When did cheap staples from other cuisines become “middle-class”, asks food writer Jonathan Nunn
The British like to think that they have a uniquely profound understanding of class. In truth, it’s the opposite. The arcane rules of the country’s class system mean we have a deranged understanding of our divisions, one that is informed not by whether someone owns financial assets or capital or employs people, but by their accent, hobbies and choice of supermarket...
The fact is that if a similar inventory of “working class” foods were to be undertaken across contemporary Britain, it would be less “gammon, pie and mash and ale”, and more “ackee, pierogi and shatkora”.
All of this is supercharged by post-Brexit politics and its discontents...
The disapproval of a shopping list or what other people are eating these days is ultimately about insinuating that anyone concerned with Brexit-induced food shortages is a paid-up member of the Ocado elite; reinforcing a narrative that Brexit itself was simply about the divide between working-class towns (one Waitrose per 100,000 people) and middle-class urban centres (one Waitrose per person).
Food (and class) in Harry Potter A (lengthy) guide for fans who aren’t British
After another user asked me some questions about British food as it appears in Harry Potter I decided to make a post about it, as no doubt other foreign readers have similar questions. I will talk about EVERYTHING so sorry if you have to scroll through loads of stuff you know to find what you want, but I have written it to be accessible to literally anyone and I don’t want to assume people know what something is just because I do.
Also, it was impossible to make the post without referencing class. The fact that it was impossible only goes to show how it’s probably impossible to understand the books in depth without an understanding of class in Britain. The whole texts are encoded with references to class which are so subtle (much like class itself) that even I, who grew up being encoded in the same way, had to analyse the texts to find them. At some point I’ll make a post about just class, but for now we’ll stick to the light-hearted topic of food!
Foods eaten at Hogwarts:
Main courses:
Probably to give a subtle wave to the fact that Hogwarts is the magical version of a public school, nearly all the food consumed there is traditional and British. A public school here is NOT a state-maintained school, it is a private, extremely expensive, prestigious, boarding school, e.g Eton, which only the children of people with a lot of money and a lot of influence attend. By default, these people are usually upper class or aristocracy. (Obviously in the wizarding world money isn’t a factor in school attendance, but nevertheless that is what Hogwarts is modelled on.) There is never any mention of processed foods at Hogwarts except chips and a few common desserts. Here is a list, with explanation, of foods mentioned there:
stew/casserole (meat and vegetables cooked together with stock for several hours)
roast beef and chicken (the two most commonly eaten meats here, I would say)
pork/lamb chops (cuts of those meats with a bit of bone through the top)
sausage (usually made with pig meat in the UK)
bacon (here it is larger and softer than in many countries)
steak (a cut of beef, usually expensive)
boiled (in water until soft, no skins), roast (in the oven until brown, no skins) and mashed (boiled and puréed, no skins) potatoes
chips (not crisps, of course, but rather fat French fries)
Yorkshire pudding (pancake batter which is cooked in a muffin pan in the oven until risen and crispy; originated from the county of Yorkshire and usually served with roast beef)
PLEASE NOTE THAT ‘PUDDING’ IS NOT NECESSARILY SWEET, NOR A MOUSSE-LIKE SAUCE THING. I MADE A BLOG POST LAST WEEK ABOUT ‘PUDDING’.
peas (usually small and taken out of the pod, a bit like petit pois, – garden peas; occasionally larger and softer – marrowfat peas; sometimes mashed up into a purée – mushy peas, which are usually served with chips)
carrots (peeled and either boiled or roasted)
gravy (like meat jus, but nowadays normally made from a flavoured powder that you add water to and stir. It’s brown and fairly thick)
ketchup (this one annoys me because no-one I know says ketchup – it’s tomato sauce, at least in the north)
sprouts (brussels sprouts )
steak and kidney pie (pastry filled with steak and kidney in a gravy)
PLEASE NOTE THAT PIE IS USUALLY SAVOURY HERE. We do have fruit pies, but if someone says ‘pie’ a British person will picture a savoury thing, probably with meat in it.
steak and kidney pudding (steak and kidney in gravy encased in suet pastry, which is a crumbly, soft pastry made from just suet, flour and water. It is steamed, not baked, usually)
sausage rolls (a staple of British lunchtime foods – sausagemeat wrapped in a flaky pastry and eaten hot or cold)
jacket potato (also called a baked potato, it’s a whole potato baked in the oven with the skin still on until it’s crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and is usually served with cheese in it)
porridge (oats cooked in milk or water, often called oatmeal in other countries)
marmalade (jam made from citrus fruits, usually orange)
PLEASE NOT THAT JAM IS NON-CITRUS FRUIT AND SUGAR COOKED UNTIL IT SETS INTO A SPREAD.
Desserts:
jam tart (a small, open pastry case with jam in it)
ice cream (the most common flavours here are vanilla, chocolate and strawberry)
apple pie (pastry case with sweetened apples)
treacle tart (pastry case with a sweet, thin filling made from golden syrup and breadcrumbs, not treacle)
éclairs (popular French cream cake – long choux bun filled with cream and topped with chocolate)
jam doughnuts (dough fried in oil and filled with jam, most often strawberry)
jelly (called jell-o in some countries – flavoured gelatine)
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH JAM – AMERICANS CALL JAM JELLY.
rice pudding (short grain rice cooked for several hours in milk and sugar until it forms a thick mixture not unlike sweet porridge)
custard tart (pastry case filled with an egg, milk and sugar mixture which has been baked until set)
spotted dick (steamed suet pudding, which is like a warm sponge cake, filled with raisins and served with custard)
chocolate gateau (fancy chocolate cake with cream on top)
trifle (layered fruit, jelly, sponge cake, custard and cream – a classic)
mint humbugs (a hard mint to freshen your breath after eating)
At Christmas:
roast turkey (the meat we traditionally eat at Christmas)
chipolatas (tiny pork sausages)
buttered peas (just peas with a bit of butter on the them)
cranberry sauce (cranberries and sugar cooked together until set – served with savoury foods like turkey – it’s not as sweet as jam)
turkey sandwiches (literally the entire country eats this on Christmas night to use up some turkey)
Christmas cake (very rich, dense fruit cake topped with a layer of marzipan and then a layer of icing)
Christmas pudding (hot, very rich steamed pudding made from dried fruits, nuts and suet, often served with brandy sauce)
crumpets (these aren’t a Christmas food, they just happen to eat them at Christmas. They are round, flat buns, though not exactly bread, with holes in them, that you toast and butter. Often people eat them for breakfast, or, like in the book, as a snack at night. They are savoury, not sweet)
mince pies (small pies filled with a mixture of dried fruits, sugar and brandy – sweet, not savoury – they were made with minced meat a few hundred years ago, and the name mince pie has stuck)
fudge (a type of sweet made by heating sugar, butter and milk until it sets)
During the Triwizard Tournament:
bouillabaisse (French fish stew/soup that hardly anyone here has heard of/would try!)
goulash (Eastern European stew made with meat and paprika that a lot of people have at least heard of and would try!)
blancmange (French dessert which is a basically white, almond-flavoured jelly that some people have heard of and a few would try)
It’s necessary to mention here, how the fact that Hermione knows what the bouillabaisse is and has tried it is a DEFINITE indicator of class. She is upper middle class. I’ll talk more about why when I do a class post, but for now it’s enough to say that no working-class child, unless they have family ties to France or have learned about it in French at school, would even know what it was and would be very unlikely to try it if given the opportunity. You can’t read that scene, as a British person, and not understand that Hermione comes from a cultured, moneyed background.
It’s also interesting to compare these foods with the foods usually served at state-maintained schools at the time HP was written: we are talking about fatty, greasy, processed rubbish with no nutrition at all, e.g. turkey twizzlers, nuggets, pizza, chips, hot dogs, cakes. You do still find such foods in state schools but normally alongside more healthy options. Since Jamie Oliver’s war on school food things are a lot better, but the point is that the food at Hogwarts is a clear nod to the privilege of the pupils: working-class kids wouldn’t have been able to eat things like that at school. My primary school (ages 4-11) served stew sometimes, with overcooked vegetables, but that’s all, and my secondary school served pizza, hot dogs, nuggets and chips every day and that was it.
Foods mentioned but not eaten in the Great Hall:
sherbet lemons (real sweets, they are strong, lemon-flavoured hard sweets that contain a powder that makes your tongue fizz)
custard creams (biscuits made from 2 square simple biscuits with vanilla cream sandwiched between them)
Foods eaten at the Weasleys’:
Food is one of the main ways by which the Weasleys are coded as working-class. Everything they eat is either a comfort food your grandma makes or some cheap thing you eat and don’t mind but wish was something else.
corned beef sandwiches (corned beef is beef which has been processed and salt-cured and has the mushy consistency of cat food. It was popular during the war, when meat was scarce and rationed, and is associated with poverty and lack of better meat. That isn’t to say that people don’t like it, but it is true that many people don’t)
Speaking of processed meats, the Weasleys eat a lot of sausage and bacon, which are very popular but also available cheaply.
chicken and ham pie (this is the only time I can think of that it is mentioned that the Weasleys were having a ‘proper’ meat, as in unprocessed, and if I remember correctly it was for Harry’s birthday, so a special occasion. It’s pastry filled with chicken and ham in a white sauce and is the sort of thing your grandma probably made)
boiled potatoes (they do have boiled potatoes at Hogwarts, but alongside other types of potato.)
It’s hard for me to explain why, but boiled potatoes, specifically, have a working-class connotation. You are definitely more likely to eat boiled potatoes in a working-class family. Here are 2 anecdotes form my life about boiled potatoes to illustrate my point!
1. I know someone from a privileged background. Her father was an electrical engineer who held government contracts. She went to a grammar school (a school that’s free but you have to pass a test to go to) and lived in an affluent city where one of the main public schools is. As soon as she opens her mouth you can hear that she’s from an upper middle-class background. I once discussed cooking dinner with her and said I was making boiled potatoes. She scoffed and said she never did as she couldn’t see the point – if she has boiled them she might as well mash them.
2. At university my friend started going out with a guy from a solid middle-class background. His parents had a second home in South Africa, where his father worked for part of the year. They were staunch Tories (supported the political party to the right of the centre). She and I once discussed making dinner and she said it was her turn to make it tonight and the guy wanted sautéed potatoes. Her exact words next were “he’ll just have to make do with boiled, I’m too tired”.
Somehow the fact that the Weasleys eat boiled potatoes makes them working-class, an under-class. It’s somehow seen as lazy and simple by people from higher classes.
rhubarb crumble (stewed rhubarb topped with a flour, butter and sugar mixture that goes hard and crumbly, usually served with custard)
Again, this is a working-class mainstay. Many people used to grow rhubarb in their gardens because it grows easily and is hardy in our weather. Add a bit of sugar and it’s an almost free dessert.
chocolate pudding (not to be confused with chocolate pudding in American terms, ours is a suet pudding made with chocolate and served hot, usually with a chocolate sauce)
Foods eaten with the Dursleys:
a bun from the bakers (could be either a sandwich made from a bread roll or a sweet bun such as an iced bread roll, without more info it’s not clear. The word ‘bun’ is used to describe many things, and it’s different depending on where you are in the country. For example, I would never say ‘bun’ and mean sandwich but I know some people do. I personally picture an iced bun).
knickerbocker glory (an ice cream sundae)
fruit cake (dense cake made with dried fruits, like a dressed down version of Christmas cake, seems quite old-fashioned now)
roast pork (a joint of pork roast in the oven, often with a layer of fat over it that goes crispy)
soup (a common starter)
salmon (usually a whole fish, baked or poached)
lemon meringue pie (the French dessert anglicised – a pastry case filled with a layer of set lemon cream and topped with meringue)
grapefruit
I want to pause at this point to point out how clear it is that the Dursleys are higher class than the Weasleys. For one, Uncle Vernon just buys whatever he fancies from the bakers for lunch but Ron (and presumably the whole family) are given sandwiches made by Mrs Weasley, containing what they can afford. Secondly, roast pork and salmon are expensive and only eaten by people with more than the basic amount of money and even then really only on special occasions. Sometimes people will have a salmon on the buffet at their wedding, for instance. It’s a far cry from processed meats and chicken and ham pie. Not least because you can make a decent pie out of even poor quality meat, but to make a good roast, especially if you are trying to impress your boss, you need a good quality joint. Thirdly, if on a diet it’s unlikely someone working-class would eat grapefruit for breakfast. I know working-class kids who wouldn’t even be able to identify a grapefruit. Moreover, the fact that they served the meal to Vernon’s boss in three courses, followed by after-dinner mints shows that they either are middle-class, or, more likely, trying to appear so. The Weasleys just have their main course and pudding, even on special occasions. I don’t think I’ve ever had a starter in my life except for in restaurants. Furthermore, at the zoo Dudley and Piers get ice creams and Harry gets a lemon ice lolly. I don’t think there is any more striking a symbol of a working-class person in the 90s trying to treat themselves than cheap lemon ice lollies! All ice cream stands had one and it was always the cheapest thing. By doing this, Vernon is showing that he views Harry as a lesser-class than himself and Dudley. Lastly, while Petunia is preparing the meal for Vernon’s boss, Harry is given bread and cheese for his supper. Bread and cheese conjures up images of Scrooge sitting in the dark eating alone because it was so cheap: Victorian levels of poverty and definite allusions to being a lesser-class.
