Yes, Rowling succeeded by reviving a tradition which lived well beyond the period of Orwell's essay, but was almost gone in my childhood.
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I read Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge, but they were very dated, and losing popularity by 1980.
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Orwell's project - to replace conservative assumptions with radical assumptions in children's literature was near-complete by then.
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you can't tell much about the success of kids literature. It's memetic, like boy bands.
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One point Orwell makes about the market he describes is it was crowded and competitive, therefore reflected desires more closely.
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Not so much the case today, where hype creates power-law distributions
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it's not so much hype as meme - kids telling their friends about a book.
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