to an incinerator that is lit every other day. Veruca Salt desperately wants a squirrel, but becomes furious when Wonka tells her she cannot have one. She tries to grab a squirrel for herself, but it rejects her as a "bad nut" and an army of squirrels haul her across the floor and throw her down the garbage chute. Veruca is disqualified from winning the chocolate factory because of her inability to control her greed and selfishness. Wonka assures her father that she could be stuck on top of the garbage chute and they quickly enter the Nut Room. As Mr. Salt leans over the hole to look for Veruca, one of the squirrels rushes up behind him and pushes him in.

In the 1971 film version, the nut sorting room is an egg room with large geese laying golden chocolate eggs. The sorting mechanism is the same with a meter that sorts the good chocolate eggs from the bad chocolate eggs, but Veruca places herself on the mechanism while trying to get a goose.

However, the 2005 film version followed the original storyline with Veruca wanting a squirrel and being rejected and thrown down a garbage chute to the incinerator that is lit every Tuesday. Luckily for Veruca and her father, Wonka is told by an Oompa-Loompa that the incinerator is broken allowing three weeks of rotten garbage to break their fall.

The Television Room

The Television Room is home to Wonka's latest invention, Television Chocolate (known as Wonkavision in the 1971 film), where they take a giant bar of Wonka chocolate and shrink it, then send it through the air in a million pieces to appear in a television. The bar can be taken from the screen, and even consumed. At Wonka's behest, Charlie takes the newly shrunk bar (Mike believes the bar is just an image on a screen). Mike Teavee is amazed at this new discovery, and attempts to send himself through television, resulting in him being shrunk down to be no more than an inch high. Mike is disqualified from winning the chocolate factory because of his inability to overcome his sloth which manifested itself in watching too much TV. This behavior led to an atrophying of his senses because the natural environment is the primary source of sensory stimulation and Mike’s primary experience of nature was replaced by his secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media. This atrophying of his senses resulted in his de-sensitivity to violence, as well as feelings of angst and frustration coupled with destructive behavior. Wonka suggests that he be put through the Gum Stretcher, where he tests the stretchiness of gum. He also planned to give him vitamins, notably Vitamin Wonka, which will make his toes as long as his fingers "so he can play piano with his feet". The Oompa Loompas escort the Teavee family to the Gum Stretcher.

In the 1971 version, Mike's mother accompanies him to the factory, while his father accompanies him in the 2005 film. In both the 1971 and 2005 film versions, Mike Teavee is stretched by the Taffy Puller, but in the latter film the consequences of his restoration are shown, as he is ridiculously tall but stretched impossibly thin.

Other rooms

Other rooms, mentioned but not visited, are listed below in alphabetical order. Each is given the name of the product it contains, which is presumably made or extracted there.

• Butterscotch and Buttergin – In the 1971 film, the Butterscotch and Buttergin is made in Willy Wonka's inventing room.
• Candy-Coated Pencils for Sucking in Class –
• Cavity-Filling Caramels – "No more dentists!"
• Coconut-Ice Skating Rinks –
• Cotton Candy Sheep – In the 2005 film, the Wonkavator heads pass a room where pink sheep are being sheared of their wool. Willy Wonka just quoted "I'd rather not talk about this one."
• Cows that give Chocolate Milk –
• Cows that give Whipped Cream – In the 2005 film, Wonka proclaims ironically that "whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all unless it's been whipped with whips."
• Devils Drenchers to set your breath alight –
• Eatable Marshmallow Pillows –
• Exploding Candy for your Enemies – In the 1971 film, the Exploding Candy for your Enemies is held in the Inventing Room.
• Fizzy Lemonade Swimming Pools –
• Fizzy Lifting Drinks – This was included in the 1971 film. This room had Charlie and Grandpa Joe drinking the concoction that nearly caused them to be chopped up by fan blades at the top of the room, but they escaped by burping repeatedly until they were safe on the ground. Subsequently, this was the event that nearly caused Charlie to be expelled from the contest, though they didn't find out until after the tour.
• Fudge Mountain – This is where the Oompa-Loompas mine chocolate fudge in the Mountain.
• Glumptious Globgobblers – "All the perfumed juices go squirting down your throat"
• Hot Ice Creams for Cold Days –
• Invisible Chocolate Bars for Eating in Class –In the 1971 film there was a button called a chocolate invisible bar in the great glass eleavtor.
• Lickable Wallpaper for Nurseries – Featured in the 1971 film. When Veruca Salt criticizes Wonka for making up a "Snozzberry" flavor, he tells her "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
• Luminous Lollies for in Bed at Night –
• Magic Hand-Fudge – "When you hold it in your hand, you taste it in your mouth!"
• Mint Jujubes for the Boy Next Door – "They'll give him green teeth for a month!"
• Pishlets for children who can't whistle –
• Rainbow Drops – "Suck them and you can spit in seven different colors!"
• Rock-Candy Mine – "10,000 feet deep!"
• Scarlet Scorchdroppers – "Makes the person who sucked them feel as warm as toast"
• Square Candies that Look Round – In the book, Wonka said he was proud of them. But when the children looked at the candy, they saw that it looked square and not at all round. Then Wonka showed them that the candies did "look 'round" by showing them the eyes on the candies that looked round.
• Stickjaw for Talkative Parents –
• Strawberry-Juice Water Pistols -The strawberry juice water pistols can squrit strawberry juice and tasted good.
• Toffee-Apple Trees for Planting out in your Garden –
• Wriggle-Sweets that Wriggle Delightfully in your Tummy after Swallowing –