On a side note, the Dursleys still got their milk and eggs from the milkman, a man from a dairy who delivered to people’s houses in the mornings. In those days lots of people still did, and you do still get milkmen now to a lesser degree. My grandparents got their milk from the milkman and so did my husband’s parents, up until at least 2000.
whipped cream and sugared violets (I had to look up sugared violets myself. I think I am probably too working-class, or possibly too northern, to have heard of them. They seem to be the head of the violet flower dipped in egg white and sugar so that it becomes hard. I have never heard of putting them in cream to make a pudding before.)
Additional foods relating to Hagrid:
birthday cake (usually sponge and covered in icing. In Britain, unlike many countries, you do not buy your own birthday cake: your parents usually get one for you)
rock cakes (these are real, though I grew up calling them rock buns. They are a basically a blob of cake cake batter with currants in, baked for a short time. They are like a cross between muffins and cookies)
treacle toffee (hard black toffee, often eaten around bonfire night)
stoat sandwiches (as far as I am concerned these are not real! I have never heard of anyone eating that! A stoat is small animal like a weasel)
Foods sold by magical establishments, e.g. Honeydukes/the Hogwarts Express:
these foods don’t exist outside HP, but could theoretically be made –
pumpkin juice
pumpkin pasties (a pasty is like a pie but the pastry is filled and then folded over, not topped with a lid)
chocoballs filled with strawberry mousse and clotted cream (clotted cream is thick, rich cream that has thickened naturally, not by whipping)
mulled mead (you can get mead, though it’s not common, and mulled just means it’s cooked through with various spices)
cherry syrup with soda (to us, soda is carbonated water, not pop)
these foods aren’t real but are based on real ones –
Drooble’s best blowing gum (wizard bubble gum)
liquorice wands (you can get sticks of liquorice
fizzing whizzbees (imo based on a sweet called a flying saucer, which is a thin, rice paper-like shell shaped like a flying saucer and filled with sherbet
exploding bonbons (bonbons here are round and soft, sometimes with a powdery centre, which break apart easily and fill your mouth
these foods are real –
peppermint creams (icing sugar mixed with peppermint oil until soft but firm, often coated in chocolate
mars bars (chocolate coated nougat-cream and caramel)
these foods aren’t real and aren’t really based on anything, as far as I can tell –
butterbeer
gillywater
sugar quills
ice mice
cockroach cluster
blood pops
toothflossing stringmints
pepper imps
cauldron cakes
these foods weren’t real before HP but now exist as part of the HP merchandise –
Bertie Bott’s every flavour beans (they are like jelly beans)
Chocolate frogs
Two final things. Firstly, on the topic of class it is worth noting that Lupin felt he had to apologise for only having teabags. Literally nobody who is working-class drinks tea in any other form than teabags 99.9% of the time. You can get loose leaf tea, which is seen as fancy, nicer and is certainly more expensive. I got some for Christmas last year, for instance. Nobody working-class would ever even bat an eyelid at someone offering them tea in bag form. It’s totally normal. The fact that Lupin apologises shows that he is acutely aware that he is more lowly than the average Hogwarts teacher. He is embarrassed by something that most of the population find normal. He feels under them, in class terms. Even though he knows Harry grew up without privilege (though the Dursleys themselves are middle-class), now that Harry is part of Hogwarts he has ascended enough in class terms that Lupin is concerned he will disappointed to have tea from a bag. This goes some way to showing how class isn’t just about money: it’s about tastes and habits.
Secondly, in compiling this post it became really clear that sausages are a leitmotiv marking times when Harry feels cosy, familial and homey. The first thing Hagrid does is cook him sausages, which represent being lifted out of the world of cold and hunger he is living in; becoming someone who others care about and want to care for. When he is rescued to the Weasleys in CoS and is blown away by the wizarding house and starts to feel at home and safe, the first thing Molly does is feed him loads of sausages. Sausages are often mentioned at breakfast at Hogwarts, especially when Harry is in a good mood. Perhaps it was unconscious and JKR herself associates sausages with feelings of family and at home-ness.
One final thing and that’s it, I promise. While writing this it struck me how different what I mean when I say “privilege” is from what an American means when they say it. I have mentioned this before, and at some point will do a blog post about it, but race is bound up so intricately with American history and life that words like “privilege” are encoded with images of skin colour. I bet the average American read “privilege” and pictured a white person, but in the UK that wouldn’t be the case. Skin colour has nothing to do with it. Here, “privilege” means what you have access to, how valid other people see your tastes and way of life, what you have grown up doing, seeing, eating, hearing, believing. It is bound up inexorably with how much money you have, what you do for a living and where you live and, crucially, with your family’s status historically. That one thing is the reason that comparisons between death eaters and Nazis don’t really hold up: HP is about genealogy and not ideology.
On the dual-layered representation of British class in Harry Potter
You should go to my blog and read my post about food in Harry Potter and my two part essay on the British class system before you read this, as it won’t make sense otherwise!
In this post I will explore how there are two class systems at work in Harry Potter and how they revolve around blood status and power relations. On the one hand there is the wizarding one: pure bloods represent the upper-class, half-bloods the middle-class and muggleborns (and by extension muggles) the working-class. Muggles might be said to represent the modern ‘underclass’ that I discussed in my essay: the bottom layer of society that has never worked (or in wizarding terms, has never had magical power). On the other hand there is also the real British class system. That exists, encoded into the characters, both in fictional terms, in the muggle world, and also in real, meta terms, i.e. although Ron, for example, never lives in the muggle world, he is still encoded with a real/muggle world class, which is only visible to the reader. In this post I will show how class is encoded using only general knowledge of the characters and specific references from The Philosopher’s Stone. I will discuss references from the other books at a later date.
Let’s start with the Weasleys, then. The Weasleys are pure bloods. They are on the sacred 28. According to the wizarding class system they are upper-class. They are magically privileged. They have access to unlimited magical knowledge, they are guaranteed a place at a prestigious school (provided they are not squibs, presumably), they are educated to the highest level available in the wizarding world, apart from Fred and George, but they chose not to finish their NEWTS. They are able to access jobs in the government. Bill and Charlie have had the opportunity to live and work abroad. The family knows important people in the wizarding world, like the minister, Dumbledore and Mad-Eye.
Moreover, whatever the books might say, it is certain that being raised in a muggle family will affect your progress at school, at least at first. Simply by having spent 11 years absorbing the wizarding world, by default, pure-bloods like the Weasleys are going to have a head start. Half-bloods will also have an advantage over muggleborns, but not as much as pure-bloods do. Because of this it is sensible to assume that muggleborns, and to a lesser extent half-bloods, will have to work harder at school to achieve as highly as pure-bloods. The work ethic difference between Ron and Hermione says this in volumes. He is lazy and doesn’t listen in lessons or do his work properly, but he still gets good marks. Hermione works herself into the ground trying to close the gap and ensure she can reach her potential. Also, Crabbe and Goyle pass their exams at the end of the year, despite being portrayed as stupid.
Ron and his siblings never have to worry about not knowing what’s going on, or feel like an outsider, in the way Harry and Hermione do. We see Harry feel stupid at his ignorance multiple times. While waiting for the sorting he wonders whether he will have to get a rabbit out of the hat, which shows that, not only is he clueless, but he is even disadvantaged by the prior knowledge he thinks he has because that’s not even correct.
Even though nobody seems to say this is in fandom, the Weasleys definitely show signs of (unconsciously) seeing muggles as inferior. For example, while talking to Harry on the train, Ron says his mum has a second cousin who’s an accountant, but the family never talk about them. They act like that person doesn’t exist just because they are the one non-wizard in the family. Towards the end of the book, Ron makes fun of Hermione for forgetting she can start a fire without wood. It’s light-hearted and there’s no malice meant, but nevertheless he is making fun of the ignorance she has due to being muggleborn and demonstrating that because of the way he thinks, in this world he is privileged.
In real terms, the Weasleys are working-class, however, and not just because they are poor. Yes, being poor is a big part of it, but it’s more than that. I’m not sure about other countries, but in Britain having red hair and lots of children is a direct reference to a stereotype of catholic families, especially in Scotland, who often have red hair due to celtic roots and have large families due to not using contraception. Having lots of kids is also a fact of the working-class in general, as you might have seen if you looked at the photos I posted in my last blog. They do tend to have more children than they can afford (of course, I am generalising for clarity – no offense is meant). Linked in with this is their clothes. Due to being poor, working-class people, especially at the time JKR conceived HP, often wore used clothes or clothes that belonged to their siblings, and often they were damaged or worn out. When Malfoy says “red hair and hand-me-down robes, no need to ask who you are”, he could have easily said “working-class” or “catholic” instead of “a Weasley”.
In addition, when we first meet Ron his nose is dirty, which alludes to his not being quite as clean as others, and rather than having money to buy lunch, he has been given some dry sandwiches by his mother. He doesn’t like corned beef, but he’s got it probably because that’s what they can afford: it is a cheaper, processed meat. The fact that the sandwiches are dry shows that the bread was perhaps not fresh and neither was the corned beef. The state of the sandwiches and the fact that Ron doesn’t even like what she’s given him, show that Mrs. Weasley is not just poor, but also so busy that she isn’t on top of things at home. While Ron and Harry are talking on the train, Ron almost lets it slip that his parents can’t afford things but stops himself and gets embarrassed. As Harry points out, there’s nothing wrong with not being able to afford something, but Ron is under pressure from two things here. 1. To maintain his privilege in the wizarding world, he needs to downplay the fact of his poverty in front of other wizards, since privilege is usually so bound up with wealth. 2. He has the same kind of strong pride that the real world working-class had/have and doesn’t want people to know his family have anything not to be proud of. When you don’t have much, dignity is about all you’ve got.
Another element showing the Weasleys are real world working-class is the homemade Christmas presents, because they can’t afford to spend much. The battle inside Ron between being proud but not showing his lack of wealth is also evident when Fred and George pull him up on his reluctance to wear his Christmas jumper. However, he is proud, so ultimately he puts it on, despite his worries. It isn’t a coincidence that Fred and George are more consistently and vocally proud and unembarrassed about their real world working-class status than their siblings and that they also end up taking a non-academic route in life.
Percy is an interesting character to look at in class terms because he doesn’t have the pride that keeps Ron and the others close to the family. He is far more worried about losing privilege because of their real world working-class status. This will come up more in later posts about the other books, but in PS we see that Percy, unlike any of the other Weasley children, calls his parents ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Use of language is an important part of creating class boundaries, e.g. upper-class and some middle-class children in Britain call their parents ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Working-class and most middle-class children call their parents a short, monosyllabic name, usually, though not always, ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. In calling his parents ‘mother’ and ‘father’, Percy is showing that he is aware how differences in class are shown and he is aspiring to be ‘better’. He is ambitious and wants to work in government, and he knows it will be harder as an adult to profit from his privilege unless he has obvious markers of it. Therefore, he adopts vocabulary he knows the upper-class use. Also, Percy protests a lot more than Ron at having to wear his Christmas jumper. I feel sorry for him when Fred and George try to force him into it – they and Ron aren’t as ambitious as him. It isn’t such a big deal for them if they fail to get a good reputation with other pure-blood (i.e. upper-class) wizards as it is for Percy – he needs to make contacts and show he can mix with the people at the top, if his dreams of working in government are to come true. He does behave badly in later books, but it’s not as simple as “he’s an arsehole”. He is trying to stop himself being held back by his class.
The language the Weasleys use in general often portrays them as real world working-class. Unlike most other pure-blood families, who fit the upper-class stereotype of crazy names, the Weasleys’ children all have simple, salt-of-the-earth names that are common for working-class people. Even Arthur and Molly do. Ginny is an exception, of course. Perhaps Mrs. Weasley named her at the height of the ‘give your daughter a crazy name’ trend, where names like ‘Keisha’ and ‘Dixie’ were popular. They also don’t really use very sophisticated vocabulary or structures that would be called ‘posh’ in Britain. Their pronunciation and accent, however, is not written as dialect though. This might be due in part to them being from the south and the countryside – as I’ll discuss later, speech gets less standard the more north you go. It also suggests that they have aspirations beyond their class – affecting a ‘posher’ voice to give the impression of being ‘better’. Occasionally you see Ron say things like “nope”, which supports that idea that there is non-standard speech under their façade. Conversely, it reminds you that they are, by some standards (wizarding ones), upper-class, but they are choosing not to conform.
