Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger Read Free Book Online Page A

admitted was modeled after herself. 1
    J. K. Rowling, right? Well, as you probably guessed, that answer is too obvious, even if everything on the list is a spot-on match for Ms. Rowling except that she belongs to the Episcopal Church of Scotland rather than the Church of England.
    The correct answer is Enid Blyton (1897-1968), the author of more than 700 children’s books, from kindergarten reading primers to the Famous Five adventures and a retelling of Pilgrim’s Progress . What is most remarkable about Blyton, a ubiquitous presence in the lives of children around the world in books and assorted media, is how few American children and adults know anything about her or her stories. She is anything but commonplace in American schools and libraries, and, to my knowledge, her work has never been adapted for television or film in the United States.
    But Blyton’s work is the backdrop that every U.K. reader and English literature wonk sees first in Harry Potter because it is the most evident literary echo sounding in Rowling’s work. Blyton’s stories feature a group of young adventurers solving a mystery ( Famous Five series), often with a magical backdrop ( The Far-Away Tree Stories ), are set in boarding schools (the series Malory Towers, St. Clare’s, and Naughtiest Girl ), and have a strong Christian moral ( The Land of Far-Beyond ).

Tom Brown as Harry’s Forgotten Father
    That her Harry Potter books are just a mush of Blyton standards and formulas, i.e., the Famous Five go to boarding school to climb the magical Far-Away Tree and save their souls, is a tempting easy dismissal critics like A. S. Byatt have made of Harry’s near universal popularity. 2 But the true critical point of reference and influence worth exploring at length is not Enid Blyton per se, but specifically the tradition of boarding school novels of which Blyton’s series are just a small part. Literally thousands of boarding school books like Blyton’s have been written in the U.K., based on the pattern of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). It is into this genre, more than any other, that the Potter books can be placed.
    But American readers, if they’re like me, are not familiar with boarding school novels. Our childhood reading of serial literature makes us think of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as the Hardy Boys going to wizard prep school with an enchanting Nancy Drew.
    Given Ms. Rowling’s evident debt to schoolboy adventure stories and our benign ignorance of the setting British readers recognize as commonplace or even clichéd, it’s worth a chapter to explore the tradition of boarding school fiction and the ways Ms. Rowling conforms to and departs from the norm.

The Public School Novel Formula: Tom Brown Visits Hogwarts
    Boarding school novels as a rule—to which there are recent exceptions—are set in what Brits call “public schools.” 3 The phrase “public school,” however, means something very different in Great Britain than in the United States. In the U.K., the “public” part of “public school” means that the school is open to any child the school accepts and whose parents can pay the costs—making it the equivalent of an American private school. The restricted or exclusive “private” contrary to this “public” openness is tutorial instruction that only the truly wealthy can afford. U.K. government schools, the equivalent of U.S. public schools, are called “comprehensives.” Though anything but hard and fast, English class lines can still be drawn between those who received public school educations and those who went to comprehensives.
    Ms. Rowling comes from a lower-middle-class British family and received her tax-supported education at a comprehensive rather than as a boarder at an expensive public school. She is more than a little put off by the suggestion that she is a supporter or survivor of the elite public schools in the U.K. In an interview with The Guardian , Rowling spoke about her