Harry Potter Series

Hogwarts Castle, the iconic setting of the Harry Potter series, continues to captivate fans worldwide. (Image: Unsplash)

Commercial success

The popularity of the Harry Potter series has translated into substantial financial success for Rowling, her publishers, and other Harry Potter related license holders. This success has made Rowling the first and thus far only billionaire author. The books have sold more than 600 million copies worldwide and have also given rise to the popular film adaptations produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, all of which have been highly successful in their own right. The total revenue from the book sales is estimated, as of November 2018, to be around $7.7 billion. The first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, has sold in excess of 120 million copies, making it one of the bestselling books in history. The films have in turn spawned eight video games and have led to the licensing of more than 400 additional Harry Potter products. The Harry Potter brand has been estimated to be worth as much as $25 billion.
The great demand for Harry Potter novels motivated The New York Times to create a separate best-seller list for children’s literature in 2000, just before the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. By 24 June 2000, Rowling’s novels had been on the list for 79 straight weeks; the first three novels were each on the hardcover best-seller list. On 12 April 2007, Barnes & Noble declared that Deathly Hallows had broken its pre-order record, with more than 500,000 copies pre-ordered through its site. For the release of Goblet of Fire, 9,000 FedEx trucks were used with no other purpose than to deliver the book. Together, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble pre-sold more than 700,000 copies of the book. In the United States, the book’s initial printing run was 3.8 million copies. This record statistic was broken by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, with 8.5 million, which was then shattered by Half-Blood Prince with 10.8 million copies. Within the first 24 hours of its release, 6.9 million copies of Prince were sold in the US; in the UK more than two million copies were sold on the first day. The initial US print run for Deathly Hallows was 12 million copies, and more than a million were pre-ordered through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Fans of the series were so eager for the latest instalment that bookstores around the world began holding events to coincide with the midnight release of the books, beginning with the 2000 publication of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The events, commonly featuring mock sorting, games, face painting, and other live entertainment have achieved popularity with Potter fans and have been highly successful in attracting fans and selling books with nearly nine million of the 10.8 million initial print copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold in the first 24 hours. The final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows became the fastest selling book in history, moving 11 million units in the first twenty-four hours of release. The book sold 2.7 million copies in the UK and 8.3 million in the US. The series has also gathered adult fans, leading to the release of two editions of each Harry Potter book, identical in text but with one edition’s cover artwork aimed at children and the other aimed at adults.

Literary criticism

Early in its history, Harry Potter received positive reviews. On publication, the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, attracted attention from the Scottish newspapers, such as The Scotsman, which said it had “all the makings of a classic” and The Glasgow Herald, which called it “Magic stuff”. Soon the English newspapers joined in, with The Sunday Times comparing it to Roald Dahl’s work (“comparisons to Dahl are, this time, justified”) while The Guardian called it “a richly textured novel given lift-off by an inventive wit”.
By the time of the release of the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the books began to receive strong criticism from literary scholars. Yale professor, literary scholar, and critic Harold Bloom raised criticisms of the books’ literary merits, saying, “Rowling’s mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” A. S. Byatt authored an op-ed article in The New York Times calling Rowling’s universe a “secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature … written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”
Michael Rosen, a novelist and poet, held the opinion that the books were not suited for children, as they would be unable to grasp the complex themes. Rosen also stated that “J. K. Rowling is more of an adult writer.” The critic Anthony Holden wrote in The Observer on his experience of judging Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was negative—”the Potter saga was essentially patronising, conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain”, and he speaks of “a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style” Ursula K. Le Guin said, “I have no great opinion of it, it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel,’ good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.” By contrast, author Fay Weldon, while admitting that the series is “not what the poets hoped for”, nevertheless goes on to say, “but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable, everyday useful prose”.
The literary critic A. N. Wilson praised the Harry Potter series in The Times, stating, “There are not many writers who have JK’s Dickensian ability to make us turn the pages, to weep—openly, with tears splashing—and a few pages later to laugh, at invariably good jokes … We have lived through a decade in which we have followed the publication of the liveliest, funniest, scariest and most moving children’s stories ever written.” Charles Taylor of Salon.com, who is primarily a movie critic, took issue with Byatt’s criticisms in particular. While he conceded that she may have “a valid cultural point—a teeny one—about the impulses that drive us to reassuring pop trash and away from the troubling complexities of art”, he rejected her claims that the series is lacking in serious literary merit and that it owes its success merely to the childhood reassurances it offers. Stephen King called the series “a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable”, and declared “Rowling’s punning, one-eyebrow-cocked sense of humor” to be “remarkable”. However, he wrote that he is “a little tired of discovering Harry at home with his horrible aunt and uncle”, the formulaic beginning of all seven books.
Sameer Rahim of The Daily Telegraph disagreed, saying “It depresses me to see 16- and 17-year-olds reading the series when they could be reading the great novels of childhood such as Oliver Twist or A House for Mr Biswas.” The Washington Post book critic Ron Charles opined in July 2007 that “through no fault of Rowling’s”, the cultural and marketing “hysteria” marked by the publication of the later books “trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide”. Jenny Sawyer wrote in The Christian Science Monitor on 25 July 2007 that Harry Potter neither faces a “moral struggle” nor undergoes any ethical growth and is thus “no guide in circumstances in which right and wrong are anything less than black and white”. In contrast Emily Griesinger described Harry’s first passage through to Platform 9+3⁄4 as an application of faith and hope, and his encounter with the Sorting Hat as the first of many in which Harry is shaped by the choices he makes.
In an 8 November 2002, Slate article, Chris Suellentrop likened Potter to a “trust-fund kid whose success at school is largely attributable to the gifts his friends and relatives lavish upon him”. In a 12 August 2007 review of Deathly Hallows in The New York Times, however, Christopher Hitchens praised Rowling for “unmooring” her “English school story” from literary precedents “bound up with dreams of wealth and class and snobbery”, arguing that she had instead created “a world of youthful democracy and diversity”. In 2016, an article written by Diana C. Mutz compared the politics of Harry Potter to the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign. She suggests that these themes are also present in the presidential election and it may play a significant role in how Americans have responded to the campaign. There is ongoing discussion regarding the extent to which the series was inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.