We don’t see their house until CoS, but once we do we find out that it is barely adequate for their needs, cramped and untidy. As I’ve said before, they also eat foods associated most with the working-class, such as boiled potatoes, pie and processed meats.
Hermione is almost the opposite of Ron. In the real world she is middle-class, probably upper middle. We know this not just because her parents are dentists. Her whole manner on the train screams it but it’s also somehow very subtle. It’s hard to articulate it. She is mature and disapproves of childish behaviour, meaning she has probably been brought up to behave reservedly. She is confident and assertive in a way suggesting she has lived a comfortable life without many things to worry about being criticised about. She clearly has faith of her convictions and doesn’t suffer from the self-doubt that characterises working-class children.
She is described as having a “sniffy” voice, which is another way of saying she talks to people with her nose in the air, as if looking down at them arrogantly. The way she unashamedly blurts out about how much she knows and can do, and also bluntly criticises Ron’s attempted spell, also screams privilege. Working-class people tend to be more cagey or modest about their knowledge and abilities, not wanting to seem superior to others and make them feel bad. Hermione clearly has no awareness of how her boasting could make others feel, especially if they are less fortunate. Higher class people tend to be like this because they don’t have much experience of mixing with people who haven’t had the same opportunities they have. The way she voices her shock that Harry hasn’t researched himself – he hasn’t had the education to know how to do that. The way she ignores what Ron’s saying and talks over him. Something about the way she words things, especially at first, before her status in the wizarding world is fully established, sounds posh.
It is Hermione who points out that Ron has dirt on his nose, even though he has been sitting with Harry for ages. Harry never mentioned it because as a working-class person it wasn’t as noticeable to him and he would have been less likely to want to criticise and make Ron feel self-conscious. Cleanliness and appearance are more important to Hermione, and she lacks the tact needed to talk nicely to an underprivileged child. The fact that she changes into her robes so early suggests that she is familiar with the process of travelling to boarding school and also that she values formality, which is another marker of the higher classes.
Her boasting on the train isn’t the only allusion to a good education. She is bookish to the point of considering huge tomes “light-reading”, understands how to use a library to do research and how to revise for exams, is bursting with independent enquiry and good at writing essays. To have these capabilities at 11 strongly suggest she went to a private primary school. Her possession of these skills is the reason she chastised Harry for not researching himself – it’s normal to her. But Harry, he’s 11 and went to his local state primary school; independent thought was stifled at home; he had no chance to do that. Her bookishness also shows that she understands that knowledge is power.
However, as a muggleborn, she is in the wizarding working-class. Moreover, she is acutely aware of it. She has had no prior access to magical knowledge. As soon as she found out she was going to Hogwarts she bought many books and spent the summer reading up and trying to offset that disadvantage. She often feels out of place and like an outsider. This is another dimension to her changing into robes early – she wanted to show she belonged. It’s also why she kept nagging everyone else to change – she had changed to fit in but it wasn’t working as no-one else looked like her yet. Her boasting on the train stemmed from anxiety as well as privilege. She wanted to convince everyone, including herself, that she merited her place in the wizarding world. As other fans have pointed out, this is why she works so hard and places school at the top of her priority list, and why she fears academic failure: she wants to prove she belongs, close the gap between herself and those with wizarding blood and to have access to the top echelons of society, because she knows from experience how important that is. When she says, “we could have all been killed – or worse, expelled”, she doesn’t just mean expelled from school, she means expelled from this layer of society, back into the muggle world, where she would be forever working-class in wizarding terms. Losing her chance to be able to slowly climb the social ladder is worse than death, because it would trap her at the bottom forever. While the first years are waiting to be sorted all Harry could hear was Hermione gabbing on about what she had been doing to prepare. She had prepared because she knew she was disadvantaged, and she was babbling because she was nervous because she felt like an outsider.
Getting on to the Dursleys and Harry then, notice how their mantra is “don’t ask questions”. Asking questions means independent thought and learning new things. The very concept of learning is discouraged in Harry all his life and his environment raises him to not be active learner – a working-class tendency. He is also working-class in other ways. He wears hand-me-down, worn clothes which don’t fit and he has no material wealth. His housing is poor at first – cramped, dark, inadequate and dusty, with insects. Moreover, he occupies such poor housing even though there is a perfectly good, empty room elsewhere in the house (like the large houses higher class people live in while the lower classes have to live in one or two rooms). He is under-fed and his health has been affected: he says he is small and skinny for age. He wears sellotaped glasses, therefore his access to healthcare is limited. He is made to do manual work around the house, such as cooking. His options in life are very limited: he can be in his cupboard, school or Mrs. Figg’s house. The Dursleys talk about him and how they manage his life like he’s too stupid to understand. Harry blushes when Hagrid says he will get him a birthday present – he is so used to not getting anything he feels awkward if he does. Since class relations are power relations, the Dursleys feel that if they keep Harry downtrodden enough they will stamp his abilities out of him. That’s also why Harry, when shopping in Diagon Alley, is looking forward to getting a wand most of all – wands are what gives wizards power. Harry senses that a wand, or power, is a key step to moving up the class ladder.
In wizarding world terms Harry’s class is unique. He has magical blood. His ancestry isn’t as pure as some – his mother was a witch, but she was a half-blood and his father’s name isn’t pure enough for the sacred 28. Harry isn’t as pure a pure blood as some might like, but is pure enough to be upper-class. Think of it like the main royal family and the rest of the upper-class. Some people are upper-class even though they are only distantly related to the monarch. They are all upper-class, but the monarch and their immediate family are even ‘better’ than the rest of the class – they are the top layer of society. So Harry is upper-class, then, and yet he has next to no power or privilege because he has been brought up as working-class (a muggle). He worries often about not knowing what’s going on at Hogwarts, for example. This shows how silly the entire class system is – Harry is not any better than others by nature. His upper-class blood is useless without the upbringing that goes with it. This is a reminder that upper-class blood does not equate to a divine birth right, however much the upper-class would like to think it does. He does have some privilege, however, once he re-enters the wizarding world. For one, he knows Dumbledore, who is in a position of power. Remember that knowing Dumbledore is not the same as just knowing a headmaster of any school. He is solely in charge of education in the wizarding world. People would have made him minister for magic if he had wanted. He has more power than any other wizard, by the books’ own admission.
The Dursleys themselves, in real world terms, are middle-class. Petunia looks down her nose at people, spies on the neighbours and worries about keeping up appearances. She also acts superior to Lily, even though we later find out that deep down, in wizarding terms, she feels very inferior. When talking to Dudley, she refers to herself and Vernon as ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ even when he is grown up, which is characteristic of middle-class families. Vernon works in management and likes shouting at people and seeming important. He also barks orders a lot, which shows he is used to having power over people. They compare Dudley competitively with other children. Whereas Harry is denied the basics, Dudley is entitled: he throws tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants, says “shan’t”, and generally demands material wealth. He also eats extremely well, as do they all. Vernon and Dudley’s weight contrasting with Harry’s is like Mr. Bumble contrasting with Oliver Twist. Dudley is going to a private, possibly public secondary school, whilst Harry is going to the local state school. You can tell Smeltings is at least private due the silly uniform, the fact that he has a place there – suggesting you have to be on some list, or pass some test - and the fact that the school encourages casual violence to build character, much as public schools do.
In some ways, the difference between Harry and Dudley is a good thing, Harry needed that start in life to become the person he is. It’s why he forms such loyal bonds with those important to him, such as Hagrid. It’s why he’s brave enough to make sacrifices. Harry understands muggles and muggleborns because he didn’t have a wizarding upper-class upbringing, and that is what makes him the hero of the story.
In wizarding world terms, however, the Dursleys are as low on the class scale as humans come. They live in constant fear of the power of those higher than them, and not without reason: their first contact with the wizards in almost 11 years ends in their child being badly hurt for wizards’ entertainment (Dudley’s pig tail), as well as being hunted across the country, driven out to sea and found anyway. Hagrid showed that, in comparison to the Dursleys, he is practically omniscient and omnipotent. And he chose to manage his relationship with them using power rather than negotiation.
Hagrid is a half-blood, so in wizarding terms he is middle-class (albeit lower). However, he is also half human, therefore he experiences racism. There is racism in Harry Potter, but it lies in how non-humans are treated, not in the death eaters’ attitudes to half-bloods and muggles. This is a good example of how racism interacts with class: Hagrid had access to education and even now has access to magical power and knowledge despite not technically having a wand. He has a job that gives him responsibility and commands some respect, and he has access to good food and healthcare if he wants it via the great hall and Madam Pomfrey. However, his race, i.e. half-giant, predisposed him to be taken advantage of by others: he got expelled because Riddle’s story in CoS was only too believable for a racist society. Compare that with Islamic extremism today – if a white child accused a half-Pakistani child of harming others at school, they would be believed. Luckily, his middle-class status saved him from being cast out, imprisoned even, because it meant that he knew the right people. If Dumbledore hadn’t spoken out for Hagrid, offered him a job, allowed him a comfortable enough existence at Hogwarts and allowed him continued access to the magical world via caring for magical creatures in the forest and looking the other way when he put his wand in umbrella, then Hagrid would have ended up living a very miserable life. Would he have done or got away with all that if Hagrid was muggleborn?
His attitudes also reveal his wizarding middle-class status. He is prejudiced against muggles, I don’t care what people say. When explaining that there are wizards to Harry he tells Harry that wizards are best off in hiding, away from the muggles and he encourages Harry to curse Dudley once he’s trained up. That attitude also highlights a key thing, that there is other evidence for in later books: wizards are scared of muggles. No matter how much power they have, they are a minority. The same is true of the real upper-class. They are scared that muggles will rise up and overthrow them, just as the real upper-class are (or perhaps were) scared the masses will. He also gets annoyed at the higher classes’ privilege in that way the person who wrote the book review I included in my class essay was: he slags off Slytherin, which favours pure-bloods, every chance he gets and tells Harry that there wasn’t a witch or wizard who was bad who wasn’t in Slytherin, which is not true. At that point he believed Sirius to have gone over and betrayed the Potters. Ok, it was Peter Pettigrew, but either way it was a Gryffindor. In saying those negative things to Harry about Slytherin he set up prejudice in Harry’s own mind. He made it sound like no-one good had been in Slytherin, which is also not true. He is angry that he does not have access to their privilege.
In real words terms Hagrid is working-class, though. His housing is small, basic and clearly inferior to the rest of the housing at Hogwarts. He works the land in exchange for being allowed to remain there, so in this respect it harks back to serfs serving the landed gentry under feudalism. At home he eats food which is less appealing and nutritious than is served in the great hall, and some of it he has because he has hunted it himself, e.g. stoat sandwiches. His appearance is “wild and ungroomed”. He has animals and miscellanea in his coat, which conjures up an image of Compo from Last of the summer wine, which was a TV comedy (though I think it was terrible) about some men in a northern town. Compo is a scruffy working-class man who keeps ferrets, which working-class people in the north used to put down their trousers for a laugh and see who could manage it the longest.
He also doesn’t see the same value in education as someone of a higher-class would: he tells Harry, Rin and Hermione they’re a bit keen to be in the library the day before the holidays. It doesn’t mean he is disparaging of education, but it does show that he can’t see why someone would enjoy books and learning new things. Going to the library is Hermione’s idea of a good time, but Hagrid only associates it with work. Both points of view are valid, but it shows how different they are due to class difference. His writing is untidy, which alludes to a low level of education and his language is most certainly encoded as working-class. In the British version, Hagrid’s speech is written as it sounds. His pronunciation and accent are working-class and arguably northern. He often misses the last letter off words: ‘an’ for ‘and’ ‘righ’ for ‘right’; he doesn’t articulate his /ooo/ sound ‘properly’; rather he flattens it: ‘ter’ for ‘to’ and ‘yeh’ for ‘you’. He also flattens and shortens some words and phrases in a way consistent with working-class speech, e.g. ‘me’ for ‘my’ and ‘gotta’ for ‘got to’. Moreover, some of his grammatical structures are colloquial and associated with working-class speech, e.g. “it’s them as should be sorry” instead of “it’s them who/that should be sorry” or, as an upper-class person would probably say, “it is they who should be sorry”. The only other person in PS to have their speech written as it sounds is the hotel (which is clearly some small, local shithole) owner in Cokeworth, who says “an ‘undred” instead of “a hundred”. This raises the interesting question of how such speech is translated to other languages, and to what extent translation could prevent you accessing the original class connotations. I have the Russian version of PS and it doesn’t contain, as far as I can tell as a non-native speaker of Russian, any markers that could tell you anything about Hagrid other than that he says “eh/er” a lot. And if you are a native speaker of an English other than British English, is Hagrid’s speech written like that? If so, do you read it and understand what it’s telling the reader about him?
