For my last post of 2016, I wrote about footwear in children’s literature. While I was happy with the topic, I was not happy with the writing, as the post was written in a rush at the last minute. So I have decided to revisit the topic this month. Specifically, I am looking at the footwear of the Big, Friendly Giant (BFG), the titular character in Roald Dahl’s book ‘The BFG’.

Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) was one of the most famous children’s writers in English. His book ‘The Witches’ won the 1983 Whitbread Award, and ‘Matilda’ won the Children’s Book Award. Many of his books, including ‘The BFG’, have been made into movies.

In ‘The BFG’ the main character, the BFG, catches and collects dreams with a net and bottles them in glass jars. He then uses a long trumpet-like thing to blow the dreams through children’s windows to give them nice and happy dreams.

Roald Dahl had a long partnership with artist Quentin Blake who illustrated almost all of his children’s books. The only other such longstanding partnership I can think of in English children’s literature is with author Jacqueline Wilson and Nick Sharratt. In 2013, Quentin Blake was knighted for his services to illustration, making him Sir Quentin Blake. Quentin Blake’s favourite Roald Dahl book is ‘The BFG’, for which he drew double the number of pictures that he had been originally asked for.

Book cover of ‘The BFG’ from 1982, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In the book, the BFG’s footwear is described like this:

“On his bare feet he was wearing a pair of ridiculous sandals that for some reason had holes cut along each side, with a large hole at the end where his toes stuck out.”

From this description, Quentin Blake wasn’t sure what the BFG’s footwear should look like. So Roald Dahl sent him one of his own sandals in the post, and that was what Quentin Blake ended up drawing.

A photo of Roald Dahl on the back of the 1982 book cover. Dahl is wearing his BFG sandals.

In fact, the BFG character was a lot like Roald Dahl himself. Dahl was very tall, like a giant. He was almost 6 feet 6 inches tall, or almost 2 metres tall. Dahl would also sometimes pretend to be the BFG, propping a ladder against his house and pushing a bamboo cane through his children’s windows to blow happy dreams inside.

Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake made a perfect partnership of words and pictures. In the words of the BFG, the result is ‘gloriumptious!’