My favourite character in Harry Potter is definitely Hermione, because she is a reader – she sees it as her gateway into a world previously hidden from her, and gains enormous intellectual and creative power from her reading. She uncovers the identity of Slytherin’s monster, and delves into Voldemort’s psychology because she reads everything, accepts the need to read things she disagrees with, and questions what is put in front of her. In short, now she has graduated from Hogwarts, it would be unsurprising to find her doing a degree in English at Cambridge. But would Rowling’s best creation be allowed to study the books in which she features?

When I decided on Harry Potter as the subject for my dissertation, the response from people I told was mainly disbelief that I was allowed to do so (alongside, naturally, plenty of jealousy). And when I requested to study it, the proviso was that I had to include – in my supervisor’s words – something that would be considered a ‘real’ book by the faculty, just so it was a bit less risky. Having dutifully read The Water Babies, I’m back on the Harry Potter and intend to stick with it and become the staunchest defender of a literary achievement that has succeeded in a way no one would have thought possible for a piece of 9-12 fiction. At least until Easter (deadline).

It seems that Harry has yet to receive fair treatment from critics, who don’t even seem to bother reading the books properly. A work of academic criticism that misquoted an author like Shelley would ridiculed, yet Jack Zipes makes the blanket assertion that ‘they do curse’ (they do, even if Rowling leaves her reader to guess which ones they prefer), ‘they do not drink’ (c.f. Winky’s bender in Book 4). Alison Lurie labels Hagrid a cockney (there are other accents in England), compares Rowling to that ‘Patrick Pullman’ (the uncredited ghost-writer twin?), and still finds time to tell her reader that ‘The British, of course, are fanatic animal lovers’ (am now having identity crisis because I only love my cat in a normal way).

Even Harold Bloom, proud that he only bothered to read one of the books, and confident that Harry Potter was destroying culture, notices that ‘sex barely enters’ the first book. Good. They’re 11. Bloom’s attitude was exemplified by his title: ‘Can 35 Million People be wrong? Yes’. He might be right. Do millions of people reading a text make it good? Of course not. But do millions of people reading them make the texts important, and show that they matter? How could it not?