By NORMAN LEBRECHT

WSJ

AP Photo/Dawn Villella

In 2000, two brothers couldn't wait to read J.K. Rowling's latest.

Step into my time-travel machine for a short journey back to the early summer of 1997. Bill Clinton is six months into his second term, Tony Blair has just become prime minister in Britain. Princess Diana is eyeing up an unsuitable lover. Apple is dying without Steve Jobs as CEO. Broadband is something people wear around their heads while playing tennis. All so long ago, a time before time.

On June 30 that year, a book was published that blew apart one of the iron rules of publishing. Children's books, a literary agent assured me around this time, when I submitted a proposal, did not sell. Kids had ceased reading, full stop. Only a television tie-in could make chain stores stock a children's book, and even that was unlikely.

Twelve London publishers turned down "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" before an independent, Bloomsbury, offered J.K. Rowling's agent, Christopher Little, a paltry advance of £2,500. The original edition appeared on June 30, 1997, in a run of 500 copies, most of which went to public libraries. That's how few children were expected to read.

Watch the trailer for 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' In the epic finale, the battle between the good and evil forces of the wizarding world escalates into an all-out war.

It is difficult to date exactly when, in the following months, Harry Potter went "viral." My family experience traces the phenomenon to the school library. Our youngest daughter brought home a copy around year four, when she was 9. Her elder sisters commandeered it and insisted that the parents read as well. What Ms. Rowling achieved—long before Warner Bros. adapted her work into films, the last of which will be released next week—was a children-led read-in that crossed all age barriers, uniting families in a primal fireside act of sharing an unfolding story, page by page.

By the time the third volume was delivered to stores, in July 1999 in the U.K. and two months later in the United States, publication was a news-leading event, timed for midnight, with teams of journalists speed-reading until dawn to provide reviews for the final edition. On trains, in airport lounges, in parks and on beaches, everywhere one went, everybody seemed to be reading Harry Potter.

The seventh and final volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," published on July 21, 2007, was the fastest-selling book on record, moving 11 million copies in 24 hours, according to an estimate by the BBC. (The second-best-selling novel of that year, Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," made headlines for selling a million copies in a week.) In all, Ms. Rowling is believed to have sold more than 450 million books. Her cycle has been published in 67 languages, more than any printed book apart from the Bible.

Not since the serial novels of Charles Dickens in the middle of the 19th century had the works of a single author excited such universal and immediate interest. The parallels with Dickens, born 200 years ago next February, are multiple and compelling. "What happens to Little Nell?" crowds shouted in New York harbor to incoming ships that carried the latest installment of "The Old Curiosity Shop." "Is Hermione all right?" booksellers were asked as midnight purchasers scanned the closing pages of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," knowing a main character was to die.

Ms. Rowling, who rarely cites influences, has mentioned the death of Sydney Carton in "A Tale of Two Cities" as a formative impression. She has also named Dickens, along with Shakespeare and the Bible, as essential reading for children at school. "David Copperfield" is one of her top recommendations. A pattern of affinities quickly emerges between two authors of very different centuries.

The common factor is hardship. Both writers were exposed to the cruelties of fate at a tender age and embedded these experiences in their main characters. Dickens's father was jailed for debt when the boy was 12, and he was put to work in a shoe-polish "blacking" factory. He drew on the jail memory in "Little Dorrit" and on the child labor in "David Copperfield," "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Oliver Twist." Early adversity turned Dickens into a formidable social reformer, a campaigner for children's rights.

Jo Rowling—she adopted "J.K." on the publishing truism that women authors did not sell—was born in 1965 and was raised in modest, rural comfort. When Ms. Rowling was 15, her mother was diagnosed with degenerative multiple sclerosis; she died, age 45, in December 1990. On a train to London from Manchester earlier that year, Ms. Rowling conceived a series of novels based on a boy wizard. She briefly went to teach English in Portugal, where she contracted a brief marriage, returning penniless with her child to study in Edinburgh. The sickness and death of the author's mother are pivotal to her creation.

From the opening page of the first book, the reader engages with Harry's child's-eye view of a world ruled by imbeciles and malefactors. Harry Potter is an orphan, alone in a world of mediocrities known as "Muggles," who do not appreciate his special gifts. Boarding a train to Scotland at platform 9¾ of Kings Cross Station, London, he finds acceptance as a wizard, magically empowered but under mortal threat from mysterious enemies.

