The Matilda Prototype

I've recently been reading a lot of short stories by Edwardian master Saki (the pen name of HH Munro).  The stories are largely wonderful -- a combination of funny and macabre that I haven't seen since Roald Dahl.  Speaking of Dahl, he was a huge fan of Saki.  Here's his blurb on the back of the Complete Works:

"In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around." - Roald Dahl on Saki

Why is this interesting?  Well, I have recently been thinking about Betsy Bird's SLJ poll of the top 100 children's books -- in her piece on Matilda, Betsy mentions a rumor that the character of Matilda was originally conceived to be "a nasty little girl, somewhat in the same vein of Belloc’s Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death.  Revision after revision turned her instead into the sweet little thing we all know and love today."

This seems like a good comparison, but for the fact that Belloc's Matilda is not terribly smart.[1. she's basically a "Boy who Cried Wolf"]  So imagine my surprise and delight when a few weeks ago, while reading Saki's short story "The Boar-Pig", I encounter a shrewd little girl named Matilda Cuvering whose sole mission in life is to terrorize stupid adults.  In the story, Matilda humiliates and extorts a pair of social climbers trying to crash a garden party.  And she doesn't limit her wrath to adults:

"I was told to imitate Claude, that's my young cousin, who never does anything wrong ... It seems [My aunts] thought I ate too much raspberry trifle at lunch, and they said Claude never eats too much raspberry trifle. Well, Claude always goes to sleep for half an hour after lunch, because he's told to, and I waited till he was asleep, and tied his hands and started forcible feeding with a whole bucketful of raspberry trifle ... Lots of it went on to his sailor-suit and some of it on to the bed, but a good deal went down Claude's throat, and they can't say again that he has never been known to eat too much raspberry trifle."

Of course, we'll never know for certain whether Dahl had this character in mind when he created Matilda Wormwood, but I can't help but wonder.[2. For those interested, I also wrote about Matilda and helicopter parenting here.]