Matilda: Roald Dahl’s Book-Loving Genius Takes On Miss Trunchbull
Matilda is a novel by Roald Dahl, first published in London in 1988 by Jonathan Cape with illustrations by Quentin Blake. It was made into a film in 1996 and a stage musical in 2010, and it remains one of the best-loved children’s books ever written.
Author: Roald Dahl (1916–1990); illustrated by Quentin Blake
Title: Matilda (1988)
Format: English paperback (Puffin), 256 pages
Scope: Children’s novel about a gifted girl who discovers she has special powers
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0141371439 (ASIN 0141371439)
A Very Special Girl
Matilda Wormwood is a very special girl. She could read by the age of three, although the only books in the house were a cookery book and some magazines. Before she was five she had read a long list of authors and built up an astonishing store of knowledge.
Her mediocre parents do not care about her: they encourage her to watch television and refuse to buy her books. Clever and determined, Matilda realises that she is much smarter than they are and so pays no attention to their ridiculous ideas. While they are out, she goes to the public library to read, so that when she starts school she is far ahead of her classmates.
Miss Honey and Miss Trunchbull
Her kind teacher, Miss Jennifer Honey, wants to move Matilda to a more advanced class, but the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, refuses. Matilda had hoped school would be different, but there she has to face Miss Trunchbull, a headmistress who hates children. When Matilda is picked on by the Trunchbull, she suddenly discovers she has an extraordinary power with which to defend herself.
It will take a superhuman genius to give Miss Trunchbull what she deserves, and Matilda may be just the girl to do it!
Mrs Phelps and the Library
At four, Matilda walks alone to the public library, where the kindly librarian Mrs Phelps watches her work through the children’s shelves and then move on to the adult classics: Dickens, the Brontës, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Orwell and more. It is one of the loveliest passages Dahl wrote, and it has sent many young readers to the same books.
Revenge, Dahl Style
Matilda’s first weapon is not magic but mischief. Her father, a dishonest second-hand car dealer who boasts of hiding sawdust in gearboxes, finds his hat glued to his head and his hair dyed platinum blonde. At school the Trunchbull’s tyranny reaches comic heights: she swings a girl by her pigtails over the fence and forces Bruce Bogtrotter to eat an entire chocolate cake in front of the school. Matilda’s power arrives when she tips over a glass of water with a newt in it just by staring at it, and she later uses it to frighten the headmistress with a message written in chalk by an invisible hand.
Dahl and Blake
Matilda was one of Dahl’s last novels, written after The BFG and The Witches, and Quentin Blake’s scratchy, energetic drawings are inseparable from it. The story has had a remarkable second life: the musical by Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010, became a West End and Broadway hit and was filmed for Netflix in 2022, following Danny DeVito’s 1996 film.
A Reader’s Book
The original reviewer was right to call it a story for every child who has felt misunderstood. It is also a book for parents and teachers: a reminder that the quiet child in the corner with a book may be the most interesting person in the room.
Why Read It Now
More than seventeen million copies have been sold worldwide, according to the reviewer’s sources, and it is easy to see why: Dahl’s wicked humour and Blake’s drawings are on the side of every child who has ever felt misunderstood. It is also, quietly, a book about the comfort of libraries and reading.
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