Miranda Mary Piker: Dahl's Lost Poem
A poem called "Miranda Mary Piker" was left out of the original edition of Roald Dahl's 1964 classic, *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. Read it here!
Jan 25, 2016
GUEST: 45 years ago, when I was a children's librarian in Michigan, I initiated a program with the children of writing to famous authors that they liked. And I also wrote to those authors myself. And you are looking at some examples of responses that I received from, in this case, Roald Dahl, who is the author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," among other books.
APPRAISER: These letters were written between late 1972 and early 1973. Not long after "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" had first been published.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And the archive is basically talking about some reviews that he had gotten from a publisher.
GUEST: Yes, that's correct.
APPRAISER: Roald Dahl is one of the greatest and wickedest children authors out there.
GUEST (laughing): Yes, indeed.
APPRAISER: And just the text of some of these letters, kind of biting humor from time to time. And you can really feel his personal touch in many of these. And in one of them, he has an extra poem here about Miranda Mary Piker.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: Now, he took out a bunch of the children from the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" story. I guess the editors wanted to make a shorter book, so he removed several of the characters…
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And one of them was Mary Miranda Piker. And what you have written here is the Oompa Loompa song that'd be sung after every naughty child met their horrible demise.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: Now, there's a version of the Mary Piker poem in the archives that has a few different words. For example, rather than saying "crunchy," it says "tasty," and then a couple other variations out there. The version that eventually got published in 2005 by The London Times did include it as "how crunchy and how good."
(laughs)
APPRAISER: This particular archive, I would give it an auction estimate of $2,500 to $3,500.
GUEST: Whoa. That's amazing.
Roald Dahl, the beloved children's author known for the delicate balance of whimsy and wickedness in his tales, was prolific when it came to writing letters to teachers and students. At the 2015 ROADSHOW event in Little Rock, a former children's librarian brought in an archive of letters from the author, one of which featured a draft of a poem called "Miranda Mary Piker" that was excluded from the original edition of his 1964 classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Collectibles expert James Supp explained that Dahl had developed numerous characters for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that were ultimately edited out, including the particularly troublesome child this poem describes. It is a cautionary stanza about Miranda Mary Piker — in the Oompa Loompas' familiar cadence — with amusingly ominous couplets like "So we said why don't we fix her/In the peanut-brittle mixer."
The poem was eventually published for the first time in The Times of London in 2005 and included in The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets, which features an entire deleted chapter about Miranda from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, later published as a short story called "Spotty Powder."
Below, you can compare the version of the poem as it was published in the book with the very similar text that was included in the letter featured on ROADSHOW. The full archive of letters including this poem, Supp said, would bring $2,500 to $3,500 at auction.
Miranda Mary Piker (as featured on ROADSHOW)
"Oh Miranda Mary Piker How could anybody like her, Such a rude and disobedient little kid! So we said why don't we fix her In the peanut-brittle mixer, Then we're sure to like her better than we did. Soon this child who is so vicious Will have gotten quite delicious, And her father will have surely understood That instead of saying, 'Miranda, Oh, the beast, I cannot stand her!' He'll be saying, 'Oh, how crunchy and how good!'"
Miranda Mary Piker (As published)
"Oh, Miranda Mary Piker, How could anybody like her, Such a rude and disobedient little kid, So we said why don't we fix her In the Peanut-Brittle Mixer, Then we're sure to like her better than we did. Soon this girl who was so vicious Will have gotten quite delicious And her parents will have surely understood That instead of saying, 'Miranda, 'Oh the beast we cannot stand her!' They'll be saying, 'Oh, how tasty and how good!'"
Related
Dylan Hayley Leavitt was ANTIQUES ROADSHOW's digital associate producer from 2012 to 2017.
