Literary Lineage

The lineage of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

33 works across 28 centuries, back to Iliad and Odyssey.

  1. 1857

    Tom Brown's School Days

    Thomas Hughes

    Victorian. England. written in English.

    Novel of a boy's years at Rugby School under Thomas Arnold, covering house loyalty, sport, bullying and moral growth. It fixed the conventions of the boarding-school story.

    What it handed down

    To Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

    Structural model, probable.

    Rowling's novel follows the boarding-school pattern Hughes set: arrival by train, sorting into houses with fierce loyalty, a house competition, a bullying rival in the Flashman mould, and a sport (rugby there, Quidditch here) that carries the climaxes of the school year. The newcomer befriended by a bold boy and steadied by a more scrupulous one recurs in Harry, Ron and Hermione.

    To Vice Versa (1882)

    Thematic kinship, probable.

    Anstey sends his body-swapped father into Dr Grimstone's boarding school, a comic version of the world Hughes had idealised. The fagging, fights and masters' tyranny are the school-story conventions turned to farce.

    Where it came from

    Find “Tom Brown's School Days” on Amazon

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Preview card: the tree of influence behind Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone