A friend of mine volunteers at a local secondary school in Durham and last term she came home with some terrible news. The class had been discussing famous literary figures on World Book Day and she was showing the class a Powerpoint. One slide of the Powerpoint showed a picture of Hermione Grainger – there are not many people in this day and age who wouldn’t recognise that bushy hair. Even those people who got twenty pages into ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ and gave up and those who saw a couple of the films then decided HP wasn’t for them, would still have a vague idea of who she was. Or so I thought…
Not a single person in the class that day had any idea whatsoever who this girl holding a wand was. Bearing in mind the people in the class were around 13 years old, so not really ‘kids’ anymore. So fair enough, none of them had ever watched the Harry Potter films. Maybe spell-binding, fantastical films just aren’t for them… But when my friend told them that this girl was called ‘Hermione Grainger’, they looked back at her, just as blankly as before.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that the literary characters who captured not just a whole generation, but a whole population are being slowly forgotten, to my utter devastation. So many people credit J. K. Rowling with bringing a generation of children growing up in a world of technology back to reading, back to ‘the book’ and back to a world of imagination inhabited by the likes of Enid Blyton, C.S Lewis, and so many other children’s authors. There are those people who completely don’t ‘get’ the Harry Potter books and films, but I think what they represent is just as important. I could definitely understand if the students in the class weren’t sure what a hippogriff was, or what the exact properties of the mandrake root are. But when a whole class of 13 year olds is completely oblivious of one of the most powerful female literary characters in a long time, I can’t help feeling disappointed.
Who is to blame? The parents? The teachers? Society? The kids themselves? I don’t have the answer to that, but what I do know is that younger generations would do well to fall in love with the wizarding world, like so many of us did – hopefully Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s release will do just that. If that fails, a couple of drops of amortentia should do just the trick!