2007 Literary manias, and concurrent sales bonanzas, are regular events; as regular nowadays as the ocean tides. The only change, it would seem, is that they get even more maniacal with the passing of centuries. At the witching hour – midnight – on 20/21 July 2007, the seventh (mystic number) and final instalment of the Harry Potter series (the ‘Potteriad’) was released.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been kept under the kind of security usually reserved for high-grade plutonium. For up to three days, among the wettest on meteorological record, expectant Potter fans camped outside London bookshops. Many were wearing wizard regalia. The town of Colchester converted its town centre into a Hogwarts theme park. J.K. Rowling was the biggest thing since Boadicea laid the place waste in AD 60.
When the stores opened at the anti-social hour, it was the literary equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush. And as chaotic. Three million copies were sold in 24 hours: a record, outstripping by at least a million the sales of the book’s predecessor, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Is the Potter Effect a good thing, unlike the Werther Effect, which led hundreds of young men to follow Goethe’s hero into copycat suicides? The Potterian memesis, it is suggested, is quite different. Life-and limb-preserving. In a witty letter to The Times Books Supplement, 28 July 2007, Edward Kelly wrote:
For those of us who have yet to read any of J.K. Rowling’s Potter series there is little to be gained from the current reviews. I did, though, stumble across this statistic that may please some readers: on an average weekend, the emergency room at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford treats 67 children for injuries sustained in accidents. On two weekends, however, only 36 children needed treatment: June 21, 2003 and July 16, 2005 – just after the releases of Harry Potter Five and Six. It was suggested at the time that talented writers produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention.
The deduction is obvious. Pottermania is good for children. It keeps them from things that go bump against their legs. But does it? The day after Mr Kelly’s letter was printed, there were alarmed accounts about a ‘damning report’ about the ‘soaring rate of childhood obesity’. As the Observer put it, on its front page (29 July):
The number of six- to ten-year olds who become obese will keep rising relentlessly until the late 2040s, with as many as half of all primary school-age boys and one in five girls dangerously overweight by 2050, according to the document.
For the first time in recent history, Britain would breed a generation of children who could confidently expect to live less long, and less healthily, than their parents.
Those 67 children who, averagely, turn up at the Radcliffe ER would, most of them, have hurt themselves playing. Reading (particularly reading a 600-page book) is the epitome of couch-potatoism. Was the Potter Effect, insidiously, helping rob young fans of their allotted span? Reading is a good thing (hence all those honorary doctorates for services to literacy for J.K. Rowling). But would it not be an even better thing for children to be outside – actively ‘doing’ something, rather than passively ‘reading’ or ‘watching’ something?