Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic for 7 year olds about a boy who gets one bar of chocolate a year.

What happens

Charlie Bucket lives in a small wooden house with six grown-ups. There are two rooms and one bed. The bed goes to the four grandparents, who are all over ninety and so tired they never get out of it. Everyone else sleeps on mattresses on the floor, with freezing draughts blowing across them all winter.

Mr Bucket screws the caps onto tubes of toothpaste. It doesn't pay much. Breakfast is bread and margarine. Lunch is boiled potatoes and cabbage. Supper is cabbage soup. On Sundays they get a second helping.

Dahl is completely matter of fact about all of this, which is why it lands.

The birthday chocolate is the best bit of the opening. Charlie gets one bar a year, puts it in a little wooden box and looks at it for days. Then he peels back one corner and takes the tiniest nibble. He can make a sixpenny bar last more than a month.

And twice a day he walks past Wonka's factory with his nose in the air, taking long deep sniffs.

The evening visits to the grandparents are the warm heart of it. Grandpa Joe is ninety-six and a half and comes alive the moment Charlie sits on the bed. He has stories about marshmallows that taste of violets, caramels that change colour every ten seconds, chewing gum that never loses its flavour, and a dotty Indian prince.

Then Mr Wonka announces five Golden Tickets, hidden under the wrappers of five ordinary bars, anywhere in the world.

Grandpa George says the obvious thing straight away. The children who find them will be the ones who can buy chocolate every day. Charlie gets one bar a year. There isn't a hope.

What follows is a proper contest, and the reporting of it is very funny. A man in the peanut business buys hundreds of thousands of bars and puts his whole workforce onto unwrapping them. A professor's ticket-detecting machine grabs the gold filling out of a duchess's back tooth.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that this is the older text, and it is not kind about how the other children look. Augustus Gloop is described as enormously fat, with folds of fat and a face like a ball of dough, and it keeps going. If that isn't something you want coming out of your mouth at bedtime, better to know now than halfway down the page.

Otherwise it's a wonderful read-aloud. Short chapters, and most of them end on something.

What to read next

The bit that stays with most readers is the boy who has almost nothing and a family worth having. Danny the Champion of the World does that too. Danny lives in an old gipsy caravan behind a filling station with his father, who tells him a story every night and turns out to have been keeping something from him for years.