Were parts of Harry Potter inspired by James and the Giant Peach?

Question

James and the Giant Peach:

• full name James Henry Trotter
• parents killed by a rampaging rhinoceros when he was very young
• lived with 2 abusive aunts until magic came into his life

Harry Potter:

• full name Harry James Potter
• parents killed by a rampaging wizard when he was very young
• lived with abusive aunt and uncle until magic came into his life

Circumstantial evidence points to a connection between the two books, but is there any more solid evidence for J K Rowling having been inspired by James and the Giant Peach? I've searched the internet without success, but there's a lot of people here who know much more about hunting down HP facts than I do!

Answer 1

JK Rowling is definitely familiar with James & The Giant Peach.

In a 2001 interview:

People sometimes compare you to Roald Dahl.

I've been compared to him more than anyone else. I take it as a compliment. There are similarities in our humour sometimes. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and James And The Giant Peach are brilliant, but he's not one of my favourite children's writers. Our writing is really quite dissimilar. My books are ultimately more moral. An unfashionable word, but there you go. They're not moralistic, but there is often a good-versus-evil subtext. They're not absolutely black and white, though. Harry breaks a lot of rules. He's not good in the Enid Blyton sense.

She does say she feels her work is different than Dahl's and if she was influenced it was at most in quirky details (source):

I'll be honest with you, I take it as a huge compliment because he's very popular .... However, I don't actually think we're that similar. I think that superficially, very superficially-because from what I know about Roald Dahl, he was very good on quirky details--we have something in common. But at a deeper level, we're quite different. This is not at all meaning that I'm better than Roald Dahl. He's an absolute master at what he did. It's just that I think we set out to do quite different things. I think his characters are more cartoonlike than mine are. I also think--unfashionable a word as that is--that my books are a lot more "moral."

She does imply that Roald Dahl is an influence in this interview:

Much of her interest in writing came about because she dearly loved to read. Some of her favorite books as a child included those by Judy Blume, Louisa May Alcott and C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series. She also likes the writing of Roald Dahl, especially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which she considers "his masterpiece."

"And I suppose the one book that very much influenced Harry Potter was Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge . . . I liked all the food descriptions and I try to put lots of descriptions about meals into all the Harry books."

The way the article is written, it sounds like that Roald Dahl came up as a list of influences for her work, but since we don't have the exact quote, we'll never know.

Answer 2

It's worth noting that parental abandonment in some form or other is an extremely common trope in juvenile literature and particularly prevelant in British literature. Whether due to literal abandonment, neglect (often to the extent that would be considered abuse these days), boarding school, displacement during war or, ultimately, death.

It's a theme in most of Dahl's books, as well as many of the books listed as influences on Rowlings in the article linked in the previous answer. I'd consider it as the Harry Potter books being part of a broad literary tradition rather than it being an explicit reference to any specific book.

Some well known examples:

Death: Harry Potter, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach

Abandonment: The Chronicles of Prydain

Wartime Displacement: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Flies

Neglect (by contemporary standards, not making a judgement here it can just be a literary device): Enid Blyton, E Nesbit

Boarding School: Tom Brown's Schooldays, Billy Bunter, Saint Trinians

Of course this theme can also be found in literature from other countries, intended for adults and feature prominantly in many fairy tales. It's just particularly prevalent in British children's literature (at a guess I'd say it was due to abandonment issues due to displacement during WWII and the prevalence of boarding schools).

Answer 3

As far as I know, JK Rowling has never said anything about James and the Giant Peach as a direct influence on Harry Potter, or for that matter, any other book. From a radio show transcript in 2000:

The question you are most frequently asked as an author is: "Where do you get your ideas from?" I find it very frustrating because, speaking personally, I haven't got the faintest idea where my ideas come from, or how my imagination works. I'm just grateful that it does, because it gives me more entertainment than it gives anyone else.

— From Mr Darcy to Harry Potter by way of Lolita, Sunday Herald (May 2000)

There's a Wikipedia article entitled Harry Potter influences and analogues, which collects various interview quotes about books and authors which may have had some influence on her writing. However, Roald Dahl is not among them.

Answer 4

In Goblet of Fire, this happens,

Harry spent most of the afternoon in his bedroom; he couldn't stand watching Aunt Petunia peer out through the net curtains every few seconds, as though there had been a warning about an escaped rhinoceros.

That's the best possible evidence for this theory.