charlie and the chocolate factory first edition

In the 1974 edition, Oopma-Loompas became long-haired, rosy-cheeked, and white, hailing from the island of Loompaland. But it was only after a series of exchanges with Eleanor Cameron, a white children’s book author who objected to the racist content, that Dahl agreed to revise the book. In the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas are reimagined with orange skin. “He found the NAACP to be unreasonable, telling Knopf editor Bob Bernstein he was unable to understand why the perceived his story as a ‘terrible dastardly anti-negro book,’ and described their attitude as ‘real Nazi stuff.’” “In response, Dahl was shocked and sullen,” Eplett writes.

The wildly colonialist stereotyping apparently received little pushback until 1971, when plans were announced for a U.S. In the 1964 book, Wonka explains that he found the Oompa-Loompas “in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.” They were near starvation, living on vile caterpillars, so Wonka smuggled them to England for their own good. Dahl, on the other hand, apparently saw nothing wrong with Oompa-Loompas-depicted as African pygmy people-being locked up forever in the factory where they supplied all the labor for Willy Wonka’s chocolate empire. The chocolate makers at least worked to distance themselves from slavery. Cocoa plantations that supplied Cadbury and other chocolate makers used enslaved labor.

Wonka explains that he found the Oompa-Loompas “in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.”Įplett writes that one real-life parallel Dahl apparently did not intend involved labor practices.

Charlie and the chocolate factory first edition