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At one time, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was going to end very differently! This was the ending in an earlier version:

The shop has been finished now, and it is the most beautiful chocolate shop in the world. It occupies a whole block in the centre of the city, and it is nine storeys high.

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Inside it, there are moving staircases and elevators to take the customers up and down, and no less than one hundred ladies, all dressed in spotless gold and chocolate uniforms, are there to serve behind the counters. They will sell you anything you want from a single little blue bird’s egg with a tiny sugary bird inside it to a life-size chocolate elephant with huge curvy tusks and a chocolate elephant driver sitting on its back.

And Charlie Bucket, coming home from school in the evenings, nearly always brings along with him about twenty or thirty of his friends and tells them that they can choose anything they want – for free.

‘It’s my shop,’ he says. ‘Just help yourselves.’

And so they do.

Isn’t it amazing how much a book can change before it is published?

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