Creating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

How Cadbury Inspired Roald Dahl to Create a Children’s Classic

Dec 5, 2008

Since 1964, children have loved reading about Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. But few know that author Roald Dahl had dreamed of this factory since he was 13 years old.

Today, millions of children know about the eccentric candy maker Willy Wonka, his chocolate factory, and his magical Willy Wonka candy. Aside from the 1964 original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book and its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), the story of Willy Wonka and his factory has been adapted into two films – the 1971 musical Willy Wonka, the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder and Tim Burton’s 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie with Johnny Depp

But in 1929, the seeds of this story existed in the mind of only one child – an English schoolboy named Roald Dahl.

Chocolate Gifts from Cadbury

According to Dahl’s autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), in 1929 he was attending Repton, a famous British public school. While Dahl hated the school’s sadistic headmaster, who enjoyed beating the students, the school did offer Dahl something he loved. Every so often, the gourmet chocolate company Cadbury would send each student a box of their new chocolates and ask them to taste and rate them on excellence of flavor.

For the young Dahl, tthese regular chocolate gifts gave him a fantastic revelation. He immediately realized that a gourmet chocolate company like Cadbury had inventing rooms where workers experimented with creating new chocolates. In his mind, this room resembled a laboratory full of men and women in white coats concocting all sorts of new chocolates and gourmet candy. He frequently dreamed of becoming one of these inventors and creating new chocolates that would excite Mr. Cadbury himself.

Rediscovering Willy Wonka

Years later, after becoming a businessman for Shell Petroleum Company and a pilot for Britain’s Royal Air Force, Dahl turned to writing – beginning with short stories for adults and later with children’s stories such as James and the Giant Peach (1961).

As he describes in his essay “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer,” the hardest part of being a writer is coming up with original plots. Since he never knew when an idea might become a good story, Dahl began scribbling all of his ideas into an old school exercise book he labeled Short Stories.

Though Dahl never stated when the idea came to him, he remains convinced that at one point he recalled his old dreams of Cadbury's gourmet chocolate company and its inventing room and jotted down the following idea in his exercise book:

“What about a chocolate factory that makes marvelous and fantastic things – with a crazy man running it?”

One of the Greatest Roald Dahl Books

Though this idea would require much more writing before transforming into the book Dahl’s fans would love, it still provided the backbone of Dahl’s children's classic. As Dahl states in “Lucky Break,” “The story builds and expands while you are writing it…But you can’t even start to write the story unless you have the beginnings of a plot.”

Since the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book was released, it has delighted both children and adults with its off-the-wall humor and imaginative fantasy. Yet all of this may have never happened if a thirteen-year-old boy had not received a flash of inspiration after tasting the chocolate gifts from Cadbury!

Sources:

Dahl, Roald. “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer.” The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1977.

The copyright of the article Creating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Children’s Books is owned by Michael Jung. Permission to republish Creating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.