Mr. Wormwood

Mr. Wormwood is a successful second-hand car dealer, a boastful father, and the source of a sharp moral conflict in Matilda’s household. He presents fraud as business ingenuity and expects his son to inherit his trade, while dismissing Matilda’s objections as evidence of her stupidity. His dealings reveal what his pride conceals: prosperity built by exploiting customers who trust him.

Identity and Household

Mr. Wormwood’s family lives in a substantial house with three upstairs bedrooms and a sitting room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. The comfortable home reflects the money he says he has made from used cars, although Matilda identifies that money as the proceeds of dishonesty. His account of success rests not on skillful repair but on disguising defects long enough to sell a vehicle.

His manner is blunt and contemptuous toward Matilda. When she asks about his business, he calls her stupid and treats the explanation as something intended for his son, Michiel Wurmhout, who, he says, will eventually join the business. He directs instruction toward the boy and excludes Matilda, making the family’s expected division of roles explicit: Michiel is being prepared to succeed him, while Matilda is not considered a worthy listener.

Fraud as a Business Method

Mr. Wormwood explains that he seeks out cars whose gears have been badly worn and make a terrible noise when shifted. He buys these vehicles cheaply, then mixes sawdust into the gearbox oil. The treatment temporarily makes the gears run smoothly, disguising the fault rather than repairing it. He admits that the noise returns only after the buyer has travelled roughly 150 kilometres—long enough, in his calculation, for the customer to be well away.

The gearbox trick is one part of a systematic practice. Mr. Wormwood tells Michiel that every car he handles receives the treatment, and that he sets each odometer below ten thousand before putting the vehicle up for sale. He boasts that the scheme was his own invention and has earned him a great deal of money. The details make the deception concrete: sawdust hides mechanical wear, while the electric drill alters the recorded mileage. His confidence depends on the delay between a sale and the buyer discovering the truth.

Matilda listens and names the ethical consequence he avoids. She tells him that the practice is worse than using sawdust alone, calls it shameful, and says he is cheating people who trust him. Mr. Wormwood answers by linking the family’s meals to his earnings: if she objects to the fraud, she should also refuse the food paid for with its proceeds. Matilda rejects that justification and calls the money dirty. Their disagreement is not a dispute over whether the scheme works; it is a clash between his equation of profit with success and her insistence that the means matter.

Pride, Performance, and Matilda’s Revenge

Mr. Wormwood is especially proud of his appearance. His everyday hat is brown, flat-topped, and decorated with a magpie feather in its band. He thinks it makes him look smart and daring, particularly when worn at an angle with his checked suit and green tie. The hat is therefore more than practical clothing: it is part of the image he cultivates for himself.

Matilda exploits that attachment the next morning. She reaches the hat on its peg with a walking stick, stretching onto her toes, and applies a thin line of superglue around the inside of its brim before hanging it back. Mr. Wormwood notices nothing when he puts it on. At the garage, however, the hat will not come off. Because pulling hard could take his skin with it, he has to keep it on throughout the day, including while adding sawdust to gearboxes and tampering with odometers using his electric drill. Rather than admit what has happened, he acts nonchalant, hoping his employees will think he chose to wear the hat all day for amusement, like a gangster in a film. The prank turns his carefully managed appearance into a public inconvenience and leaves his own vanity to do the work of the joke.

Fatherhood and Conflict

The contrast between Mr. Wormwood’s two children is clearest when he teaches Michiel how to calculate the day’s profits. After returning home in a garish checked suit and yellow tie, he announces that he has had a very good day: he sold five cars at a profit. He lists sawdust in the gearboxes, an electric drill on the odometers, a little paint, and other tricks as the means by which buyers were persuaded to purchase. Then he calls Michiel over for paper and a pen, intending to teach him the sums. Matilda is ignored.

This scene joins his business conduct to his family conduct. He does not hide the fraud from his son; he presents it as expertise worth passing on. His boast about the five sales and his lesson in adding profit turn deception into a family inheritance, while Matilda’s exclusion sharpens the difference between the child he trains and the child whose judgment he refuses to hear.

Response to Matilda’s Teacher

When Miss Honey visits the Wormwoods’ home after nine in the evening, the television can be heard inside. Mr. Wormwood opens the door only partway. Wearing a sports jacket with orange-red stripes, he mistakes her for someone selling raffle tickets. Once she identifies herself as Matilda’s teacher and says that speaking with him and his wife is important, he asks whether Matilda has already got herself into trouble.

He then tells Miss Honey that she is responsible for Matilda from now on and that she should deal with the matter herself. The exchange extends his pattern of rejecting responsibility: he has just insisted that Matilda accept the benefits of his dishonest income, yet when her teacher seeks his attention, he attempts to hand responsibility for the child back to the school. His response reinforces the distance between Matilda and her father, and sets his indifference against the teacher’s effort to speak with the family about her pupil.