Hogwarts Student Population/Classist Hogwarts

[elfundeb]

No: HPFGUIDX 45613

Eileen said:

Some people have argued for the existance of 
race problems in the books. I don't see it. Others have summoned the 
spectre of sexism. To a certain extent, I do see that, though it's not 
as big as some people seem to see it, imho. Others have pointed out 
that discrimination against non-magic people does seem to be present 
amongst the good guys. [snip]

But all this pales in comparison to issues of class. Here I'm sure JKR 
believes one thing and the text sets out quite another. [snip]

I think there's a lot to be pondered about JKR's 
presentation of Stan [Shunpike] always being in connection with working class 
stereotypes. 

Now me: 

Unlike Eileen, I've had more difficulty seeing the class problems in the books than the race and gender incongruities, or the inconsistencies in the paternalistic attitudes some enlightened characters seem to have toward Muggles. JKR does engage in some class stereotyping by assigning Stan Shunpike an obvious working-class accent and associating him with the dishwasher at the Leaky Cauldron. However, I don't see any evidence on which to base an assertion that he did not attend Hogwarts. The Knight Bus is a magical bus and presumably requires magic to operate. There is no evidence of other wizarding schools besides Hogwarts. Thus, I think it's reasonable to assume that he attended Hogwarts. Harry didn't recognize Stan, but his age is only Harry's estimate and he could well have left before Harry arrived. Or, like Hagrid, he could have been expelled. I'm not disturbed, either, that Stan, excited to discover his passenger was actually Harry, used his natural speech patterns. In fact, I suspect that JKR gave him that accent solely in order to highlight what she probably thought was a humorous play on the London night bus, where such accents are probably common.

I don't worry about class accents at Hogwarts any more than I worry about the two unnamed Gryffindor girls in Harry's year. Textual evidence indicates that they must exist, but they will not be relevant to the storyline; to name them would be superfluous.  JKR simply wasn't planning to write students in dialect, or Colin Creevey the milkman's son would likely have had such an accent.  He doesn't.  I ascribe much of this to JKR's compact writing style. As Pippin once said, in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/40104

"Every sentence serves a purpose, whether it's to entertain, inform, persuade or confuse." Hagrid is the only other character given a dialect in the books.  He, unlike Stan and Ernie, is an important -- and unique -- character and his accent is an indicator to the readers that he is lacking in the education one gets at Hogwarts. I think JKR just wasn't thinking about this issue when she drew a caricature of a bus conductor.  

The size of the wizarding economy does suggest that there should be more than 40 students in Harry's year at Hogwarts, but this is a fictional universe, and rather than clutter up a plot with a lot of extraneous details, JKR has chosen to focus on the Hogwarts version of Jane Austen's "two or three families in a country village." She has created a Hogwarts community that she can portray as a very small village.  It's a literary device that makes the presentation of characters and story more manageable, and I have accepted it for the Potterverse without speculating on where all the other wizard children in the UK attend school.  I may be accused of glossing over the evidence regarding poor Stan, but as I explain in more detail below, I don't think there is a class representation problem at Hogwarts.

Eileen again, on class among purebloods: 


Now, for the known backgrounds of Hogwarts students.

[snip Muggleborn analysis]

There is no question of Classism here. 

