Roald Dahl's The Minpins

Otherworlds of scale, nature's extremes, and material entanglements

Figure 1: Cover of Roald Dahl’s Billy and the Minpins, illustrated by Quentin Blake.

The Minpins was Roald Dahl’s “valedictory children’s story”, as his biographer Donald Sturrock calls it.¹ It recounts the tale of a boy, significantly named Little Billy, who defies his mother’s rules, enters “The Forest of Sin”, and discovers a secret community of tiny p…