Looking at Malfoy next, it is completely clear that Malfoy is upper-class in both worlds from the moment we meet him. In Madam Malkins he refers to his dad as ‘father’, which I’ve already talked about, he talks about bullying his dad to get things he wants, showing he is entitled and wealthy and Harry describes his voice as “drawling”. This adjective means that you drag out your vowels. In Britain, posher language is characterised by long vowels, whereas more colloquial speech has flattened vowels. There is potential here for Americans not to understand this, if in the American version of PS the word “drawling” is still used, because in American accents “drawl” is usually attributed to the south, which has connotations of sounding like a yokel. Here a drawl is very posh speech. This is why Harry dislikes Malfoy instantly, despite barely having exchanged a few sentences with him – he picked up on the huge class difference and it made him uncomfortable. Malfoy also says, “I say!” at one point, which is extremely posh. In fact that exclamation is purposely contrasted with Ron’s working-class translation,“oy!”, at one point. He also says, “would you mind moving out of the way?”, which is also very high-class. Most people would say, “can you move out of the way?” A lot of the speech that shows characters to be upper-class or working/middle-class is to do with subtle registers of English that are extremely hard to explain. Crudely, you could say that the lower someone is in class, the more minimalistic and blunt their speech tends to be. “Would you mind” is both longer than necessary and overly formal (polite) (though, of course, Malfoy meant it sarcastically).
We don’t know where Malfoy lives until later in the series, but we do know he is wealthy and privileged enough to have staff, since he views Hagrid as a servant. This sounds so prejudiced of him, but really he is just as much an outsider to the world of working as Hermione is to the world of magic. When he said, “he’s a sort of servant isn’t he?” he was betraying inherited class prejudice, yes, but he was also just a child trying to make sense of his surroundings using the only frame of reference he had.
In my opinion, something Malfoy says in PS makes it absolutely clear that the pure-blood/half-blood/muggleborn thing is about the British class system: “I really don’t think they should let the other sort in do you? They haven’t been brought up to know our ways (...) they should keep it in the old wizarding families. What’s your surname anyway?” This illustrates perfectly what I said in my essay about the upper-class being a case of which family you belong to. Malfoy believes that wizarding knowledge should be basically kept within the sacred 28, just as the British upper-class believes that access to their world should be basically kept amongst themselves. It’s why European royal families inter-married to the point of disease in the past. His comment “some wizarding families are better than others” means exactly the same thing. Read ‘some British families are better than others’.
Malfoy has the wealth associated with being upper-class and he rubs it in everyone’s face. He can’t empathise with less wealthy people until later in the series, when he realises some things are more important than money. Somehow, an upper-class family who isn’t living as an upper-class family should, like the Weasleys, is more unsavoury than a working-class family living in the same conditions, because the upper-class see their status as a divine birth right. For that reason, Malfoy is especially unpleasant to Ron. There is a large section of PS where Malfoy makes a snide remark about the Weasleys’ poverty every single page. He also calls them “riff-raff”, which is a real world insult. It means rubbish, the dregs of society, people whose only cause to live is to serve.
Then there’s Hogwarts itself and the staff who live there. Hogwarts is completely upper-class. For a start, consider all the stuff you need to buy just to go. I know there’s an access fund, but it’s implied you only get it if you have literally nothing, including parents. Imagine how much it is to buy all the books and equipment and uniform. You need to be wealthy to be able to buy all that and not worry about money. Secondly, the quality of stuff around the castle shows it’s upper-class, e.g. glittering gold plates and goblets and historical artefacts like suits of armour. It sounds like Buckingham Palace. Then there’s the fact that it’s a castle at all. Upper-class families reside normally in historic buildings. I mean could it get any posher than a literal castle? Then there’s the fact that you make a dramatic entrance over a darkened lake like you’re in a film noir. How pretentious is that?
Also, Harry is bowled over by how amazing the food is. As I’ve said before, most kids at school at that time were eating chips and turkey twizzlers every day. Wizards have special, private transport to take them to school, where they board for literally no reason other than class tradition because it would be just as easy to travel by floo powder every day. They are obsessed with sporting competitions. In normal muggle schools hardly anyone cares about sport. People like P.E. as a subject but they don’t all go and watch matches involving school teams and get emotionally involved. I have never once been aware of anyone going to a school sports fixture as a spectator. That alone might be hard for Americans to get their heads around.
The school houses is also a feature of posher schools. Some lower-class schools have them as well, but people don’t care about them in the same way. No-one feels like they are a part of their house, and they certainly don’t absorb their house as part of their identity later in life the way Hogwarts students do. Additionally, the ghosts we meet have upper-class titles: Sir and Baron. Moreover, there is the fact that the teachers call the students by their surnames, even sometimes with titles, e.g. “Mr Potter”. That is completely an upper-class thing. Traditionally, I think you used to get it at normal schools as well, but since well before HP was written, it has been a feature of solely top-end schools. It comes from the formality that marks the upper-class. There’s a moment in one of the books where McGonagall calls Harry ‘Harry’ while having a gentle, friendly conversation with him, and then immediately switches back to ‘Potter’ once she returns to strict, no-nonsense teacher mode, and Harry himself picks up on it. There’s also the use of people’s full first names, which also gives an air of formality, distance and authority. Dumbledore, for instance, refers to Ron as “Mr. Ronald Weasley”, which sounds ridiculous to the average ear. Hermione also habitually switches from ‘Ron’ to ‘Ronald’ when she is chastising him – this demonstrates that she knows how to create the sort of authority and formality required to construct a superior power relation. Then there’s the sheer fact of the pretentious Latin incantations. Many working-class kids would struggle to remember even the most basic of incantations. In fact, the kids coded as real world working-class often do struggle to do well at spells: Ron, Harry, Neville for instance. Hermione, who is real world middle-class, has had the sort of education that predisposes one to be able to remember foreign vocabulary. She probably even did Latin at her previous school whereas Harry certainly won’t have gone anywhere near it at his primary school.
Dumbledore is immediately marked as upper-class (which of course he is because he’s head of the wizards) by the fact that on the Hogwarts letters they list his numerous titles and positions at the top. Just in case you were in any doubt about how much power he has. And then there’s eccentric speech he gives that causes Harry to ask if he’s mad. Of course he’s mad, he’s the head toff. I talked in my class essay about the stereotype that upper-class people are eccentric.
The fact the teachers are called professor shows how upper-class it is too. No-one in state schools, or even private schools to my knowledge, does that. It’s hyper-formal and posh. British schoolchildren call their teachers ‘miss’ or ‘sir’ or their title and name, i.e. Mr Dumbledore. There’s also the fact that Dumbledore is the one who makes all the profound, philosophical statements in the books: he has had the education and mental energy to think about life. One of these statements is that having all the money and life you could ever want is not such a wonderful thing. OK, I get what he’s saying but, still, that’s easy to say when you have a lot. If he was poorer and hadn’t stayed healthy into old age, would he have thought that? Probably not. I already mentioned that Dumbledore says “Mr Ronald Weasley”, but in the same sentence he says, “Misters Fred and George Weasley”, “Miss Hermione Granger” and the word “lavatory”, all of which are very posh. I’ve never met a working-class person who says ‘lavatory’. Everyone knows what it means, but most people would say ‘toilet’, or maybe ‘loo’.
Let’s look at Snape next. In Harry’s first potions lesson Snape chastises the class for not writing down what he was saying. That’s because he knows first-hand how education can open doors and change who you are. We don’t know this yet in PS, but it completely incredible he has got this far in life. He has done so largely due to curiosity, gathering information, making notes of new things, and using it all to work things out and say the right things to the right people. He knows that knowledge and skills honed through practise are power.
He knows Harry has been living with middle-class relatives, that he is the descendant of a rich wizard and is famous. He also knows Petunia, although we don’t know it yet. He does not know that Harry didn’t know he was a wizard, or that Harry has been treated as a third-class citizen. He also doesn’t know what Harry knows about him. It is logical to assume that Petunia might have mentioned him, and if she had she would have done so disparagingly (she does do this actually, but later in the series). While he is giving his rousing, poetic potions speech at the start, Harry is talking when he shouldn’t be. Snape interprets this as arrogance. His whole “fame isn’t everything” moment, where he questions Harry about stuff he couldn’t possibly know is meant to be a lesson in humility. Snape is saying ‘I might be under you in class but I am the one with the power now’. He is also championing hard work - Snape wants the other kids to know that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done so far; as far as he is concerned it’s what you do with the opportunity to learn and how hard you work that matters. It’s unfortunate that he misjudged Harry and knocked his confidence, but it shouldn’t be seen as such a big deal. If I had been in that class I would have felt reassured. When people get worked up about Snape’s behaviour here, it’s because they don’t realise or understand that he and Harry did not start off in life equal. Nor, indeed did many of the kids in that class. Americans misjudge that scene because they are brought up believing that all men are born free and equal in right. Even if that idea doesn’t translate into reality in the US, the sentiment is there. People have it etched into their brains. Here, it is very different. The class system means that everyone knows that people are not born free or equal in right. To Snape, Harry represents a layer of society that wanted to keep him unequal; to stop him doing well for himself. It’s an irony that the death eaters, the purists of the upper-class world, allowed Snape access to their privilege in a way that the Marauders, who champion muggleborns, did not. I will talk about that in a later post.
Snape seems to get on with Filch, which suggests he feels comfortable around him in a way he doesn’t with everyone else. Filch is certainly encoded as working-class – he works hard doing manual jobs and nobody cares. It’s treated as laughable if students make a mess or damage something People make fun of his appearance. He’s a squib. I always feel ill at ease reading bits with Filch in them. I feel like he is mocked for his lack of privilege and treated like a slave. Snape seems to be more at ease with him than he is with others, so that, to me, suggests they have similar background. Snape’s grouchy attitude stems in part from knowing he is out of place in terms of class. He is defensive and stressed as a result.
The way Snape talks also carries class coding. Working-class people tend to be quite abrupt and direct in their speech, especially in the north, which some people take for a bad temper or bad manners. In fact I would say from experience that the further north you go, the more blunt and brutally honest the speech, and the more likely people are to mock you. Usually this mocking is down to showing a lack of formality in order to construct openness and familiarity, but it is frequently misunderstood. They call a spade a spade and don’t bother with the subtleties that make cushion their opinions and ideas. It is the reason Scottish comedians tend to be more caustic than English ones. To me, nearly all of Snape’s grouchy-sounding comments stem from this tendency. He is speaking to the kids the way people spoke to him when he was a kid. His manner stands out massively in the minds of most of the Hogwarts pupils because it is so out of place, not because he is rude and the other teachers aren’t, but because he has working-class roots and the others don’t. He has since moved up the ladder, so he affects speech that is more befitting to his position as a Hogwarts teacher, as well, for example he appears to have standard pronunciation. He also consciously uses more sophisticated vocabulary than is natural to him. We see this in his opening speech in Harry’s first potions lesson. He gives the poetic speech about what you can learn in potions, pauses, then slips back into his natural speech: “if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach”. The insult, the contraction ‘aren’t’, the quantifier ‘bunch’ are all markers of lower-class speech. He probably couldn’t help doing it – the sophisticated, well-spoken professor act is indeed an act. (In fact, the extremity of the ‘working-class playing upper-class’ act is the reason he is so good at occlumency and spying – he has had so much practise pretending to be something he’s not and blocking out undesirable traits that it comes naturally.) He also, unconsciously, was trying to construct an air of relaxed ease in the classroom: when people talk like that, it makes him feel at ease. I know Harry was also raised working-class, but it was a middle-class household, so his experience of speech isn’t exactly the same, and also, crucially, Harry is from Surrey – a lot further south than Snape is from. As I said, that abrupt, sarcastic, bluntness increases the further north you go.
The image of Snape spitting on the ground at the end of the quidditch match, to me, makes him appear uncouth and socially inappropriate, which plays (negatively) on his working-class background.
When Harry and Hermione go after the stone, Snape’s puzzle is not based in magical knowledge. It’s a logic puzzle accessible by everyone. This is a big deal, in my opinion. A muggle could get through that puzzle. That shows, firstly, that he doesn’t value inherent privilege and membership of the upper-class, but genuine intelligence, curiosity and enquiry, spanning all classes (and races – a house-elf could have done it). Secondly, that he is still thinking like a muggle. He is a great wizard, he used to be a death eater and he is a teacher at the poshest school in Britain; you would think he would have started to embody upper-class, but instead he is still soaked with muggle, or working-class attributes. He has moved up the social ladder, but it can’t be done cleanly, with clearly defined lines. That one act of setting a non-magical puzzle says everything. Hermione is thrilled with it because, probably for the first time all year, she doesn’t feel like an outsider. The puzzle is just as accessible to her as it is to anybody. That is great teaching, even if it’s questionable obstacle-setting!
