Background information

Matilda is a gloriously funny children’s book, written by Roald Dahl, the most successful children’s writer in the English language. The book was made into a highly successful film in 1996. Matilda is about a very clever little girl called Matilda. She can speak perfectly at the age of one and a half, and read adult books when she is aged four. But Matilda has a problem. Her parents are horrible. Her father is a dishonest car dealer and neither he nor his wife are at all interested in their daughter. All they want to do is watch TV, and that’s all they want Matilda to do, too. But Matilda has other ideas. She wants to teach her nasty parents a lesson. She glues her father’s hat to his head and tricks her parents into believing that there is a ghost in the sitting room.
When Matilda is five years old, her parents send her to the local village school. There she finds a friend in her kind but poor class teacher, Miss Honey. Miss Honey realizes that Matilda is a genius and tries to help her. It is difficult for her, however, because the headmistress, Mrs Trunchbull, is a terrible bully and does not like Matilda.
Everyone is terrified of Mrs Trunchbull - except Matilda. One day, Matilda realizes that she has ‘special powers’. She uses these powers to defeat Mrs Trunchbull and help Miss Honey . . .


Dahl’s stories echo children’s deepest fantasies. Impossible things happen in the most ordinary situations. Miss Trunchbull picks a child up by the hair in the school playground, whirls her round above her head and throws her into a neighbouring field. Then the five-year-old Matilda suddenly acquires magical powers which enable her to defeat her terrifying headmistress and rescue Miss Honey from her poverty. The child has become the heroine. The world of a child is a magical one, not yet limited by reality. Did we not dream that we could fly when we were children? In Dahl’s stories, children do fly - they overcome the limits of their world, defeat the wicked, and rescue innocent victims. Dahl originally wrote his stories for his own children. His daughter Ophelia writes, ‘The most important quality about my father was his ability to make everything seem like an adventure...’ Dahl’s stories convert easily to films. All of the films based on Dahl’s stories, including Matilda, have been very popular with children all over the world.