Can “ugly thoughts” make us ugly?

Sophie Sanders revisits The Twits by Roald Dahl to explore the provocative idea that our inner lives might shape our outward appearance. 

If you’re a 90s kid, like me, you almost certainly read The Twits when you were growing up. To refresh your memory – or to bring you up to speed – it’s about an unkempt couple named Mr and Mrs Twit who, between them, have a food-caked beard, a glass eye, bad breath, awful BO, and a crooked nose. Simply gross. But shockingly, we learn that Mrs Twit had been born with a ‘nice face’ – her ugliness is because of her ugly thoughts. Because, as Roald Dahl writes, ‘if a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.’