Matilda has one of the most memorable casts of characters in children’s fiction. Dahl uses exaggeration to make each character instantly recognisable — the kind people are truly kind, the cruel people are truly cruel. This makes the book especially satisfying for young readers.
Matilda is a small, quiet girl with an extraordinary mind. She teaches herself to read at age three and works through great works of literature before she even starts school. Despite being treated with indifference and cruelty by her family, Matilda remains cheerful, resourceful and deeply good-natured. She is loyal, brave and — crucially — fair. She uses her intelligence and eventually her telekinetic powers not for revenge, but to achieve justice.
Miss Honey is Matilda's form teacher and the moral heart of the novel. She is gentle, kind and perceptive — the first adult to recognise and champion Matilda's gifts. Behind her quiet manner lies a sad history: she has been dominated and exploited by her aunt Miss Trunchbull since childhood, and lives in a tiny cottage with almost nothing to her name. Her relationship with Matilda is one of mutual rescue — each gives the other what they most need.
The headmistress of Crunchem Hall is one of Dahl's greatest villains. A former Olympic hammer-thrower, she is physically enormous and morally monstrous — terrorising children and staff alike. She keeps the Chokey (a narrow cupboard with nails and broken glass) for punishments. The key to understanding Trunchbull is that she was once a champion athlete: she applies the same domineering, competitive mentality to running a school. She is also Miss Honey's aunt, and has stolen Miss Honey's inheritance.
Matilda's father is a loud, self-satisfied, dishonest man who sells cars with wound-back mileometers and other fraudulent modifications. He has no interest in education or books, and treats Matilda with contempt. Dahl uses him to represent wilful ignorance — the idea that some people are threatened by intelligence and respond to it with hostility.
Matilda's mother spends her time playing bingo and watching television. She is not actively cruel like her husband but is profoundly neglectful — uninterested in her daughter's needs or abilities.
Matilda's older brother is perfectly ordinary and a replica of his father in miniature. He represents the 'normal' child the Wormwoods would have preferred.
Matilda's best friend at school. Brave and mischievous, it is Lavender who puts the newt in Miss Trunchbull's water jug — an act that inadvertently triggers Matilda's discovery of her telekinetic powers.
The kind librarian who encourages Matilda's reading from a very young age. She plays a small but important role as an early adult who treats Matilda with respect.
A pupil at Crunchem Hall who steals a slice of Miss Trunchbull's personal chocolate cake. As punishment, Trunchbull forces him to eat an entire enormous chocolate cake in front of the assembled school. Bruce succeeds, to the children's delight — it is one of the novel's great scenes of quiet defiance.
The novel’s emotional core is the growing bond between Matilda and Miss Honey — two people who are both isolated and misunderstood, and who find in each other a genuine family. Dahl sets this against the contrast of the Wormwood household, where family bonds mean nothing because there is no love or respect.
Miss Trunchbull and Miss Honey’s relationship as aunt and niece is a dark mirror of the Matilda–Honey relationship: where Honey nurtures, Trunchbull crushes; where Honey gives, Trunchbull takes.