Why on earth didn’t the librarian safeguard Matilda?

[BeardofHagrid]

This five-year-old has to cross a busy High Street to get to the library, then comes out with, “Oh yeah, Mum goes to Bingo every day and leaves me alone in the house till night time so I come here. I taught myself to read because of the neglect.”

And all the librarian has to say is, “There’s another Charles Dickens for you, my love, do come back soon”?!

Like…..? Was she not bothered at all?

Because it was written around 40
years ago when teachers could still literally cane kids so the chokeywould have been seen as a lesser punishment probably!

It's a book.

Small children dont generally outsmart adults either but that is the theme of so many children's books.

That was in the film.

In the book Danny doubted whether his father had read twenty books in his whole life!

Why weren't the police called when the trunchable assaulted the girl with the plaits and force fed that other one a whole cake and smashed the plate on his head?

I was listening to George’s marvellous medicine alongside my primary aged child while we travelled to our holiday destination thinking constantly …. that would kill someone if they ingested that, every time he poured the next toxic mixture into the bucket to feed to grandma.

It’s a story

Children's books often massively rely on extremely incompetent and or unaware adults. Otherwise the children would not be in the position to save the world from evil, solve the crime, escape mortal peril, etc. Once you see it, you see it everywhere!

Exactly. The main problem of virtually every children’s book is how to get ‘good’ adults/parents/guardians out of the way, so the children can be in proper jeopardy. The FF are always going off on solo holidays, or with incompetent adults, or fall into the hands of bad adults . Obviously HP is, like many children’s books’ protagonists, an orphan, but JKR then had to kill off the most powerful wizard in the world, make the Ministry of Magic turn bad, and put all other responsible adults into a position where they can’t help him.

I’ll be gutted if my kids never get into Roald Dahl

The bit I always remember in Danny the Champion of the World (which I think was my favourite of all the Dahl books) was the instruction at the front to say when you are a grown up and have children of your own, don't forget what it's like to be a child, children don't want boring ground down parents, they want a parent who is sparky. And sparky was in a different font so it looked all sparkly and exciting.

And the policeman who dropped his h's but put an extra h on every vowel word which didn't have one as if to make up for it "That is a very hinterestin' story you 'as there, young man, a very hinterestin' story hindeed!"

And Danny's memories of his dad bending over the kitchen table and his mum digging shotgun pellets out of his bare arse with a kitchen knife.

Did social services not know that 4 elderly adults were all sharing a double bed. In Charlie and the chocolate factory.

Disney solves the problem by orphaning the youngsters.

Here’s a headscratcher for Danny the Champion of the World: when Danny goes to school, his father insists on walking him there and back, two miles each way. Would this not take a lot of time out of Danny’s Father’s day, when he might be needed to serve petrol? It was in an era when children often walked to school alone. Or did people just accept that rural filling stations might have very limited hours?