Chapels in British boarding schools

Carol justcarol67 at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 18 21:22:52 UTC 2007


Montavilla 47 wrote on the main list:

<snip> Also, it was very odd to me that the wizards had no religion.
I thought it might be because religion is such a taboo
subject in popular culture. But it always stuck me as very
strange for a boarding school to have no chapel--it's
such a staple of the English boarding school depiction. <snip>

Carol responds:

My knowledge of the British boarding school tradition is pretty much
confined to nineteenth-century Eton. I haven't read any boarding
school novels (unless the segments in "Jane Eyre" and "David
Copperfield" count for something), but I, too, was under the
impression that attending chapel was a staple of British boarding
school life. I'm wondering whether any British or Commonwealth posters
can enlighten me as to whether that would still be the case near the
end of the twentieth century, when HRH were attending Hogwarts. (I
moved this post to the OT list because I didn't think the question was
sufficiently canonical to post on the main list.)

BTW, I agree that JKR wasn't just protecting her plot from discovery
by suppressing explicitly religious (Christian) motifs until the final
instalment of the series. I think she was fully aware of the hostility
to religion in contemporary culture (not just in Britain but in the
U.S. and, no doubt, in continental Europe as well). She wanted the
books to have universal appeal, IMO, but she probably didn't want to
be attacked for ostensibly foisting overtly Christian views on her
readers by depicting those views as desirable. Safer in this cultural
climate not to break the taboo. (I do think, though, that the
Christian motifs go beyond the afterlife to forgiveness and
redemption, as well as sacrificial love.)

Carol, hoping that she's not arousing strong emotions with this post
and mostly just asking whether chapel is still a part of boarding
school life in Britain
 





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