Dahl's stern morality gives his work the edge
Nicolette Jones
Times Online June 21, 2005
ROALD DAHL has a reputation for subversiveness and political incorrectness, which most people assume is why children love reading him. When his books were promoted in a television advertisement, its slogan was: “Nice children don’t read Dahl”. In fact, Dahl’s books are a mixture of wild impropriety and very high standards indeed of children’s behaviour — and that of their parents.Yes, Dahl lets George poison his bad-tempered grandmother in George’s Marvellous Medicine with a concoction that includes paraffin, sheep-dip and engine oil. He lets Matilda put superglue inside her father’s hat. A child in the same novel puts itching powder in her headteacher’s gym knickers. The hero of Danny, the Champion of the World, who is about 10, takes it upon himself to drive his father’s car several miles. And in James and the Giant Peach the horrible aunts Sponge and Spiker are run over until they are “ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book”, though the hit-and-run peach is not, to be fair, really under James’s control. . . .