Though I am not a person given to read very much in the way of fiction, I do enjoy what can be titled in general as “Great Books,” and I am fond of genre reading so long as I can relate to the conventions of the genre. As a historian with great interests in cultural history, though, one of the questions that one has to wrestle with is what separates those cultural artifacts that are made to last from those which are popular for a brief moment and are doomed to vanish, to become either forgotten or a punch line to a horrible joke that no one wants to remember. What is the difference between Moby Dick and some Horatio Alger tales? That is the question I wish to wrestle with today.

Popularity bears no relation to quality when it comes to cultural works, but obscurity does not necessarily mean that something is good either. What is it that separates the wheat from the chaff when one is looking at cultural artifacts? It’s not always an easy matter to decide. Some works that are popular when they are released also happen to be great works. The works of Charles Dickens, for example, were very popular when they were released, and they have remained relevant and important works (despite the weaknesses of Victorian novels in general) in large part because there was great depth to Dickens’ works apart from their superficial appeal. A similar reason explains the survival of Jane Austen’s books from the Victorian times to know in enduring popularity as books and adaptations. There is something deeper underneath the glittering Regency gold-diggers in search of husbands, something more substantial than Caroline Bingley’s flirtations, something more enduring than a mere regency costume romance.

What is it? It’s hard to say. Charles Dickens had a very vocal (if a bit melodramatic) sense of defiant support of the poor and exploited masses of his day and age, and never lost sight of a basically just view of society. Jane Austen wrote about the gentry, but also wrote very deftly about the tragic fates that threatened her heroines if they could not find a sufficiently wealthy and genteel husband—lives of drudgery or spinsterhood such as she herself endured. Their works, in other words, questioned the morality of life at the times even as it provided a glittering and interesting plot, as well as witty dialogue, for those readers interested in merely surface appeal. Even George Eliot herself, whose books, like the way overly long Middlemarch, had largely the same sort of appeal. She wrote according to the custom of her time (overly wordy Victorian novels) but managed to put an ironic distance between herself and her own society. She simultaneously appealed to her society and sought to remind them of their own foibles.

If we examine the works of our own times that might endure, we would do well to pass over those ones that merely appeal to prejudices, like the way overrated His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. We would do better to find works that simultaneously question our present society even while they appeal to it. A good place to look would be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Despite its massive popularity, it is a book that offers considerably more depth than often meets the eye. Its examination of exploitation (the house elf problem), prejudice (half-giants and werewolves), as well as the deep problems of corruption in high places and even among those commonly thought good (the evil of Albus Dumbledore as well as the corruption of the Ministry of Magic in the last four novels of the series). What starts out as a simple children’s tale shows itself as speaking deeply about the exploitation and corruption of our own times, a darkly political angle that was (not unintentionally) nearly entirely removed from the movies, which by and large shy away from such deeper readings of any kind of literature. (Jane Austen’s novels are routinely turned into shallower romances than the often bitingly ironic books they come from, and J.K. Rowling’s books have fared no differently.)

Nor does this exhaust the set of great books from recent decades. Why did some obscure “sword and wizard” novel called Lord of the Rings become an epic trilogy movie? Because it spoke to the depth of the crisis of our times—of the apparent invincibility of evil, of the small and often powerless nature of those who are good, and the need for faith in something beyond ourselves and beyond the material. For J.R.R. Rowling, like J.K. Rowling, like C.S. Lewis, like Jane Austen, and like Charles Dickens shared many elements of a Christian worldview, even though with a great many doctrinal errors in their beliefs. However successfully or not, they wrestled with the spiritual and the eternal while writing books that simultaneously managed to appeal in the here and now. They did not sacrifice real theologial and philosophical and intellectual depth for popularity, nor did they write deliberately obscure works that were unable to be understood or appreciated by a wide audience either. They had both the substance and the shadow (not coincidentally, the most important chapter of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was called “The Substance of the Shadow.”).

What made these books so superior to the Horatio Alger tales that appealed to their times but have become an embarrassment nowadays? For one, Horatio Alger’s tales (along with many others) appealed to a simplistic, optimistic, and essentially non-rigorous view of society, one caricatured by Voltaire in his Candide. Those who do not want to wrestle with the problem of evil, like Job’s friends, often express views of divine providence and virtue being rewarded that approach, if they do not reach, the level of caricature themselves. Such works are important because many people do not want to believe that the innocent really do suffer without apparent remedy in this life, or that sometimes evil people do get their way, or that hard work and virtue do not inevitably lead to wealth and success in this life, as much as we might want to believe it. Horatio Alger tales are a lie, an opiate for the successful to dull their awareness and their discontent at profiting from an unjust system of society. Unlike the prophets of old (like Amos) or unlike the writings of those who wrestle mightily with the problem of powerful evil (like Dickens, Austen, Rowling, Lewis, and Tolkien), they simply want to make a Disneyfied fairy tale where all good stepchildren find their fairy godmother and end up marrying a handsome prince, while all of their wicked step-siblings are punished. Life doesn’t work that way. We ought to stop pretending ourselves and wrestle with the deeper reality, and the deeper evil, that we have been put on this earth to fight.

Ultimately, Horatio Alger tales are the superficial and vain wishes of wicked generations writ large into self-serving volumes. Societies that do not wish to question themselves, do not wish to examine themselves, and do not wish to challenge the evil and oppression they are complicit in seek such opiates to dull their own sense of guilt or fear at divine discontent. They invent religious systems where the poor and exploited deserve their misery because of sin and that the rich and powerful are virtuous, that God always helps those who help themselves here and now, and that we need not do anything for others because everyone is in their perfect place according to the beneficence of divine providence, gospels of prosperity that prevent us from seeing our own evil, from seeing ourselves as the fat cows of Bashan who sell the righteous for a pair of shoes. When we cannot see bear to see ourselves for who we are, the pleasant pictures we paint for ourselves become objects of ridicule for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who know better, and know the truth. They read books like A Little Princess, and wonder how many other young men and women of great abilities and noble character never had the chance to enjoy prosperous and pleasant lives simply because they lived in evil times.