Live and work
Roald Dahl was born on 13th September, 1916 in Llandaff, South Wales. Dahl’s parents were Norwegian. His father died while Roald was still a child.
Dahl attended Llandaff Cathedral School for just two years. Then from the ages of nine to thirteen he attended St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Weston–super–Mare, England. He did not enjoy the school because many of the teachers were cruel and often caned the students. Dahl was good at cricket and swimming, but he performed poorly in class. One of his main hobbies was reading, and some of his favourite novelists were the adventure writers Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.
When Dahl was thirteen his family moved to Kent in England, and he was sent to Repton Public School. Sadly, Repton was even harsher than his old school. The headmaster enjoyed beating children and the older students used the younger ones as servants. However, there was one good thing about the school. Every few months, the chocolate company, Cadburys, sent boxes of chocolates to Repton for the students to test. This happy memory gave Dahl the idea for his most famous novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
After school, Dahl decided that he wanted to travel. He got a job with the Shell Oil Company and two years later was sent to East Africa. In his autobiography, Going Solo, he recounts some of the exciting adventures there, including the time a black mamba entered his friend’s house and a snake catcher had to be called in.
In 1939, World War 11 started. Dahl joined the RAF (Royal Air Force) and learned to fly warplanes. Unfortunately, on his first flight into enemy territory he ran out of fuel and crashed in the Libyan desert. He fractured his skull but managed to crawl out of the burning plane.
Dahl started writing in the 1940s while based in the USA. His first story was a newspaper account of his air crash. In 1945 he moved back home but in the early fifties returned to America, where he met his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal. They had five children together but got divorced in 1983. Dahl remarried soon after. The last years of his life were very happy and he wrote some of his best books during this period: The BFG, The Witches, and Matilda. Roald Dahl died on 23rd November 1990 in Oxford, England.
His revolting rhymes
Revolting Rhymes book and manuscript
With a BBC adaptation of Revolting Rhymes coming to UK TV screens this Christmas we take a closer look at the inspiration behind the book.
Revolting Rhymes is Roald Dahl’s reimagining of traditional fairy tales as a series of rhyming poems with a twist. He began by reading a book of fairy tales and then, as this manuscript page shows, he copied down the main plot points of stories he thought he could adapt into a funny alternative version.
Page from Roald Dahl’s manuscripts
The reworking of the tales was heavily influenced by Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, a series of morality tales about naughty children and their deserved comeuppances. In an interview at the Singapore Puffin Book Fair in 1989, Roald Dahl talked about Belloc’s influence.
autionary Tales no doubt also appealed to Roald Dahl’s love of horror. In Revolting Rhymes, he twisted the endings of familiar fairy tales, leading to a gruesome end for his characters, such as when Jack’s greedy mother is eaten by the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk.
Revolting Rhymes is not unique amongst Roald Dahl’s work in using fairy and folk tales for inspiring his poetry. In James and the Giant Peach the centipede starts a song with the line, “Once upon a time When Pigs were swine…” This line also began The Story of the Three Little Pigs in early written English fairy tales, like the Mother Goose rhyme collections. Roald Dahl was also inspired by traditional songs such as the Scottish folk song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, which is used in The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me as the basis for ‘The Duchess’ Song’.
Manuscript page from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes
Revolting Rhymes has a simple metre, again borrowed from Belloc, because it was “a very easy one for children to say”. Encouraging children to read aloud was perhaps inspired by Roald Dahl’s love of romantic poetry, particularly Dylan Thomas. In interviews Roald Dahl talked about Thomas’ exceptional voice, and chose his reading of the poem ‘Fern Hill’ as a favourite piece of music when he appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs. He also included an extract of Thomas’ poem ‘In Country Sleep’ in Matilda. In this early draft of the scene, the sight of Miss Honey’s cottage down a narrow country lane invokes in Matilda a sense of being in a Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, many of which were adapted for Revolting Rhymes.
Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes manuscript
Poetry and rhyme is an integral part of Roald Dahl’s children’s books appearing in some form or another in almost all his stories: from the Oompa-Loompa’s moralistic tales of naughty children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to the joyful songs throughout James and the Giant Peach. Revolting Rhymes showcases the author’s ability to write fun and accessible poetry with a dark comedic style.