from: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/books/want-more-wonka-a-lost-chapter-is-found.html?_r=0
It appears that Roald Dahl, below, once planned for Charlie Bucket to have a lot more company and a somewhat wilder adventure in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” A lost chapter of an earlier version of this 1964 book that was found after Dahl’s death in 1990 was recently published for the first time in
The Guardian. It reveals more temptations for a larger cast of characters and some variations on character names.
The chapter opens with eight children — including Charlie, escorted by his mother instead of his Grandpa Nebulous — entering the Vanilla Fudge room. At this point, two other children, Miranda Grope and Augustus Pottle, who later became Augustus Gloop, have already fallen into the chocolate river. Inside the room, the visitors see a mountain of chocolate where hundreds of workers (later called Oompa-Loompas) are chipping away chunks of fudge that are then loaded onto wagons and transported through a dark hole in the wall. Two children, Tommy Troutbeck and Wilbur Rice, disobey Willy Wonka and jump into the wagons. They are quickly swept away through the hole into the “Pounding and Cutting Room.” Wonka tells the parents that this room is where the fudge is pounded “against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin.” After that, he says, “a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops.” The chapter did not make the book because it was “deemed too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral for the tender minds of British children almost 50 years ago,” The Guardian said. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide in 55 languages, according to
RoaldDahl.com, and has been made into two movies and a musical.
Thread Creator
