Roald Dahl’s classism — the problem with Matilda
I’d reached a parental milestone. Finally, my son was getting to the age where we could read chapter books together: a reward for the years of reading the same picture books over and over. I pulled the new pink-gloss copy of Roald Dahl’s Matilda from the shelf. My mum had recently bought it for her grandson, knowing it was one of my favourite books as a child. It’s a story that promotes reading and libraries, where the woman is the hero and the smart girl is the star. Right up my street.
By page five, I’m already feeling uncomfortable. Matilda’s parents are neglectful and cruel. They love TV, hate books, and seemingly despise their intelligent daughter. Her dad is a petty criminal and a petty bourgeoisie wannabe . Her mum doesn’t work, doesn’t cook, and spends her days playing bingo. From start to finish, the narrator ridicules Matilda’s working-class parents — and it’s not subtle.
Dahl uses classist tropes to encourage us to laugh at them, and hate them too. Dad wears a tacky suit and gaudy tie. Mum is a “large platinum blonde woman” with “mousy-brown roots”, and heavy make-up. Look at their poor taste! What terrible parents! See how stupid they are!
I thought back to when I would read Matilda when it was first published in 1988, huddled together with my sister on the bottom bunk in our bedroom. I loved Roald Dahl and was oblivious to any racism, misogyny or sizeism in his books. Today his bigotry — particularly his anti-Semitism — is well-known. But I’m not sure his classism is. In Matilda and elsewhere, these false stereotypes about class still pass unnoticed.
Like Matilda’s, my own dad was no stranger to a bit of “skullduggery”, as he used to say. He was a working-class man who dreamed of bigger and better: not just more money (although he absolutely wanted that), but also a brighter, easier future for his children. Education was key to that — as it is to so many working-class families.
I remember the intricate shelving Dad had built in the hallway of our council house. On opening the front door, you’d be faced with a mini library of all the classics, illuminated from below by tiny spotlights. The same classics Matilda devoured in her local library: The Brontës, Hardy, Hemingway, Orwell. Matilda and I read because we enjoyed it — to improve our daily lives, not our lot in life.
30 years on, it makes me sad to think of the lazy generalisations that I absorbed as fact, without questioning. Now, with two small children of my own, I have another go at falling in (and out of) love with children’s literature. My kids know that poor people read books, that one person’s idea of style and beauty isn’t necessarily better than someone else’s. Together we’re building a book shelf of our own favourites — books that don’t depict working classness as something to be mocked, pitied, or exceptionalised.