Wizard-born

The Malfoys - Upperclass. With a manor. A name guaranteed to summon 
shades of 1066 and All that. etc. etc. etc.
Pansy Parkinson - Quite good enough to simper about on Draco's arm. 
And does anyone want to claim the Malfoys aren't class-conscious? 
Crabbe and Goyle - Good enough for Draco's boon companions. Some 
suggestion in the text that their parents are part of Lucius Malfoy's 
circle. 
The Weasleys - Poor, but obviously an old family. Both Lucius and 
Draco talk of them as equals that have fallen to a lower level. Arthur 
Weasley works at the Department of Muggle Artefacts. Although this is 
not the heart of the action at the Ministry, he is on close terms with 
all the Ministry higher-ups. And in an emergency, he's at the heart of 
the action.
Pavarti and Padma Patil - Pansy's comment to Pavarti about Neville 
suggests that they knew each other before Hogwarts: more evidence of a 
"magic circle" in the wizarding world.
Neville Longbottom - Pureblooded. Father was a popular auror. Very 
popular. His grandmother continually chides him for not upholding the 
family's honour.
Cedric Diggory - Father works for the Department of Magical Creatures. 
Like Arthur Weasley, at the heart of the action.
Harry Potter - According to Rowling, James was independantly wealthy. 
Barty Crouch Jr. - one of the "oldest" pureblood families
Ernie Macmillan - Boasts that he can trace his family back through 
nine generations. (I've always thought Ernie was meant to be the 
wizarding equivalent of Justin. :-) 

[snip]

So, while you can point to the presence of the Creeveys as a basis for 
an absence of class discrimination at Hogwarts, to do so is 
fundamentally misleading. Because, while the backgrounds of the 
muggle-born students is diverse, the background of the wizarding born 
students isn't. 

Now me: 

The common thread I see in the above list is that it is composed entirely of purebloods, with the exception of Harry himself and perhaps the Patils. Perhaps my difficulty in seeing the class issues stems primarily from the fact that I strongly associate the pureblood/mudblood distinction with racism in the U.S. and, unlike Eileen, I see many different classes represented within the universe of pureblood wizards:

The Malfoys, with their manor, House-Elf, and last name evoking the Norman era, are obvious aristocrats, as Eileen indicates.

The Crouches, who also have a House-Elf (who are stated in CoS to "come with big old manors and castles and places like that"), are likely also old aristocracy. 

Pansy Parkinson - I agree with Eileen, though the only evidence is that Draco thought she was good enough to ask to the Yule Ball.

The Weasleys -- they are stated to be an old, prominent family. Perhaps there are aristocratic origins, but Arthur may come from a long line of younger children so that they are far removed from any aristocratic origins or manor the family might have or have had. They seem very middle class to me. (As for where they have sunk from and why, visit the Imperius!Arthur trimaran.)

As for why Arthur is always in the thick of things, that's the type of person Arthur is. He is a person of action in a crisis. At the QWC, Arthur says as he, Bill, Charlie and Percy rush off toward the crowd in hoods and masks, "we're going to help the Ministry." Arthur and his sons are volunteers. As are all of the 20 or so wizards who apparated to the site of the Dark Mark. They're not an official delegation. The only high-level ministry official that appears to be there is Crouch, and he's looking for his son. It looks much more like Arthur and Amos Diggory step into an authority vacuum and take over. Amos certainly didn't go because he expected to find that a magical creature had conjured the Dark Mark. Arthur's just a conscientious mid-level bureaucrat who took action because action was needed and the proper officials from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement weren't available. And Arthur cuts short his holiday to do damage control on the reporting of the event because he feels responsible, not because he is a high-level official charged with that responsibility.

Crabbe & Goyle -- the younger C&G seem not to be Draco's friends so much as his bodyguards. I have never imagined them to be part of the wizarding aristocracy, as the Malfoys clearly are. They seem perilously close to being Draco's servants. However, they are unquestionably purebloods, or Draco wouldn't have made the comments he made to Polyjuiced!Harry & Ron. 

The Longbottoms -- there's an essay in the Lexicon describing clues that the Longbottom family is from Lancashire.  http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon/longbottom.html 

The description in this essay of Blackpool, where Neville was nearly drowned by Great Uncle Algie, as a "spectacularly tacky seaside resort" where mill town employees frequently vacationed, suggests that the Longbottoms have a working class background.  But they are most definitely purebloods.  And popular, at least with the general populace.  

