Is J.K. Rowling becoming the next Charles Dickens?

After finishing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night, I was struck more and more by the reactions that readers at wotmania had regarding the final chapters. There was a mixture of surprise, alarm, sadness, and anger. Almost the whole gamut of human emotions were on display in these posts relating their interactions with the story. For those readers, Rowling's book was not just a well-told story, but something more, something more important to them than the words printed on paper and bound together.

Every so often, books appear that capture national or even international attention. Although the stories and characters may be different, although the setting and style may bear scant semblence to one another, there is just something, some je ne sais quoi, that links the story, the readers, and the time the story is written. Whether we are talking about the decadence of the Jazz Age/Weimar Era and how Thomas Mann (in The Magic Mountain), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), or especially F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night) or if we focus on the Victorians or the Beat writers or even 'children stories' such as Where the Red Fern Grows, some of the best authors have managed to create memorable and moving scenes that last beyond their immediate times to create immemorial images that have burned their way into our collective consciousness.

Judging by the way Harry Pottermania has struck the globe, from the books, the movies, the action figures, and other miscellaneous objects, one would be hard pressed to think of an author who has managed to have such a cultural impact on the world. However, there is one author from the past who comes to mind, one whose importance has only grown as we draw ever further away from his Victorian abode: one Charles Dickens.

When I thought about Rowling in conjunction with Dickens, I was not thinking about sales figures, the quaint turns of speech both employ to draw in the reader, or even the sometimes brilliantly insightful commentaries buried within large amounts of dross, but instead on how well each has managed to connect the reader to the events taking place in the book that he or she might be reading at the time. One Dickens story in particular reminds me so much of the current discussions involving the latest Harry Potter book: The Old Curiosity Shop. While this story is not as famous as Oliver Twist ("Please sir, I want more.") or A Christmas Carol, in its day, this serialized novel about a picturesque shop and the little girl Nell moved people. Whether it was due to the quaintness of the shop settings or the humaneness of Nell or something else, The Old Curiosity Shop was a runaway bestseller not just in Dickens's native Britain, but also in the fledgling United States. Every month at ports along the American Atlantic seaboard, there would be large crowds of people gathered around one reading scenes from the latest installment of Dickens's latest masterpiece. They would laugh at the oddness of some of the characters, or smile as Nell's sweetness came on display, but one day they received a shocking installment: Nell had become sick.

While they waited, there were debates as to whether or not Nell would survive and if things would continue along their merry way toward a happy ending. But Dickens surprised people by having Nell die. From London to Scotland to the American frontier, tens of thousands of people read her deathbed scene and her passing away and they just bawled. Imagine grown men today just breaking down and crying because a little girl died. Yet somehow, her fictional death, when placed amongst the greater backdrop of what was transpiring in a rapidly industrializing Britain, with its exploited boys and girls dying in great numbers from work injuries or from diseases such as cholera or smallpox, came to symbolize just how cruel and capricious this world could be.

It was this image that popped into my head as I read the final 100 pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. While I will not spoil what happens there, I can say that it appears that Rowling has taken quite bit of Dickens's purpose to heart: she has worked very hard over six books to create something that moves the spirit. It is as if she was holding up a mirror for us to gaze into, letting us see again, as if anew, just how unfair this world can be. The Harry Potter series is rapidly becoming much more than 'just' a series for children. There are moments in the past two books that invoke a much darker, more worried world behind the whismical fantasy backdrop. Perhaps we are reading a series worthy of the post 9/11 or post 3/11 or post 7/7 world, one in which children and adults can suffer, can grieve, and yet still can love and carry on.

Maybe it is time to just come to terms with the notion that J.K. Rowling has created something that is much more than the sum of its parts. And in that, she might truly become like Charles Dickens.