We don’t find out much about Quirrell but we know he is upper or upper middle-class because he travelled around the world. Going on a gap year and travelling the world tends to be something only wealthy and culturally experienced people want to do and can afford to do. In Deathly Hallows, it is mentioned that Dumbledore and Doge were planning to do this and JKR called it ‘the grand tour’. This is a real historical, upper-class concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour.
A few words on Diagon Alley now. The goblins are interesting. It’s been said goblins are a jewish stereotype, which is definitely true (though not intentional by JKR I am sure) and they face racism. It’s also true, however, that in the real world we don’t like bankers, and that’s linked to class too. It feels like bankers are upper-middle class arseholes trying to get as close as possible to the top echelons of power by making the working-class ever poorer. I think that’s part of the reason Gringotts is so splendid and ornate on the surface, yet dark, dangerous, unpleasant and even mysterious on the inside – because it reflects real bankers, or at least the image we have of them: rich and polished to look at but nasty on the inside. Also regarding Diagon Alley, Harry takes a faint dislike he can’t put his finger on to Ollivander. It’s because Ollivander remembers the ancestry of his wands. It’s a reference to the upper-class using blood (which is the same thing as ancestry and surname) to define their social status but Harry is too young to understand what it is that bothers him. The moment Hagrid and Harry arrive back in the muggle world after shopping they are eating burgers on plastic seats. This image of cheap food and furniture marks their transition from upper-class (the wizarding way) to working-class (the muggle way).
We see another example of how wizarding blood is a metaphor for class in Neville’s experiences. Neville is a pure-blood and his family is on the sacred 28. He has magical privilege just like Ron. His parents famously served in the closest thing the wizarding world has to a military, which echoes the tradition of real upper-class men serving in the British armed forces. Yet, by contrast, he has little power. He isn’t encoded as working-class in the same way Ron is, but we know that his status is questionable because he isn’t very good at magic. His blood is pure, but is it healthy? His family were so appalled by the idea that he might not have ‘healthy’ wizarding blood that they abused him and put his life at risk to force the truth about his blood out. He isn’t a squib, but he isn’t good at wand magic. His skills lie in herbology, which lacks the power associated with wands and also alludes to working the land. He is descended from pure-bloods so he was unquestionably born into the upper-class. The question is, does he have the qualities the upper-class use to maintain power over the lower classes? For, whilst membership of the upper-class is defined by blood (in both the real and wizarding world), that status is simply ceremonial if you do not have the power relations that go with it. Since Neville does not have what it takes to have such power relations, he is an embarrassment and loses a considerable amount of his privilege. Squibs suffer a similar fate. To me, a squib is a member of the upper-class who dramatically don’t fit in, or are unable to exude some of the qualities critical for power relations.
(This is going to sound weird, but I have often felt that Neville is loosely based on Prince Harry. In case you don’t know, people have always speculated that Prince Charles might not really have been Harry’s father because he looks so different from him and so similar to another man Diana knew, James Hewitt. He doesn’t really behave like royals traditionally do and has always been kind of normal seeming. He goes drinking with mates, goes to parties and generally interacts with anyone. He doesn’t care as much about putting on a persona for the public, sometimes doing stupid things in front of the press and he also did badly at school. He grew up while the HP books were being written, and of course by the time JKR was writing CoS his mother had died. All that has always felt to me quite comparable with Neville not really fitting in where he was supposed to and not having his parents at home and not doing well at school, but then turning out to be one of the most decent of the lot of them.)
If, as I believe, the blood status of wizards is a metaphor for the class status – pure/upper, half/middle and muggle/working – then several interesting questions are raised. Firstly, to what extent are characters aware if their classes, both wizarding and real, and how does that effect their lives. Secondly, was the metaphor intentional? What was JKR trying to say? Or what does it say about her, and by extension about the average British person. Thirdly, why do so many characters have a real world class which contrasts, rather than parallels, their wizarding world class? And what of those who do have parallel classes? Finally, and most importantly, since class relations are power relations, what significance is there of Voldemort’s proclamation that, “there is no good and evil, only power”? These are questions that I will attempt to answer over later posts, one for each book, though it will be quite a while before I have time to write more.
Brace yourselves A very long essay (like, a thesis) on the British class system with references to Harry Potter Part 2
Let’s continue. Have another comedy clip showcasing how stupid the upper-class is meant to be, to get you going:
A side point: almost all the British actors celebrated by Tumblr went to private or public school and are upper-class, or upper middle-class.Here’s a buzzfeed quiz to give your brain bracing time for part 2. I got it right for the exact same reason the top commenter did! Have a look once you’ve done it! That’s another blog post in itself!
As I mentioned in my post about food in Harry Potter, food is intricately bound up with class. Working-class people have tradtionally had a poor diet, through poverty and lack of education, and also because of the impact of the Second World War, when food was very scarce. Where I am from people were still dying of malnutrition when my dad was teenager, so in the late 1960s. Working-class people then used to cook with beef dripping as they couldn’t afford other fats, and everyone on his street shared the same pan of dripping. I am from a former industrial town with two-up, two-down terraced workers’ houses, just like Snape, so we can assume that when Snape was a child he experienced similar levels of malnutrition around him.
Things are much better now, but in the last century people used to grow a lot of their own food if they had outdoor space, steal or not eat. They could afford to buy very little and then only the cheapest foods, which are often the least nutritious. It meant that they didn’t eat big or regular meals and that there was very little variety in their diets, and no treats. JKR has a story about trying to buy a tin of baked beans, and nothing else, from the supermarket, for her daughter’s meal, and having to put it back because she didn’t have enough money. Then, tins of beans were like 10p.
When my parents were at school, all kids used to get a small carton of milk for free at breaktime to make sure they were getting enough calcium. In the 70s, Thatcher (may she rot in hell) was education secretary (this was before she was prime minister) and she stopped the milk provision, which meant that many working-class kids stopped getting a key part of their nutrition. She was too disconnected from working-class people to understand, or care, that she was taking away critical nutrition. It was a political and social scandal and she got the nickname ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’.
Best ever comment about that evil bitch is from the comedian Frankie Boyle, who had much to say about her, but the best was on the subject of her funeral: “give everyone is Scotland a shovel and we’ll dig a hole so deep we’ll deliver her to satan personally.”
Since we don’t finish school here until after 3, schools provide a lunch, which most people have to pay for (or you can take your own). The canteens in secondary schools are usually far too small and, certainly until very recently, when Jamie Oliver started a war on school food, served repetitive, low nutrient, processed rubbish. Until the turn of the century you would be lucky to get anything other than hot dogs, turkey twizzlers, chicken nuggets, chips and pizza, and when I say pizza, I mean a square chunk of dense bread with cheese and tomato purée on it. And cake. Now schools usually do at least pasta, salad and sandwiches as well. The main problem is budget. These schools are state-maintained and are given an allowance to spend on each thing. When Jamie Oliver started his campaign against poor quality school food, the school he worked with had a budget of 13p for every child. The ‘better’ the school the better the food: public schools, whose budget comes from fees, serve the kind of food Hogwarts did. Some kids, i.e. those from very low income families, are allowed a free school meal, and for many it is their only meal of the day, even now. I work in a working-class school and trust me, at least half never get a breakfast, and many have a sandwich for the evening meal. I know one boy who is given a Nutella sandwich every evening and that is all. Theresa May, who is a wannabe Thatcher, just announced recently that she is thinking of scrapping the free school meals program. It would be a disaster for the poorest kids.
Buying cheap food isn’t the only issue. Since working-class people work so much they are too tired and busy to cook proper meals, so they often settle for ready-meals, fast-food and takeaways. Lack of education has an impact as well. People eat food for taste and convenience alone, not fully grasping that they need to eat certain things to be healthy, and as a result many go under-nourished or become obese.
There is also the issue of how to cook things – not just in terms of lack of education, but in lack of facilities. Some people don’t have a hob, or an oven, maybe even just a microwave.
Hydration is an issue as well. A lot of working-class people don’t realise how much water they need to drink to be healthy, so they are dehydrated, and their kids are as well, so they don’t have very good concentration, so they don’t do as well at school, and the cycle of lack of education continues.
Middle and upper-class people have the money, time and mental space to buy and make, or have made for them, varied, healthy foods. They have the education to eat and drink the right things. This means they are healthy and can concentrate at school or at other things and become successful.
Housing and class
Where you live is defined by, and indicative of, class. I am simplifying here, but in a nutshell, the north of England and a lot of Scotland and Wales is predominantly working-class. The further south you go, the higher the dominant class. This is because it was in the north that mills and factories were built in the Industrial Revolution, and because coal mines were up here. Many towns were built purposely to house workers of a certain factory, mill or mine. They all look the same, just with different bricks: terraced rows of small, dark houses with 2 rooms upstairs and 2 downstairs. Many have since been extended by owners to include an indoor bathroom, which would originally have been outside in an outhouse. A few people still had outdoor toilets in the 90s. The film Billy Elliot is an excellent overview of such towns and housing. If you haven’t seen it and you are interested in class, you should definitely watch it. Later on, social housing was built in the form of semi-detached houses and large blocks of flats, but detached houses have only recently become a thing for anyone other than the upper-class.
Working-class people end up living in the worst housing. Many of them rent rather than own, and that’s not as good here as in the rest of Europe. Tenants don’t have many rights and there is little regulation on landlords. Many people, right now, are living in slum housing. I am talking no flooring, unpainted walls, no heating, filth everywhere. You can either rent from a private landlord, who can do as little as he likes to make you comfortable, pretty much, or you can rent from your local council. Council housing is usually either semi-detached houses or in bigger cities flats in large blocks. The abysmal state of blocks of flats has recently been all over the news in the form of the Grenfell Tower block fire, where many people died and have had to be rehomed, simply because cheap cladding had been used on the outside of the building and the fire travelled up it like it was tissue paper. Many blocks have this same cladding on. The residents there had complained about safety many times but had been ignored. To make matters worse, there is a serious shortage of council housing across the country because fucking Thatcher (again) introduced a scheme where council tenants could buy their home if they lived in it for so long, and they could buy it for a crazily cheap price. Loads of people took advantage of it by buying their home for next to nothing, waiting a few years then selling it on for a massive profit, but of course that meant all the fucking social housing disappeared. My sister-in-law got divorced around 12 years ago and she went to the council to put her name on the list to get somewhere to live and the list was so long it took 5 years to offer her anything, and then it was the shittiest house imaginable, because that’s all they’ve got left.
They also ruin what little housing is left by a) putting loads of criminals and drug dealers etc in one place, so you end up with some estate from hell and b) putting foreign immigrants all in one place, so you end up with people who came here for asylum from either side of a civil war living next to each other, or ghettoising them so that they are abandoned and lost.
In Scotland working-class housing was, until very recently, tenement buildings, which were sort of communal flats. Families had their own rooms but had to share some of them. The stairs and communal areas were like something out of a Victorian workhouse. Slums. Here are some pictures, with info, of working-class housing in Glasgow between the 40s and 60s. Glasgow is especially woeful. I actually love the place, but there’s no denying it has been hell on earth for much of its history. I remember doing a geography project at school (mid 90s) and discovering that the life expectancy in the most working-class part of Glasgow was 54. It has gone up since, but is still below the national average: all the factors I have discussed combine to literally knock years off people’s lives.
Regarding the rows of terraces built to house industrial workers I mentioned earlier, this is exactly the sort of place Snape grew up. Here’s an example. They would have had a sitting room and kitchen downstairs and 2 bedrooms upstairs, with an outside toilet, while he was a child, and certainly no plumbed in bath or shower.
Upper-class people live in detached houses, usually historic ones like castles and former estates. They usually have multiple houses.
Middle-class housing is varied depending on whereabouts on the continuum people are. It ranges from townhouses, to large, nicer semi-detached houses, to detached houses to mansions. A key point I want to make here is that it is totally normal to have the lowliest of working-class housing, such as in the picture, and then a few minutes’ walk away, a middle-class area. Upper-class housing is always considerably separate from the other two, but working and middle are near each other. I saw a ridiculous post a few weeks ago claiming that Lily must have been poor because she lived close enough to Snape that Petunia knew who he was, but that is utter rubbish – that person can’t have been British. Nearly all towns have slummy areas and middle-class areas, and our towns are small. Also, he was doing that accidental wandless magic kids do, so no doubt he had a reputation for being a weirdo.
