Veruca Salt
Who doesn’t know the sadly ironic—but grotesquely justified—story of what happened to Veruca Salt when she won one of the Golden Tickets earning her a tour of Willy Wonka’s factory? It is a tale told in verse by the Oompa-Loompas. A story in rhyming couplets about the little brute who nasty behavior got her nothing more than a one way ticket down a garbage chute. You know the rest: Veruca didn’t become spoiled rotten on her own and that is why mum and dad take that trip along with her.
Tom Young
Tom Young is not the main character of the poem “The Price of Debauchery.” That honor goes to an unnamed little girl and her equally unidentified mother. The mother warns the daughter to stay away from boys because kissing them can bring on foul diseases. The little girl nevertheless winds up putting this advice to the test, though she actually had forgotten all about her mother’s warning when she allowed Tom Young to steal just one tiny little kiss behind the house one day. Sure enough, the incident proves that mothers do know a thing or two: she “caught Tom’s horrid runny cold.”
“The Porcupine”
This character plays even less of a role than Tom Young and he’s the title character! The porcupine appears in total but briefly in one key scene: when the little girl who is the real main character sits down on a rock to enjoy her Saturday sweets. Except it wasn’t a rock. It was a…well, it wasn’t a rock lobster as one can easily guess. The incident in which she mistakenly sits upon a porcupine instead of a rock occurs in the sixth stanza and over the course of the next fourteen stanzas that titular character exists only as quill to be removed by Dr. Meyers, the dentist. Like Vito Corleone, the porcupine’s presence lingers over the story even when he is not actually part of it.
Mister Unsworth
Roald Dahl died in 1990 and the poem featuring this character was not published until 2003. The title is “My teacher wasn’t half as nice as yours seemed to be” and that teacher is Mr. Unsworth. What was so bad about him? He was a history teacher, it seems, with a definitely short fuse for students who could not remember historical dates. In fact, he had a nasty habit of grabbing a student by the ear and twisting it whenever they dared to demonstrate ignorance. He would twist so hard—and so often—that by the end of the term there was no less than eight one-eared students in a classroom where the floor was literally littered with ears which had been twisted clean off the heads.
Goldilocks
Unlike the other reimagined stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White and the Three Little Pigs which comprise Revolting Rhymes, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears remains virtually unchanged. There are three bowls of porridge, each of a strangely out-of-sync variation in temperature. Then there are the three choices of seating arrangements and Goldilocks’ subsequent indecision. And before too long the porridge carries out its usual effect and a sleepy little girl must choose in which bed to seek slumber. The details remain essentially the same, but in the telling of the story, everything else changes. Goldilocks is here presented as a charmless little housebreaker and thief with no appreciation for fine antique furniture nor conscience about trekking mud—and worse—into a complete stranger’s house.
