A Lost 'Chocolate Factory' Chapter! No Joke!

It's all in the headline: There's a lost Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chapter, and it's been... found. And before you're all like, "No! Don't ruin my childhood," it's actually super-good. Really, though, what else do you expect from Roald Dahl? There's even a new illo from Sir Quentin Blake, too.

On Saturday, The Guardian released the previously unpublished section, titled "The Vanilla Fudge Room," which was Chapter Five in one of Dahl's early drafts of the 1964 book. The lost writing was uncovered in his papers following the author's death in 1990. The reason the chapter was given the axe? It was "deemed too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral for the tender minds of British children." Whoa there.

OK, fair: In the chapter, we're introduced to something a bit terrifying called The Pounding and Cutting Room:

"That hole," said Mr Wonka, "leads directly to what we call The Pounding And Cutting Room. In there, the rough fudge gets tipped out of the waggons into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops."

The section also features more characters than ended up in the book, which is pretty cool. If that all doesn't pique your interest to go read, I don't know what will: This is your most-beloved children's book we're talking about here.

For a book that seemed to have its place in history already comfortably mapped out, Chocolate Factory has been making news lately; not only has it now gotten an extra chapter, but its recent cover scandal featuring a hyper-sexualized child put it in the spotlight earlier in August.

Maybe it's not for kids after all.

Image: Paramount Pictures