The mere fact that Petunia criticises Snape’s clothes proves beyond doubt that she wasn’t working-class, as in those days, everybody working-class was wearing hand-me-down clothes like that, therefore another “poor” person wouldn’t have noticed/mentioned. The punk movement’s fashion of safety pins in the 70s came about due to the simple fact that the working-class were wearing such old clothes that they were falling apart and they could only fix them with safety pins. As Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols said, “we had to use them – the arse was hanging off your jeans so you just had to shove a few safety pins in it.” So Petunia wasn’t poor or she would have empathised with Snape, not criticised him.
It crops up everywhere and all the time
By complete coincidence yesterday I saw a review on Amazon that completely illustrates how notions of class pervade our conscious in Britain. It was a review for a book about Freud and feminism, an academic work. It was the only negative review amongst quite a few positive ones. I’ll let you read it then I’ll discuss:
I bought a copy for a penny on Amazon and that was over spending. I have worked in the mental health field for over thirty years and have trained as a psychotherapist and am very well acquainted with Freud's work. I was shocked by how badly this author described his ideas. If I didn't already know what she was talking about I wouldn't have had a clue about what she was saying. She really seems to be someone who wants to make a somewhat complicated subject even more complicated. I stopped at the end of her second chapter as I just couldn't take anymore. I wouldn't describe her as providing the reader with an explanation, in fact one could be forgiven for viewing her writing as an attempt at deliberate confusion or if not confusion an attempt to make what Freud had written about sexuality as even more difficult to understand than it was. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised by this. The author is essentially taking a Lacanian position towards Freud, a position that upper middle class complicated academics have taken up. Unfortunately these are people who really don't want to accept what Freud actually wrote and instead want to impose on his writings their own wishes for what they would have preferred him to write i.e. that the unconscious is structured like a language and that word representations exist at this level, despite Freud's own writing that this isn't so. What amuses me is that author purports to be a Marxist. Given the way she writes it's clear enough that she wants to keep the uneducated working class at quite a distance. This book is in my opinion pretentious upper middle class trash. I'm giving my copy to Oxfam.
Firstly, the fact that it’s a stream of consciousness rant should tell you enough to know that it’s not trustworthy. The most important thing, though, is the linking of academic analysis with being upper middle-class. The reviewer has taken a stance on psychoanalytical ideas that is typical of the science side of the discipline. They clearly think it’s a waste of time to look for meaning beyond practical application, e.g. for literary analysis, and something only someone with time and money would do.
It goes deeper than that as well. There’s a clear derogatory link between academia and being upper middle-class and the reviewer is offended because, as a result of their lower class, they don’t understand the book. They have tried to blame the author, by throwing around intellectual names like Lacan and Marx, and showing that they are the sort of high-standing citizen that gives to charity, but ultimately, the subject matter of the book is beyond them. They have taken this to be a result of class hindrances, which it probably is. The reviewer isn’t educated or cultured enough to understand the book. This annoys them and so they are attacking those who are.
There is a perception, which is hard to explain, that the most difficult and annoying class is the middle-class. Part of this arises out of the fact that the middle-class is such a long continuum. People who are middle-class often have delusions of being very high class, even though they probably started as working-class. They are constantly competing with each other within the class. This review is, to me, a good example of that, because it’s obvious that the reviewer is lower middle-class themselves. They have a profession, they are educated at higher education level and they are reading books about Freud for fun. They are proud to be middle-class. But then this book comes along and makes them feel alienated from their own demographic. It makes them feel like an outsider; they don’t have the power to understand the book. So they attack the author for daring to show that they aren’t so high up after all.
The perception of middle-class people of being stuck-up also links to a perception that some upper-class people are easy-going and easier to get on with for working-class people than the middle-classes. The idea being, no doubt, that the upper and working classes both understand their place, they are content with who they are. But the middle-classes are always wanting to keep with the Joneses, to get better, to compete with you. Here are 3 comedy clips that illustrate my point. The first is stand-up comedy by Billy Connolly, who’s about as working-class as you can get (it’s just audio), and the others are from a 90s sketch show (bonus: the second one has the actor who plays Mr Weasley in it!)
I always felt like Gryffindor was a bit like the annoying middle-class guy comparing you to him. I can just hear Gryffindors saying “I couldn’t help but notice that I am considerably more perfect/popular than yooouuuuwww”!
In conclusion, feel free to dislike Severus all you want, but if you could stop calling him racist I would really appreciate it.
To finish (at last, I hear you cry) here is a Brief suggested watch/listen list if you interested in representations of class. They should all be accessible online.I am happy to answer questions about any of them.
TV-
Blackadder, but only series 2-4, 1 is shit (Rowan Atkinson plays a middle-class man stuck between the stupid working and upper-classes)
Harry Enfield and Chums, Little Britain (both sketch shows attacking all classes)
Only fools and horses (2 working-class brothers try to make a living by selling dodgy goods at the market)
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (you will need subtitles – it’s about a group of guest workers in Germany and the main characters are geordies, which means from Newcastle)
The fact that these are all comedies says it all about our views of the situation.
Films – Billy Elliot (2000)
Pride (2014) (both are about the miners’ strike in the 80s, which is the most important event in recent working-class history, and both deal with LGBT themes)
East in East (1999) (about the added struggles for working-class immigrants)
The Full Monty (1997) (about unemployed working-class men stripping for money – it’s a comedy!)
Music – the album ‘Different class’ by Pulp, a band from Sheffield, a very working-class city (which I happen to love as I went to university there) which suffered terribly from the collapse of British industry since basically all the steel was made there. The film ‘The Full Monty’ is set there.
Other – any stand-up comedy (the working-class art) by the comedians Peter Kay or (pre-2000s) Billy Connolly.
I prefer to respond to comments with full posts rather than in comments as my autism makes me quite systematic and I struggle to follow multiple threads of conversation at once!
Class and race
Firstly, regarding the rather blurred lines between class and race that come out of Foucault’s ideas about racism, i.e. that racism is not simply socio-political, ideological discrimination but rather a form of government that is designed to manage a population:
The fact that membership of the upper-class is defined almost exclusively by blood does absolutely create a link between the abstract concept of class and the scientific fact of biology. Automatically, the majority of people are excluded from the upper-class due to having the wrong biology, i.e. the wrong blood. In that sense, the upper-class (though not the middle-class) constitutes a biopower in Britain. Since this all started so long ago in history when there were few coloured people in Britain, this automatically means that the blood which determines upper-class status belongs to white people. It also means that the concept of class, at least for the upper-class, includes a notion of being a race apart from the rest of us; biologically separate.
However, firstly, that race apart doesn’t have its foundations in skin colour. The upper-class didn’t envisage themselves as biologically separate in order to manage a population of coloured people; they did it to manage the masses of Britain (and to a lesser and less clear extent, Europe) and managing the masses is still the reason for having that class structure today. This means that, whilst it is racist in the sense that it excludes coloured people by default, it isn’t racist in the sense that excludes them because of ideological discrimination against skin colour or other racial features related to biology, such as eye shape. In a way, if you imagine the upper-class to be a separate race from the lower classes, that in itself turns the lower classes into a race, meaning that, in class terms, everyone is the same race no matter what biological features they have.
Secondly, if you remember, I said that it’s almost impossible to become upper-class, except by marriage and, to lesser degree to become a Lord. Those options are technically open to anybody. Race doesn’t theoretically stop you doing that. I have linked to an article about a Nigerian woman marrying some arsehole-sounding toff! She is the first, but nevertheless shows that it’s possible. Please note that the article is from a right-wing newspaper and comes across as very patronising. It also calls the woman black when she isn’t. She is coloured but not black. Saying black here isn’t racist but there is a problematic tendency for some people to conflate ‘black’ and ‘not white’, which lumps everybody who isn’t white into one big group as washes away their individual stories, which is obviously terrible. I have only included the article to show that the upper-class is open to people of different races, in the same limited ways it is open to others. I don’t read that paper – it just pops up on google often if you are looking for class related things because it’s a middle-class sort of paper and, as I said before, the middle-classes are kind of obsessed with class!
Thirdly, although the upper-class is formed via blood, the others aren’t, so your sense of class perception comes from all those other things I mentioned in the original essay. There is nothing biological or official which could mark a person as working or middle-class. Class for working and middle-class people is a mixture of traits, experiences and values. It is a frame of mind, even. Something that runs deep within you and touches every bit of you. You can taste it, even.
It is absolutely true that Britain has problems with racism. Some people’s racist attitudes, as well as the sort of institutionalised racism you get in all western countries, limits and restricts opportunities for coloured people and makes life extra hard for them. There are many coloured middle-class people though. Struggles due to racism and struggles due to class aren’t the same thing. Racism is an attitude; class isn’t. Race is a group within society, rather a layer of society. It’s true that people’s experiences of racism will be different depending on their class, but this difference isn’t big between working and middle-class, and there will also be experiences of racism that people have across all classes. The fact the woman in the article is the first marchioness (the wife of a marquis) is due to the fact that society is starting to tackle racism. It hasn’t happened before because western society is racist, not because class and racism is the same thing. She still had to be wealthy for it to happen, but then so would anyone, no matter what race they were.
Class and gender
Again, there is discrimination based on gender. Again, gender is a distinct ‘group’ within society. It’s true that people’s experiences of gender discrimination will be different depending on their class, but this difference isn’t big between working and middle-class, and there will also be experiences of gender discrimination that people have across all classes.
It’s interesting to note that the idea of upper-class status being defined by your surname gives a new dimension to how changing your surname changes/destroys your identity: women can move classes if they change their surname when they get married, and that will, in turn, change who they are, much more deeply than the way your identity is usually changed when you get married.
Class and health
Inevitably, working-class people are in poorer health than others. We have the NHS here, thank god, so everyone can get decent healthcare. However, the NHS is not that good. The people usually are, but the system isn’t. The NHS is a government body, which means major decisions and funding come from the upper-class or upper middle-class, since they are the only ones who can the contacts required to get into government. The government interferes with research, blocks the release of medications approved by other countries and generally makes life difficult for NHS employees by giving them onerous paperwork or giving them no choice but to work triple shifts with no break. They also dramatically under-fund it. Hospitals have poor facilities, too few beds and very long waiting lists and doctors sometimes hold back prescribing none-essential medicine because of the cost. Moreover, you do have to pay for the dentist and optician. In fact, it is at breaking point at the moment. We have our most right-wing government in years and a of people (including me) believe it won’t be long until it is scrapped. This isn’t the place to get on about that, but believe me, it would be a socio-economic disaster.
A few anecdotes, as ever:
- One of my mum’s colleagues has a detached retina. It was diagnosed by her optician 3 weeks ago. They sent her immediately to hospital, but she couldn’t go to her local hospital as, like nearly all hospitals serving smaller towns and more rural areas, it is too basic to deal with almost everything. So she had to have a journey of an hour. The hospital she was sent to (my local hospital – I live near a city) decided that they, too, didn’t have the equipment/expertise/staff to deal with it and sent her to a hospital in the nearest major city, so she had another journey of an hour. That hospital agreed they could operate but they couldn’t fit her in for nearly 2 weeks, so she would have to go home and come back then. So she travelled home (2 hours). They called and postponed the appointment due to lack of staff not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES. She has still not had the operation. If her retina moves again at all, she will be blinded in that eye. She isn’t allowed to even get out of bed in case sitting up moves it.
- My uncle recently had an illness that caused him to have severe pains in the region of his appendix. He went to hospital (the same hospital my mum’s colleague couldn’t go to). They didn’t even have the expertise to diagnose appendicitis so he was sent to my local hospital, like my mum’s colleague. After arriving at the second hospital he was left for 9 hours before he was seen to. If it had been appendicitis he would have probably died. Luckily it wasn’t. Since there was a chance he might have had to have surgery to remove the appendix, during those 9 hours he wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything. Once they established what it was, they brought him some toast (bearing in mind he hadn’t eaten in at least 12 hours, if you count the time he spent at the original hospital), which is inadequate enough, but, they served it in a bowl, because they had no plates. Honestly.
I could give many more examples. Almost everyone here has got numerous horror stories about the NHS. We do support them and working-class people especially and fervently behind the NHS, because without it we wouldn’t have healthcare at all. If it goes we genuinely fucked.
Higher class people, being most often wealthy, can afford private healthcare, so they don’t realise and/or don’t care that basic healthcare is so inadequate.
There’s also the issue of how living a working-class life affects your health. You work harder and longer than some people. You don’t get a good diet. You live in housing that might be cold, damp, cramped or have maintenance issues you can’t afford to fix, or your landlord doesn’t fix, like missing roof tiles. That all takes its toll on the body. If your personal hygiene isn’t great you might develop skin problems. A combination of not cleaning your teeth well and eating too much processed food, combined with the fact we do have to pay for dental care, might mean you have bad teeth. I have 4 teeth missing, for instance. I know someone who does voluntary work at a homeless shelter, and they have to make soup or stew and that’s it because the people who eat there have no teeth. They have all rotted and fallen out. It is possible for middle-class to end up homeless and in need of such help, because class isn’t all about wealth, as I’ve said, but at least they could access a decent diet if it was provided by charity because they are likely to have decent teeth.
