James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach is a popular children’s novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The first edition, published by Alfred Knopf, featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. There have been reillustrated versions of it over the years, done by Michael Simeon (for the first British edition), Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996, and a musical in 2010.
The plot centres on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically-altered garden bugs he meets. Roald Dahl was originally going to write about a giant cherry, but changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is “prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry.”[1][2]
Because of the story’s occasional macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of censors.[3][4]
Dahl dedicated the book to his six-year-old daughter, Olivia, who died only a year after the book was published.[5]
James Henry Trotter is a boy who lives with his parents in a house by the sea happily. Unfortunately, when he is four years old, an escaped rhinoceros from the zoo eats James’s parents and he ends up with his two cruel aunts, Spiker and Sponge. Instead of caring for him, they treat him badly, feed him improperly and force him to sleep on bare floorboards.
After James had been living with his aunts for three years, he meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that would change his life for the better. While returning home, James stumbles and spills the bag on the ground, losing the crystals as they dig themselves underground. The nearby peach tree, in turn, produces a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house. Spiker and Sponge build a fence around it and earn money by selling viewing tickets to tourists; James is locked in the house only able to see the peach through the bars of his bedroom window.
After the tourists have gone, James is assigned to clean the rubbish and finds a tunnel in the peach. He enters it and meets Centipede, Miss Spider, Old Green Grasshopper, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glowworm, and Silkworm who become his friends.
The next day Centipede cuts the stem of the peach, causing it to roll away and crush James’ aunts. It reaches the sea and is surrounded by ravenous sharks. James uses Miss Spider and Silkworm to make threads, while Earthworm is used as bait and draws 501 seagulls[6] near the peach, whereupon the threads are tied on their necks. The peach is lifted off the water. High above the clouds, the peach encounters Cloud-Men who are portrayed as responsible for weather phenomena like hailstorms and rainbows. The peach goes into the clouds and meet cloud men demons. Centipede mocks the Cloud-Men, but James is able to avoid the altercation by bringing the peach to a lower altitude. James realizes that the group has reached New York City.
The massive peach lands on the spire of the Empire State Building. It is mistaken as a bomb at first, resulting in the arrival of police and firemen. Calming the crowd, James tells the whole story and becomes friends with many children in New York, and they eat the peach and James and his friends get their own jobs.
