In all seriousness, Matilda is the ultimate 'misfit' story with some dark humour (and a bit of magic!) thrown in. I understand if you are American (assuming sorry) that perhaps the tone, humour or taste may be not to your taste-it is terribly British-forgive us it's a terribly British book by a terribly British author. Oddly enough, in Dahl's original draft of the book, Matilda actually WAS a horrible brat (even saying she was "born wicked") who played tricks on her simple, but not malicious parents. You can read a detailed synopsis of this first draft in Jeremy Treglown's excellent biography. I don't have my copy with me, but I remember thinking "WTF?" when I read the summary. It was unrecognizable and a large chunk of it involved something about Matilda using her powers to cheat at horse races. Essayist Alex Carnevale describes the original Matilda as "a devilish little hussy who only later becomes "clever", perhaps because she found herself without very much to do after torturing her parents."
It was actually Dahl's American editor, Stephen Roxburgh, who deserves much of the credit for transforming what was essentially an absurd, chaotic mess into the familiar underdog story we know today. The original was so bad that Roxburgh pretended not to have even received his copy of the manuscript. Over the following year, Roxburgh insisted on extensive revisions, while Dahl's British publishers were actually satisfied with previous drafts. Eventually, Dahl threw a hissy fit, his ego bruised over some comment about contracts Roxburgh made, and moved to a different publisher for the U.S. edition (having made all the extensive revisions to the story Roxburgh actually spearheaded).
In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness Of Roald Dahl
Updated On: 9/25/12 at 05:33 PM