Then there’s mental health. Mental health services are woefully inadequate anyway, but if you are working-class then the system is designed to keep you working, so you might be accused of whining, or have your illness ignored completely if there’s no physical evidence of it. The people around you are likely to be unsympathetic towards weakness, especially if you’re a man, because working-class people can have a ‘shut up and get on with it’ kind of attitude. You might struggle to get and keep a job, which makes you even poorer. Your life is likely to predispose you to depression, since you are working so hard, not getting much back and have little time for yourself. Since you have no choice but to work and the system won’t help you much via support or disability benefits you might look for other ways to cope, such as alcohol or crime. You won’t have the time, money or energy to get out and do much with people so your relationships will be affected, which also can lead to depression.
You are likely to live in a more urban area and won’t have the time, energy, money or transport to get into nature, so you probably don’t get enough fresh air, exercise and relief from stress. That affects your physical and mental health, and also stops you accessing your own country.
My next post will be about the 2 pillars of class in Harry Potter - the wizarding world class system and the muggle/real world one.
To finish, here are 2 pictures of working-class areas in Britain around the time Snape was born. The first is the town I grew up in. I’m not sure where the second is. The photographer thought possibly Birmingham, in the midlands.The silhouette (although it’s a girl I think) reminded me of Snape!
Brace yourselves A very long essay (like, a thesis) on the British class system with references to Harry Potter Part 1
OK, I did this already. It’s long, but stick with it anyway. And watch the videos.
In Britain, people are broadly split into 3 social groups: working-class, middle-class and upper-class. The factors which determine which class you belong to are varied and complex, but in a nutshell include: how wealthy you are, where you live (location and type of dwelling), what variety of English you speak (or whether you speak English), what level of education you have, what you do for a job, what you do in your free-time, who you are friends with, what you like and dislike, your political views and affiliation, the nature and number of the opportunities you have in life and, in some ways the most important of all, which family you belong to, how far you can trace your ancestors back through history and what those ancestors did and who they were.
Although people who fall into the following categories are often working-class because our society, like any other country’s, is still trying to eradicate prejudice, these categories are not factors in and of themselves: race, nationality, religion, disabilities, gender and sexuality.
It is not the case that people’s class is constantly mentioned or even at the forefront of one’s mind, nor does it harmfully imply natural divide in the way that, for example, the caste system in India does. Class is subtle, nuanced, exists unchallenged and often doesn’t occur to you as the cause of a problem unless you really go looking deeply for it. It is undoubtedly damaging, however. Your class determines your path in life. It determines where you will live, how much money you will have, what education you will be able to access, what job you will be able to do, who you will be able to socialise and have relationships with and what opportunities you will have access to.
It is impossible to outline concisely but accurately exactly what sort of person is in which class. I will aim to do my best here, with references to Harry Potter, since I want fans who aren’t British to be able to understand these nuanced class subtleties better.
A very crude, basic description is that working-class people do “unskilled” jobs, usually for minimum wage and earn just money enough to exist; middle-class people have professional jobs, an education higher than secondary school and earn enough money to live comfortably and buy things they want as well as things they need; upper-class people belong to certain families who can trace their ancestry back a long way and are usually very wealthy and often related to the royal family. Their lifestyles are often funded by taxpayers’ money.
An overview
It is already complex enough, but it gets even more murky. For one thing, there are layers within the classes. You can be lower or higher within your class and the terms “lower middle-class” and “upper middle-class” are very common. Where you come on these inter-class continuums affects your life just as much as which class you are in.
Secondly, there are also two distinct groups who don’t fit in to the three classes. 1) very wealthy people, usually celebrities, who are super-rich but come from lower class backgrounds. A great example of this is the Beckhams. They are so rich from his football career and her music career that he had his wages paid directly to charity in the latter half of his career. They live lavishly, spend a fortune on designer clothes and their wedding was an imitation of a royal wedding. However, they spent years being mocked for seeming stupid and uncouth and it was all because of one thing: how they sound. As soon as they speak, you can hear that they started life near the bottom of the social ladder. I will do a separate post about language and voice at some point. Here’s a clip from an impressions show.
2) an “under-class” who lives on state welfare benefits and doesn’t work. These people tend to not have enough money for their needs and their chances and aspirations in life are extremely limited. People in this category range from those unable to work through disability to drug addicts to genuinely unpleasant people who would rather take hand-outs from the government than contribute to society. The right-wing media portrays them as lazy, worthless and a blight; the left-wing media portrays them as misrepresented people who have been failed by society. The truth is in the middle.
Thirdly, unlike upper-class, what constitutes “working-class” and “middle-class” are not fixed concepts. Rather, they are in a state of constant flux and progression. What those terms meant when I was a child and Harry Potter was being written are not the same as they mean now, nor were they the same as when my parents or grandparents were children. It changes slightly with every generation. Nowadays, the middle-class is much bigger than it was then. Efforts have been made to get working-class children to go to university and some do, meaning that more people are moving into the middle-class. We are more aware of class prejudice than we used to be and many people do try to avoid it, therefore options have opened up for working-class people and allowed them to access things they couldn’t before. The technological revolution has made a huge difference. The internet allows people to travel everywhere and find anything from their own sitting room and has given some people aspirations they wouldn’t have had before.
Conversely, the definitions of ‘working-class’ have broadened. Many people now consider themselves working-class when, in my parents’ youth, they would have been middle-class due to the house or street they lived in or the fact that they manage to go on holiday every year. The two lower classes are definitely more mixed than before and the lines between them are blurring. I guarantee someone younger than me will read this and think “I consider myself working-class but I have never had any of the experiences OP describes”. Another thing which has made a huge difference is the collapse of British industry. In the 80s and 90s, the majority of the working-class worked in factories or similar industrial businesses. Then the powers that be closed them all and sold production to firms abroad who could make things more cheaply, and unemployment boomed. Literally, cities just died. Some people eventually got different jobs, though jobs where their skills were undervalued, and which alienated them from their work value. Many people didn’t. Many people had to live off state welfare benefits, which were not adequate and somehow out of that, that “under-class” I mentioned was born. Many of the people who choose to live off the state are people whose families lost their livelihoods at that time and ended up broken; just gave up.
Linked to that, another factor which makes it all quite complex is pride. Those people (the film The Full Monty is all about this btw) were proud of what they did with their skills and then they were just thrown away like they were nothing. They lost their pride and many never got it back. Working-class people, in particular, tend to be fiercely proud of being working-class. I won’t comment on the psychology of that here, but to illustrate: my husband won’t have it that he is middle-class now. He is. His argument is that he has to work, but that’s a huge over-simplification of what “working-class” means. He can afford holidays abroad and organic food, he lives in a detached house in the countryside, he owns 3 houses which he rents out to tenants (and they are kept to a very high standard). He is without a doubt middle-class. A teacher at school once claimed he was working-class for the same reason, and a lecturer at university did, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what it really means to be working-class. There’s a good book about going back to your roots called Pies and Prejudice by the radio DJ Stuart Maconie, who is northern working-class originally but now lives a privileged life in London. He was inspired to write it when he had a friend over for lunch one day and they asked where the sun-dried tomatoes were, and he replied that they were by the cappuccino maker. Such ludicrously posh items made him stop in his tracks and think “what the hell has happened to me?”
Lastly, it is possible to move both within your class and to another class. This is called social mobility. I, for example, grew up almost at the bottom of the working-class. I lived in a very deprived area, had few opportunities and my family had only just enough money to subsist. I am now technically lower middle-class. I now live in a detached house in a sought-after village, I do a professional job, I have enough money to buy more things than just those I need and I am educated to postgraduate level. However, moving up a class is extremely difficult and many people never manage it. Those who do always carry markers of not quite fully belonging there, such as accent, vocabulary, etiquette etc. I have managed it, in short, because I am intelligent enough to have won scholarships for university, because my immediate family are also intelligent and exposed me, as much as possible, to other cultures, and because I married a builder whose parents had moved up the social ladder a little and gave him some land to build a house on. It is mostly down to luck and chance.
Sometimes people are very sensitive about their class and worry about it; sometimes British people themselves are not fully aware of it all. Such people are usually (and this is not meant nastily): middle-class from birth, therefore comfortable enough not to have thought much about it, or younger than early 20s, therefore they haven’t experienced and analysed hindrances arising from their class or had a university education where they would learn more about it. Very young people might have even more trouble getting their heads around it because of sheer lack of world experience and the modern world: it’s not quite the same as it used to be since the internet took over, since that brings opportunities to everyone that lower-class people might not have had before the turn of the century.
The reasons for class and the role of history
The reasons why this class system exists are even more complex. Keeping it brief, there are two key factors. 1. to maintain power for a privileged few and ensure the populace doesn’t try to take that power (people are too busy, pre-occupied and uneducated to challenge it). 2. historical influence: we used to have a feudal system where serfs worked the land for rich land-owners in exchange for living on it. During the Industrial Revolution some people managed to gain capital and power through production and factory ownership. They became the middle-class. This has evolved into what we have today.
The importance of the influence of the feudal system cannot be overstated if people are to grasp why race isn’t as critical a social issue here as it is in the USA. The USA is still recovering from Slavery, by which I mean the historical, slave trade triangle event, not the concept of enslavement. A major part of that country’s history is brutally, sickeningly forcing people who aren’t white to do the manual toil on US shores that kept privileged people in their positions of power. Racism and racist slurs equate to supporting slavery. Britain has a different history. Whilst we played an awful role in the slave trade, we didn’t have slave plantations on our shores. It wasn’t coloured people who did the toil. It was the working-class. For centuries the working-class were forced, at times with as much violence and as little food and rest as African slaves endured in the Americas, to do back-breaking work all day without a break, simply to have a place to shelter and some food. Under the feudal system this meant in the fields and during the Industrial Revolution it meant in dirty, dangerous factories. The working-class was, and to some extent still is, enslaved. That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist here or that it’s not despicable. It does and is. But it doesn’t have the same connotations. Slurs about class, however, DO have those connotations. Here, making nasty comments about, or looking down your nose at, working-class people equates to supporting slavery, albeit more subtly than racism equates to supporting slavery in the US. Disparaging comments about the working-class are a bit like, for example, calling a black man “boy” in the US. But because a) it is more subtle and b) much longer has passed since we had the feudal system and the Industrial Revolution than has passed since America had slavery, class slurs in Britain are less emotive, emotionally-charged and offensive than racial slurs in America.
What makes you upper-class?
I mentioned that ancestry plays a huge role in determining class. I also mentioned that there is social mobility (moving up to a higher class or even down to a lower one). There are certain families who can trace their ancestry back centuries and are descended from royals and rich land-owners. That means that certain surnames and bloodlines are prestigious. These people form the upper-class.
It is very unusual for upper-class people to mix with working or middle-class people. I, for example, have only met one upper-class person in my life. They go to different schools from the rest of us and do different things socially. For this reason, upper-class people tend to marry other upper-class people, in fact most would frown upon anyone who did otherwise. Because it’s all about family status, marriage would be the only real way you could move up to upper-class, but it’s practically unheard of. You are born into the upper-class. If you inherit the surname, you inherit the status that goes with it, regardless of any other factors. For this reason, upper-class families tend to be ‘pure’. Here is a newspaper article illustrating my point. The comments are also interesting. It’s from a popular right-wing paper.
Another illustration: when Prince William married Kate Middleton, whose family are crazily rich, the media and nation went into a frenzy over the fact that he was marrying “a commoner”. They used that exact word. Kate’s family became wealthy during the Industrial Revolution and she, her siblings, her father, grandfather and great-grandfather all attended expensive, prestigious public schools. Her family is incredibly wealthy, has the best opportunities available and were friends of the royals for decades before she met William. Nevertheless it was huge news for her to marry William. Why? Because she wasn’t upper-class. Despite the privileged life she led, despite her family’s centuries of wealth, she didn’t have the name or the blood to be considered upper-class. It all comes down to family status. In crude terms, William married below him, and they were very lucky that it wasn’t a scandal. Some people were offended by it, in fact. Remember that in the 1930s Edward VIII had to abdicate in order to marry “a commoner”. To most people “a commoner” is someone normal, but here it is someone who doesn’t have the name or blood of a small, select group of families. It’s also interesting to note that she is rarely called ‘Kate’ by the media since joining the upper-class, but rather her full name ‘Kathrine’.
