For the first time ever, Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been published as a Penguin Modern Classic – the very grown-up and prestigious arm of the publishing house, which has been responsible for printing books like 1984 by George Orwell, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and Delta of Venus by Anais Nin.
It’s a unique honour for a children’s book to make it onto the classics list and to celebrate the release, Penguin posted a teaser of the book’s new cover without its title and asked fans to guess which novel the cover related to.
It didn’t quite go according to plan though because immediately most of the users guessed that the cover was from a far more lascivious book from the back catalogue, guessing that the blonde child on the cover related to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, or Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.
We can kind of see where they’re coming from – we have to say an image of a very dolled-up, pre-pubescent girl isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when we think about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That’s probably Charlie. Or possibly the Chocolate Factory.
Things didn’t improve either when they unveiled the cover – and its title – on social media, when people started slamming it for being totally inappropriate. Responses ranged from the confused, like Green Wing’s Stephen Mangan, who asked: ‘Wha? Have they read it?’, to the accusatory, like user @Tslamoth’s reaction: ‘Random Penguin goes near-pedophile with the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover. Really creepy design choice.’
Penguin explained the rationale behind the choice of image – which is supposed to be Veruca Salt – by saying:
‘This new image for CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY looks at the children at the centre of the story, and highlights the way Roald Dahl’s writing manages to embrace both the light and the dark aspects of life, ready for Charlie’s debut amongst the adult titles in the Penguin Modern Classics series.’
We mean, that makes sense. Roald Dahl is famous for including very dark imagery and storylines in his novels – as the fact of young Veruca Salt herself proves. (Remember, she was the one who was deemed a 'bad nut' by squirrels in the factory and ended up down a garbage chute.)
But still, illustrating a story that centres around two (male) protagonists with a provocative image of a young Veruca Salt starring blankly into space, her face covered in make-up and in clothes far too old for her doesn’t seem like the most sensible choice.
And if it is designed to get more young women reading classic books, then isn’t it a sad message about society that publishers are resorting to such gender-stereotyped ploys?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.