I’d heard something about Harry Potter when the first book came out in 1997 or 1998 while I was in my first or second year of graduate school. But it was the summer of 1999 when I started thinking about it a lot. I spent that summer in Edinburgh, and the bookstores were full of the first two books, and then, with the release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with signings and readings of the third book.
Much to my regret, I didn’t attend any of the readings, but I did pick up and read the UK versions of the books. I found them enchanting. As a child, I enjoyed stories about boarding schools and have always liked fantasy fiction, so the structure and genre of the books appealed to me. Too, the book’s popular appeal in Britain is hard to overstate. The books were everywhere. I bought mine home with me.
The following year I was back in the UK. As it happened, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were in London on July 8, 2000, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released at midnight. We’d gone out to dinner and headed over to Waterstone’s Books at Piccadilly which was opening at midnight to offer the book at the first possible minute — the first of what would become a tradition of Harry Potter midnight releases.
We expected a crowd but were stunned at the turnout — the line of people stretched and wound around blocks. I was struck by how many young children were there, waiting. As we stood there, I wondered what it would have been like to be nine years old and out at midnight, waiting for a book to be released. I remembered what it was like to be out at night on Halloween when even 8 PM seemed very late. Some of the children were dressed in costumes. All were excited, but like children at Disneyland, waiting for a ride, they were patient, caught up in their anticipation.
The people standing next to us were Australian parents, with two children. They told us they’d come straight from the airport, after the long flight from Sydney, with barely a stop to check into their hotel. Getting to the bookstore had been, they told us, the only part of the trip the children had talked about for days. Maybe from the flight, maybe from being dazzled by being out so late and the sights and sound of nighttime London, neither child spoke much.
I don’t like crowds and was quietly worrying about what it would be like when the doors opened, but the staff at Waterstone’s had planned the night well. There were boxes of the books at the counter. When the door opened, people moved immediately into the line, bought their copies, and were ushered out of the store.
Goblet of Fire, while not the longest Harry Potter book, is 636 pages in the UK edition — more than twice the length of the previous book. In the coming days, all over Britain, we saw small children, not-so-small children, and adults, lugging copies of the book around. I wasn’t carrying mine. I had stayed up all night reading it and had finished it in less than two days.
The excitement surrounding the book reminded me of the stories of crowds in nineteenth-century New York storming the docks shouting to the arriving sailors, asking if Little Nell was alive when Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialized. Though hardly the only person to make the comparison, I realized then that these books were going to be formative memories for this generation of children, not only in the UK, but globally. That the children who grew up reading these books were going to have a universal symbolic language about Hogwarts and He Who Must Not Be Named. And that I was someday, perhaps, going to teach a class on these books.