Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
No one knows where they are with Willy Wonka – an ambiguity typical of Dahl’s most memorable characters. A dandy in plum-coloured velvet, Wonka excites awe and unease. He is charismatic yet seedy, with movements like those of “a quick clever old squirrel from the park”. His greetings are too over-the-top to qualify as old-world courtesy: “Overjoyed! Enraptured! Enchanted!” And he doesn't suffer fools gladly. Touring his chocolate factory, he sounds like a nouveau riche property developer: “The grass you are standing on, my dear little ones, is made of a new kind of soft minty sugar that I’ve just invented.” Photograph: Everett /Rex Features
Matilda
Miss Trunchbull has evolved into one of the most notorious of Dahl’s villains since the RSC’s musical Matilda in which Bertie Carvel played her as a round-shouldered school ma’am, vicious spinster and roaring sadist taking out, presumably, her disappointments on her charges. She especially loathes pigtails but finds them handy when swinging small girls through the air. She was never, she boasts, a child herself. Dahl has a gift for taking a recognisable type and then blowing it up fantastically with poisonous hot air. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The BFG
The Big Friendly Giant is first encountered as an abductor with a thieving arm “as thick as a tree-trunk” and a stride “as long as a tennis court”. But once he sheds his cape, he is dressed like a modest grandad, and the details reassure – especially his “ridiculous sandals”. The BFG, it turns out, is the ultimate protector: he collects children’s dreams, destroys their nightmares. His English is racily peculiar but as nothing to his diet of snozzcumber and frobscottle – a bubbly drink which causes him to fart: his “whizzpoppers” enough to propel him to the top of most children’s charts. Photograph: FremantleMedia Ltd/Rex Features
The Witches
Sometimes one detects a gleeful misogyny in Dahl, and in The Witches it’s allowed free rein. The Grand High Witch appears as a pretty 25-year-old in a “rather stylish long black dress”. But beauty is about to prove even less than skin deep. This femme fatale unclasps something from behind her ears and “the whole of that pretty face came away in her hands”. Dahl taps into a fundamental nightmare with assurance, identifying “something terribly wrong” and “foul and putrid and decayed.” And then a final shivery flourish: serpents in the Grand High Witch’s eyes. Photograph: Everett/Rex Features
Fantastic Mr Fox
Mr Fox is a helpful paterfamilias who asks his wife what she would like seized for their dinner. He’s also the most cunning fox imaginable. He outwits Messrs Boggis, Bunce and Bean (three rogue farmers) every time. What makes Mr Fox fantastic in his family’s eyes and ours and the eyes of Wes Anderson – who made a beguiling film about him in 2009 – is that he is never despondent. When his home is in danger, he digs himself a deeper hole. But metaphorically speaking he is not in a hole at all. And his day job? Newspaper columnist. Photograph: Courtesy 20th Century Fox
Esio Trot
Always the pageboy and never the groom, Mr Hoppy would not expect to qualify for this column. But he’s one of life’s quiet victors. He falls in lust with luscious Mrs Silver in the flat below. But she seems only to have eyes for her tortoise. Dahl departs from his own traditions in allowing Hoppy to stay ordinary while exciting interest through his winningly extraordinary courtship strategy. He ingeniously fools Mrs Silver into thinking her beloved tortoise is gaining weight (introducing impostor tortoises on to her balcony) and she is so chuffed she marries him. Happy Hoppy at last. Photograph: PR
The Twits
Mr and Mrs Twit are such a revolting couple that it’s hard to choose between them for the honours – but Mr Twit nudges into the lead because of his health hazard of a beard. Dahl goes forensic describing it – the detritus is in the detail: “If you looked closer still (Hold your noses, ladies and gentlemen), if you peered deep into the moustachy bristles sticking out over his upper lip, you would probably see much larger objects that had escaped the wipe of his hand.” And Dahl then presses on, with unsavoury relish, down to the last mouldy cornflake. Photograph: PR
Danny the Champion of the World
Dahl’s boys – George, Charlie, James and all – lack the fierce quirks of his villains. But Danny deserves his place as a character to be conjured with. He is a rural outlaw, a hero who borders on a revolutionary. With his father’s guidance (his dad is a committed poacher), he drugs 200 pheasants (embedding powdered sleeping pills inside raisins). Their “Sleeping Beauty” plan doubles as class warfare against snobby local squire Mr Victor Hazell. And, as is so often the case with Dahl, heroism verges on criminality – which only adds to its compelling quality. Photograph: FremantleMedia Ltd/Rex Features
George’s Marvellous Medicine
Grandparents in children’s stories nowadays tend to be unashamedly sentimentalised. But Dahl saw no need to grovel and cooked up a corker of a granny, a “grizzly old grunion” and professional killjoy. When not engaged in assassinating George’s character, she airs unwelcome ideas about diet. “Eat less chocolate,” she advises. “It makes you grow the wrong way…” George finds revenge in a medicine of his own devising that makes Granny’s head hit the ceiling. She becomes high in every sense and gloriously dotty, shouting: “Come on, boy! Give me some more!… Dish it out! I’m slowing down.” Photograph: Ian Tilton/PR
James and the Giant Peach
This stupefying peach qualifies as a character – dwarfing everyone in sight. It renders James’s two odious guardians, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, inconsequential. It has colossal glamour and, on first encounter, embodies a magic suggestive of the clairvoyant’s most essential prop: “The moonlight was shining and glinting on its great curving sides, turning them into crystal and silver. It looked like a tremendous silver ball lying there in the grass, silent, mysterious and wonderful.” The peach may not speak but its luscious, benevolent, enchanted presence makes it a fruit to remember. Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features