The 2005 film also included a Puppet Hospital and Burn Center as well as the Administration Offices (where the female Oompa-Loompas work) when the Great Glass Elevator passes by them.

Reception

Although the book has always been popular and considered a children's classic by many literary critics, a number of prominent individuals have spoken critically of the novel over the years. Children's novelist and literary historian, John Rowe Townsend, has described the book as "fantasy of an almost literally nauseating kind" and accused it of "astonishing insensitivity" regarding the original portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies, although Dahl did revise this later. Another novelist, Eleanor Cameron, compared the book to the candy that forms its subject matter, commenting that it is "delectable and soothing while we are undergoing the brief sensory pleasure it affords but leaves us poorly nourished with our taste dulled for better fare". Ursula K. Le Guin voiced her support for this assessment in a letter to Cameron. Defenders of the book have pointed out it was unusual for its time in being quite dark for a children's book, with the "antagonists" not being adults or monsters (as is the case even for most of Dahl's books) but the naughty children, who receive sadistic revenges in the end. A fan of the book since childhood, film director Tim Burton states, "I responded to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it respected the fact that children can be adults." In a 2006 list for the Royal Society of Literature, author J. K. Rowling named Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among her top ten books every child should read.

Accolades

• Blue Peter Book Award (UK, 2000)
• Millennium Children's Book Award (UK, 2000)
• New England Round Table of Children's Librarians Award (USA, 1972)
• Surrey School Award (UK, 1973)

Adaptations

The book was first made into a feature film as a musical titled Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart, produced by David L. Wolper and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, character actor Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe, and Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket. Released worldwide on 30 June 1971 and distributed by Paramount Pictures (Warner Bros. is the current owner), the film had an estimated budget of $2.9 million. The film grossed only $4 million and, while it passed its budget, was still considered a box-office disappointment. However, as was noted in an article entitled; "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: From Inauspicious Debut to Timeless Classic", exponential home video and DVD sales, as well as repeated television airings, the film has since developed into a cult classic. Concurrently with the 1971 film, a line of candies was introduced by the Quaker Oats Company in North America, Europe, and Oceania that uses the book's characters and imagery for its marketing. Presently sold in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the candies are produced in the United States, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Brazil, by Nestlé.

In 1985, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory video game was released for the ZX Spectrum by developers Soft Option Ltd and publisher Hill MacGibbon.

Another film version, titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and directed by Tim Burton, was released on 15 July 2005; this version starred Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket, Deep Roy as the Oompa-Loompas, and Geoffrey Holder as the Narrator. The Brad Grey production was a hit, grossing about $470 million worldwide with an estimated budget of $150 million. It was distributed by Warner Bros. The 1971 and 2005 films are consistent with the written work to varying degrees. The Burton film, in particular, greatly expanded Willy Wonka's personal back-story borrowing many themes and elements from the sequel. Both films, likewise, heavily expanded the personalities of the four "bad" children and their parents from the limited descriptions in the book. A video game based on Burton's adaptation was released on July 11, 2005.

