[HPforGrownups] Re: Spinner's End.

[Marion Ros]

No: HPFGUIDX 156755

Eggplant:

>>>I also assume it was Snape's childhood home because it seems the exact
sort of place a young Snape would grow up in, dingy, rather poor, and
in a Muggle neighborhood as befitting his Muggle father. I doubt JKR
will find a more colorful place.<<<



Marion:

Is there any reason why a wizard family wouldn't live between Muggles?
The Ancient and Noble Black family lived in Grimauld Place, the only wizard family in a whole neighbourhood of Muggles!
I think Sev lived with his grandparents (I think he lost both parents before going to Hogwarts) in Spinners End. Why should the Princes be any different than the Turnpikes or the Ollivanders.
The Ollivanders probably live above the shop, but who knows where and how the Turnpikes live? Not every wizard family has a manor or a cottage in the country. Not every wizard family is independent rich or works for the Ministery. Some of them are shopkeepers or they make things. My guess would be that the Princes were one of these 'working class' wizard families. Or maybe they had once seen better times but things got rough. It happens.
I find it rather disturbing that the fact that Tobias Snape was a Muggle would immediately suggest to people that the Snapes lived in squalor. As if Wizards could not live in squalor (the Gaunts for instance?) As if Muggles were somehow a dirty, filty subspecies of near-humans whose favourite pasttime would be rolling around in the mud.
Or do I misread the post and you mean that Snape was apparantly poor (dingy grey underwear etc) and that Spinner's End fits that image?
Still. A working class neighbourhood in a Northern industrial town in the fifties and sixties when Snape grew up might not have been rich, but it would have been clean. Very clean. Scrubbed stoops, polished doorknobs. Women judged eachother on the cleanliness of their homes, the way the children were dressed (clean and whole if not entirely new) and how those children behaved (polite) And how often their respective husbands went to the pub.
"Never to poor to buy soap", was the motto in those days.

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