Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is a timeless story with iconic characters that include the five lucky children who have a golden ticket. But an unpublished chapter that was just released revealed that some of the book's content was not suitable for children.
The lost chapter called "Fudge Mountain" features a new room in the world of pure imagination with a scenario to test the will of the children. While the book features five children, Dahl created a total of 15 children in earlier drafts. In these drafts, there were many more rooms where each child, one by one, would succumb to their candy-obsessed gluttony.
"Fudge Mountain" was not published in the final draft of the book because it was deemed too inappropirate and disturbing for British children.
The room includes an actual vanilla fudge mountain where two of the children fall to their temptations. Dahl brings the room to life:
"In the centre of the room there was an actual mountain, a colossal jagged mountain as high as a five-storey building, and the whole thing was made of pale-brown, creamy, vanilla fudge. All the way up the sides of the mountain, hundreds of men were working away with picks and drills, hacking great hunks of fudge out of the mountainside; and some of them, those that were high up in dangerous places, were roped together for safety.
As the huge hunks of fudge were pried loose, they went tumbling and bouncing down the mountain, and when they reached the bottom they were picked up by cranes with grab-buckets, and the cranes dumped the fudge into open waggons - into an endless moving line of waggons (rather like smallish railway waggons) which carried the stuff away to the far end of the room and then through a hole in the wall."
The two boys, named Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck, go for a ride on the wagons, disobeying orders. They vanish in the "hole in the wall" and are on the track to the Pounding and Cutting Room. "In there, the rough fudge gets tipped out of the waggons into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops."
We can see why this chapter didn't make the cut. But the lost chapter allows us inside the imaginative world of Willy Wonka one more time.
You can read the full chapter here.
