Like the setting of the novel, Rowling's themes and characters are both traditional and off-beat. British to the core, the themes and characters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone contain a delightful blend of classic fantasy and Victorian sentiment minus the tendency towards what a contemporary audience might consider saccharine.

Ideally—and at their best—both classic British fantasy and Victorian literature enjoy the great themes of love and death, of good and evil. This is true of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, wherein the title character, our noble hero, having been orphaned and overshadowed by a cruel and ignorant world, continues to battle issues of class and conscience even after he is delivered to a better, more accepting and acceptable, place.

It is this better place, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the magic world more generally, that inspires...