Ernie MacMillan -- there's nothing in canon to indicate his class, only his pureblood pedigree. Looking at the issue in light of the history of racial prejudice in the U.S., Ernie's protestations of purity (though uttered in the context of the basilisk threat) strike me as reflecting the attitude of lower-class whites who saw themselves as superior to the most educated and intellectual members of the black elite, all because of the color of their skin and the "purity" of their background. But the white elite looked down upon them as "white trash" just as the Malfoy family looks down on the Weasleys. 

The Diggorys -- I'd put them more or less in the same category as the Weasleys. Amos is simply a member of the department, not a head or assistant minister. 

Eileen is absolutely right that the wizarding community is very close-knit, and everyone seems to know everyone else. However, I don't necessarily see that as an indication that everyone travels in the same social class. Whether there are 280 Hogwarts students (as the internal textual evidence seems to indicate) or 1000 or whether there are other wizarding schools in Britain, the wizarding community is quite small. Indeed, we are told that it was in danger of dying out altogether but for the fact that wizards began to intermarry with Muggles. If there are relatively few wizards, and many of them are clustered in a few wizarding enclaves, it is likely that many of them know one another regardless of relative social status. The flying lesson in PS/SS does suggest that the Patils, the Parkinsons and the Malfoys were all acquainted pre-Hogwarts. I don't think it necessarily suggests they knew Neville; they had seen Neville in action at the first Potions class, where he melted his first cauldron. What also stands out is the isolation of the Weasleys from this circle; Ron and Draco had never met before taking the train to Hogwarts.  So even if there was a circle of elite wizarding families pre-Hogwarts, the characters that my reading of the evidence suggests were outside that circle did not know the elite children.

Eileen on the MoM composition: 

And now on to the Ministry of Magic, which is manned by Fudge (upper 
class), Crouch (upper class old family), Ludo Bagman (whose father was 
an old friend of August Rookwood - a posh sounding name in itself), 
and Arthur Weasley (old family). There's no evidence for the 
backgrounds of the other Ministry people, though I would be very 
surprised should Amos Diggory not conform to the model. Again, what we 
know is what's important. I'm sure it's quite possible the current 
Head of Magical Law Enforcement is Ernie Prang's brother. But the text 
shows us the Old Boys network firmly entrenched.

Me: 

IMO, the hallmark of the Fudge regime at the MoM is Fudge's emphasis "on the so-called purity of blood." And therefore those who are in positions of greatest importance at the Ministry are undoubtedly purebloods. Since the WW is presented as a relatively small community, then the MoM is probably a relatively small community as well, and everyone working there probably knows everyone else there.  It's probably like my own workplaces, past and present. I may know everyone well enough to chat in the hallways, but that doesn't put me into the same social circle.

Arthur knows Fudge in a professional capacity, but there's no indication that Fudge socializes with anyone other than those at the top, such as Dumbledore and Crouch. For example, in PoA, it appears that Arthur speaks with Fudge only in the context of devising a plan to get Harry to King's Cross station safely.  It's very clear from the apologetic way that Arthur explains why they will be transported in Ministry cars that Arthur isn't important enough to obtain such transportation for himself.  I think we should believe Molly's statement that Arthur has deliberately been held back from the inner circle at the Ministry.

So, in summary, I believe class distinctions are woven into the pureblood wizarding community, and that working-class purebloods are visible at Hogwarts.  The WW *is* classist, and unpleasantly so, as exemplefied by the Malfoys and their ilk and the way others kowtow to them.  Class distinctions aren't presented in a flattering light.  Whether the series ultimately will take on an unintentional classist subtext will, IMO, ultimately depend on what happens to the wizards with working-class backgrounds such as the Creeveys (or Neville, if you agree with my interpretation of the textual clues).  But I don't believe there's a substandard school somewhere for wizards who are destined to become dishwashers, or if there is, I believe that whether one is admitted to Hogwarts instead of that other school depends only on whether the wizard is, in Neville's words, "magic enough to come."

Debbie

who is most interested in learning the class background of Argus Filch


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