This book has adapted frequently for the stage, most often as plays or musicals for children, and a radio production for BBC Radio 4 in the early 1980s. These are often titled Willy Wonka or Willy Wonka Jr. They almost always feature musical numbers by all the main characters (Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Violet, etc.). Many of the songs are revised versions from the 1971 film. A musical based on the novel called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the Musical will premiere at the West End's London Palladium on 23 June 2013. The show will be directed by Sam Mendes.

The Estate of Roald Dahl also sanctioned an operatic adaptation of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory called The Golden Ticket. The Golden Ticket was written by American composer Peter Ash and British librettist Donald Sturrock. The Golden Ticket has completely original music and was commissioned by American Lyric Theater, Lawrence Edelson (producing artistic director), and Felicity Dahl. The opera received its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on June 13, 2010, in a co-production with American Lyric Theater and Wexford Festival Opera.

On 1 April 2006, the British theme park, Alton Towers, opened a family boat ride attraction themed around the story. The ride features a boat section, where guests travel around the chocolate factory in bright pink boats on a chocolate river. In the final stage of the ride, guests enter one of two glass elevators, where they join Willy Wonka as they travel the factory, eventually shooting up and out through the glass roof.

Editions

• ISBN 0-394-81011-2 (hardcover, 1973, revised Oompa Loompa edition)
• ISBN 0-87129-220-3 (paperback, 1976)
• ISBN 0-553-15097-9 (paperback, 1980, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman)
• ISBN 0-14-031824-0 (paperback, 1985, illustrated by Michael Foreman)
• ISBN 1-85089-902-9 (hardcover, 1987)
• ISBN 0-606-04032-3 (prebound, 1988)
• ISBN 0-89966-904-2 (library binding, 1992, reprint)
• ISBN 0-14-130115-5 (paperback, 1998)
• ISBN 0-375-81526-0 (hardcover, 2001)
• ISBN 0-375-91526-5 (library binding, 2003)
• ISBN 0-14-240108-0 (paperback, 2004)
• ISBN 0-8488-2241-2 (hardcover)
• ISBN 0-14-131130-4 (2001, illustrated by Quentin Blake)

See also

• Roald Dahl
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film)

References

1. Martin Chilton (18 November 2010) The 25 best children's books The Daily Telegraph
2. Bathroom Readers' Institute. "You're My Inspiration." Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader. Ashland: Bathroom Reader's Press, 2005. 13.
3. John Rowe Townsend. Written for Children!. Kestrel Books. 1974.
4. Cameron, Eleanor (1972). "McLuhan, Youth, and Literature: Part I". The Horn Book Magazine. Retrieved 27 September 2008Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
5. Le Guin, Ursula K. (April 1973). "Letters to the Editor (on McLuhan, Youth, and Literature: Part I)". The Horn Book Magazine. Retrieved 27 September 2008Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
6. Paul A. Woods (2007) Tim Burton: A Child's Garden of Nightmares p.177. Plexus, 2007
7. Tim Burton, Mark Salisbury, Johnny Depp "Burton on Burton". p.223. Macmillan, 2006
8. "From Beatrix Potter to Ulysses ... what the top writers say every child should read". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 May 2012
9. Kara K. Keeling, Scott T. Pollard Critical approaches to food in children's literature p.221. Taylor & Francis, 2008
10. "Willy Wonka company information". Careers In Food. Retrieved 28 December 2010.
11. ^ "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to open in West End". BBC. Retrieved 18 June 2012
12. The Golden Ticket American Lyric Theater
13. Alton Towers Theme Park, Staffordshire The Guardian. Retrieved 24 August 2011

External links

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Official Roald Dahl Website
• The Willy Wonka Candy Company

• Use dmy dates from August 2010
• 1964 novels
• Children's books by Roald Dahl
• Willy Wonka
• British novels adapted into films
• Alfred A. Knopf books
• Size change in fiction
• BILBY Award winning works
• British children's novels
• Novels by Roald Dahl