Harry is a Dickensian archetype, a child of cruelty who inspires in us an urge to make a better world. Alongside Oliver Twist, he is the most celebrated orphan in world literature. Oliver is altogether too perfect, untouched by the evil around him. Harry, more credibly, wrestles with forces of darkness and commands our sympathies.

Like Dickens, Ms. Rowling gives some of her secondary characters onomatopoeic names, informing us before we read another word what kind of person they are. Just as Scrooge, Mr. Bumble, Magwitch and Fagin reflect negative traits in Dickens's world, so do Severus Snape, Quirrell and Filch in that of Harry Potter. Ms. Rowling goes beyond Dickens in imprinting evil into a person's name. Voldemort means flight of death in French, Malfoy is bad faith.

In common with Dickens, Ms. Rowling knows that the reading public will not be insulted by situations that it can recognize. In Hogwarts, she nods to the classic genre of the English school story, established by "Tom Brown's Schooldays" in 1857. Yet she also draws deep on a well of Nordic mythology, plumbed by J.R.R. Tolkien in "The Lord of the Rings" and by Richard Wagner in his Nibelungen tetralogy. Hagrid, Hedwig and Hogsmeade could readily appear in any of these epics.

The force of the Harry Potter cycle lies, as with Wagner, not so much in the originality of its subject matter as in the execution of a panoptic vision across a great span of time. Dickens, writing week to week, never harbored such grandiose ambition. The closest any other author gets, at this level, to creating and sustaining a fantasy/reality world is Mark Twain in the Tom Sawyer novels, of which four were successfully published during his lifetime.

Tom is supposed to be 11 or 12 years old when the cycle begins, a year or so older than Harry, and Twain employs him as a paradigm of lost American innocence, a nostalgic tweak at his mostly adult readership. Harry represents no other time or place. He is what he is: an English boy who is sent off to boarding school, where, from friends and teachers, he discovers both his own nature as a wizard and the hair-raising hazards that he may face at any time.

It is here that Ms. Rowling achieves the double-whammy of getting child readers to emote with a central character who is outwardly like them, inwardly not, empowered by wizardry yet otherwise ordinary. Tom's magic is pure mischief, fooling another kid to whitewash his aunt's fence. Harry's is existential. He pretends at normality, knowing he can shed it at will to frustrate the forces of evil.

Harry, nevertheless, arouses greater empathy because he seems to be a child liberated from the control of dull, distracted adults, rejecting his soulless environment. No sensitive child would want to grow up to be Harry's Muggle relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of No. 4 Privet Drive. Harry Potter allows children of the suburbs to loathe their Little Boxes, to fly a nebulous broom, play non-televisable sports and aspire to a life out of the ordinary. Whether read in Seattle, Sarajevo or Soweto, Harry gives children a license to judge the adult world—and find it wanting.

Few works of children's literature have grasped this rejectionist need so intuitively. "Little House on the Prairie," that inexhaustible American saga, fostered civic conformity. C.S. Lewis, in the "Chronicles of Narnia," bred good little Christians. Roald Dahl, ostensibly rebellious, invented a controllable naughtiness in his chocolate factory. The magnetic charm of Harry is that he has no limits: He can do anything, fly anywhere and yet remain sympathetic and real, an achievable role model. The only other modern work of children's literature that pulls off this otherworld/our-world duality is Mark Haddon's brilliant and disturbing "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," in which a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome evokes an outsider-insider dichotomy. Mr. Haddon, like Ms. Rowling, understands that children need to express an innate difference.

Much of Harry Potter's iconoclasm disappears on film, due to Hollywood's regimented conformities of set, sound and stereotyped character. It speaks volumes for Ms. Rowling's novels that many children will forever imagine Harry Potter as quite different from the actor who plays him, Daniel Radcliffe. By rekindling the urge to read, J.K. Rowling trumped the machine-tooled dream factories.

Ever since she finished "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in 2007, Ms. Rowling has given tantalising hints of future ventures. Now Pottermore, a website that goes live on July 31, has been announced as the sole source for electronic downloads of the Harry Potter books, as well as any prospective future texts. Still only 45, Rowling seems ready to step up her game. From Dickens, with his 20 novels, she must know that what a writer does is write. More books, and then more. Hers may not continue to appear as print on paper for much longer, but they will always exist to be read, one word to the next: the word triumphant.