Two things out of this: firstly, don’t fall into the trap of assuming being upper-class doesn’t affect your life negatively. The lower-classes have worse struggles, but it would be wrong not to appreciate the difficulties associated with being upper-class. The expectations of you, the responsibility you have to your name, limitations on who you are allowed to socialise with and love, constant media and public attention and pressure to be someone important. It is exactly these issues which led Prince Harry to have a troubled youth.
Secondly, it is because of all this that many people feel it is incorrect to view death eaters in Harry Potter as a metaphor for Nazis. They are really a metaphor for the ‘pure-blood’ upper-class families. They do not round people up and exterminate them. They use power and influence to gain more power and to subjugate those they see as inferior because they do not share their names or blood. They do not base their ideologies on pseudoscientific claims about appearance, like phrenology. They base it on inherited blood. To highlight the fact of the class metaphor even further – there is a way to become effectively upper-class without being born or married into it. It is a lesser upper-class, because you don’t have the family name or blood, but you still become a de facto nobleman. The way is to become a Lord. You can google how to do it in the real world if you’re interested, but clearly the key point is that Tom Riddle’s adoption of the title Lord represents the change in his class. He does it because he knows he has upper-class blood but can’t prove it, so he has to indicate his status another way.
Why is Harry Potter about class?
The three blood statuses of wizards equate to the three classes: muggle born = lowest-class (working-class in the real world), half-blood = middle-class and pure-blood = upper-class.
It is because of this that the word “mudblood” is not the slur many people take it to be. It is not the wizarding version of the N word. It is not as offensive as that. It is offensive, yes, but it is not an unforgivable utterance which betrays inherent racism. The fact that the characters are prepared to repeat it when reporting it has been said shows that it is not comparable. I can’t even think the N word. If I think about it I don’t say it, in my mind I literally say “the N word”. Both characters and fans are prepared to say “mudblood”. It is not the same.
The fact that Voldemort and Snape are high-ranking death eaters also proves the story is not a metaphor for racial aggression: they are half-bloods and Snape comes from a working-class background and yet they have moved from their groups to be prominent members of the highest group. They have moved from lower classes to upper classes. It hasn’t happened by marriage like in the real world and it was very difficult – they had to be great wizards to manage it. But they did manage it. It is not possible to change your race, but you can change your class. Therefore, the wizarding war is a metaphor for class struggles not racial struggles, therefore “mudblood” is a nasty way of saying “commoner”. If you have dirty blood you aren’t part of the pure, select group. You don’t belong to the wizard upper-class. People shouldn’t say “mudblood” because it implies inferiority and enslavement, but if you do say it you are not racist, it isn’t the same as being racist, and isn’t as offensive or as unforgivable. It’s only slightly more offensive than saying “chav” or “ned” in a nasty tone of voice.
So it would be great if people could stop calling Snape a racist based on him saying “mudblood” one time as a teenager under extreme stress.
This all also explains why joining the death eaters was attractive to half-blood, working-class Snape in his youth and why JKR said he did it because he thought it would give him power and impress Lily. Those people who are confused because Lily wouldn’t be impressed by his joining the wizard Nazis – this is the answer. It’s because he wasn’t joining the wizard Nazis, he was joining the wizard upper-class.
Real class-based insults
A quick note on terminology – “chav”, or “ned” in Scotland, means a similar thing to “white trash”, but anyone can be a chav/ned, regardless of skin colour. The opposite of that insult is “toff”, which means upper-class and posh, but it’s negative. Here’s a picture of fictional chavs from the comedy TV series Little Britain.
Here are some comedy clips of some chavs interacting with the higher classes. You might not make all of it out, especially if English isn’t your first language, because working-class people generally speak with strong regional accents and use dialects (this couple are from London). You will probably notice though, bits where you can understand it much better – that’s because they are switching into “proper English”, or their version of it.
These vocab tips might help you out:
‘to have it off’ means to ‘to have sex’ as well as simply turning something off
‘winalot’ is a dog food brand; ‘camelot’ is the national lottery organisation
‘giro’ means welfare cheque
Education and class
In general, working-class people go to state-maintained schools. These vary enormously in quality, mostly in terms of what resources and spaces can be bought and built for the budget the government gives them. Middle-class people normally go to these schools too, though a substantial number go to grammar schools, which are state schools that you have to pass a test to go to when you are 10/11, or private schools, which are schools independent of the state which charge fees and can be boarding schools. Both of these have good sites and resources and get good results.
Upper-middle class and upper-class people go to public schools, which is another level of private school. They are incredibly expensive, very old, boarding schools which select students based on who they are, as in, what family they belong to, and how much money they have. Teaching and the content of lessons is similar across all three types of schools; the difference is in funding – what the school can afford to offer in terms of books, experiences, classrooms, class sizes etc. Having a public school on your CV basically guarantees you entry to any university.
Private and public schools get good exam results because of their facilities and the fact that the students’ families are educated and encourage (or pressure) them to achieve highly. State secondary schools get mixed results because their facilities and resources are not adequate and many working-class families don’t value academic achievement, so don’t encourage it. A lot of students are unable to cope with the level of critical analysis required to succeed at A-Level (qualification at 18 years old) because independent thinking and reading non-fiction hasn’t been encouraged at home. I left school without finishing my A-Levels because I found that too difficult and had to build up my abilities gradually until I was able to handle that level.
The top universities now have to release data showing they are trying to admit students from working-class backgrounds, but nevertheless attendance by working-class kids at top universities like Oxford and Cambridge is low, because those universities demand things working-class kids don’t have: varied extra-curricular activities, the ability to pass an entrance exam, a proven track record of independent enquiry, enough money to pay double the fees most universities charge, the etiquette (e.g. dining manners) required to interact with all the upper-class kids etc. This is a poor state of affairs and denies working-class students access to ground-breaking research and thinkers. The bigger issue, however, is that it keeps them away from power. All the influential people: politicians, big businessmen, investors, lawyers etc, go to the same few universities. They meet there, get to know each other through secretive clubs (google the Bullingdon Club for more info) and this enables them to network and make contacts, which they use later in life. Working-class people never get those contacts, therefore find it almost impossible to get any power.
To demonstrate the prejudice, an anecdote:
My friend Claire is middle-class and went to a grammar school. She got As in her A-Levels and went to Cambridge University. On the first day she met the people who would be on her course as well. Every single one of them had gone to private or public school. When she told them which school she had come from, they said, with what they believed was genuine praise and kindness, “wow, you’ve done really well to manage to get As and get into Cambridge considering where you’ve come from”. She isn’t even working-class. She had led a pretty privileged life. Yet they were astounded and condescending towards her. They viewed her achievement of coming from a middle-class grammar school with good exam results the way many of us view Malala’s success and entrance to university after her experiences in the Swat Valley. They were, like many people of that class, totally disconnected from popular reality.
This leads me to the defence of another Slytherin: Slughorn. Some people view him as racist because of his comment that Lily’s academic success was even more impressive since she was a muggle-born. As I have shown already, blood status in HP is a metaphor for class struggles not for racial tensions, so it is not correct that he is racist. In fact, he was doing what those people on Claire’s course were doing: expressing shock that someone from the (wizard) working-class could achieve so highly in academia. It’s inherent prejudice, it’s patronising, yes. But it’s not racist, and it is even well-intentioned.
Another point to mention here is access to knowledge outside the content of lessons. That has improved a lot with the internet, but still, access to books is limited. A few years ago the government started talking about closing some libraries and it caused an uproar. Without libraries, most working-class people would have very limited access to books. It is yet another case of failing to understand that most people do not have the privileges they do, as well as desiring to limit the extent to which the working-class can get an education, so as to keep them in their place.
Personal hygiene and class
This issue is very close to my heart because as a child I had very poor personal hygiene and I was bullied terribly for it. It is not a nice thing to have to admit, but some working-class people don’t have brilliant personal hygiene. It isn’t unusual for very low-class people to smell, have bad teeth, not change their clothes regularly, rarely change their bed sheets and not to wash every day. To take myself as an example first, when I was little I was not bathed regularly, nor was I made to clean my teeth. I hate saying this, because I know it’s horrible, and believe me I am OCD with washing now, but when I was a child I went weeks without a bath or a change of clothes. We didn’t have a shower. It was neglect, there’s no way around it. However, it wasn’t malicious. In my parents’ generation and before them, it was normal not to wash very often if you were working-class. These days, hygiene practises amongst the working-class are much much better, but even still you do even now get smelly, dirty people.
It wasn’t just me. In my year (grade) alone at secondary school there were three students who were showered at school by the matron (in a kind way) because they didn’t wash at home.
Why? Well obviously that is complex, but I’ll try to explain. It is absolutely linked to being working-class. For a start, facilities were a problem because of poverty. When I was born (1985) we didn’t have a bath or shower, our bathroom was just a toilet. We also didn’t have a washing machine. We just couldn’t afford those things. To use a bath we had to go to my grandparents’ house. When I was a few years old we got a tin bath, which is like an unconnected bathtub that you fill with jugs. We didn’t have much money for water and soap though so use of it was limited. My mother washed clothes in it as well by hand. When I was around 5 or 6 we got a proper bath. However, our house was so cold that it was physically painful to use it. We didn’t have any heating except for an open fire in the living room and this was the north of England I’m talking about. In winter the bed sheets got damp from the cold. When we had the tin bath you could put it in front of the fire, but the plumbed in bath was upstairs in a bathroom. My dad braved it more often than my mum, and since I was little I didn’t bath myself. Those three students that got showered at school I mentioned did so because even by the late 90s, they still didn’t have a bath or shower at home.
Another reason is lack of education. People just aren’t taught about personal hygiene at school, so if they don’t already know at home you won’t find out either.
On top of that, many working-class people are too busy or pre-occupied to remember about or find time for things like washing. They work long hours, often multiple jobs, and when you aren’t sure if you’ve got enough money to eat, getting washed just doesn’t seem that important.
Another factor is depression. Living in poverty, working hard just to survive, knowing you have little opportunity in life creates depression. Depressed people can lose interest in things like personal hygiene.
Not washing is so ingrained in working-class history that the phrase “the great unwashed”, originally a term used by Victorian authors, is now a reasonably common way of referring to the masses. It is used both derogatorily and ironically:
I was bullied terribly, especially at primary school, for being smelly and dirty. It was constant, day in, day out, and is definitely the reason I am now over-the-top in cleanliness. One of the main things people made fun of was my hair. I was bullied for having greasy hair to the extent that, on a school trip where we were staying overnight, 2 girls that I was forced to share a room with, having tortured me for hours, including ruining my shoes, said they would stop it if I washed my hair.
I understand that some people say cruel things when they are young, but the fact remains that if you choose to make fun of someone because they are dirty or greasy or smelly, you are actually making fun of them for being poor, not having basic facilities at home, not having been taught proper personal hygiene because their parents didn’t know or were too busy or depressed. You are behaving like you are socially superior to them.
This is obviously the main reason why I love Snape. I immediately saw myself in him, and every time someone mentions his greasy hair it alludes to his working-class childhood. When he joined the death eaters he moved up the ladder, but the disadvantaged start he had in life is still written all over him. It is also why I love Slytherin – the house is populated mostly by pure-bloods, or in other words by upper-class people, and yet they embrace him and allow him social mobility anyway. They looked at him and saw something other than his class.
It’s not just about wealth
Since membership of the upper-class is brought about through ancestry, it is possible to be upper-class and not rich. Most upper-class people are descended from rich people and have inherited wealth alongside their name and blood, but occasionally there’s a family whose ancestors lost most of the money, so they are left with just a title and the estate (house and land). It costs a lot of money to run an upper-class house because they are invariably old, listed, castle-y buildings in the countryside. That means they are big and cold and cost a fortune to heat. Stuff breaks or wears out so the maintenance costs a fortune as well. They might be so big that they need staff as it’s too much for just the family to keep on top of, so there are wages to pay too. On top of that, they try to live an upper-class lifestyle to keep up appearances, which is very expensive. A good few years ago now there was a documentary called The Fucking Fulfords, about an upper-class family who couldn’t afford their lifestyle or house and swore all the time. Even though they weren’t wealthy they didn’t get jobs, largely because they had been brought up to believe it was beneath them, and as a result they are lazy fucks. It’s on youtube if you want to watch it.
Lazy is not the only stereotype of the upper-class. There are quite a few, all based in fact, such as that they are eccentric and strange. Fulford is definitely that. Another is that they are stupid. Since they don’t understand life in the same way as regular people, because they don’t have jobs, some things they don’t know are astonishing. There was a reality TV series years ago where this entitled, upper-class girl did working-class, minimum wage jobs, and it was painful to watch. She didn’t know how to do basic tasks like make a cup of tea, because she never did anything for herself at home. She didn’t know what a gas bill was. A lot of these people barely wipe their own arses so it’s no wonder they appear incapable. The Monty Python sketch “twit of the year” utilises that stereotype to make fun of the upper-class. It also pokes fun at the stereotype of having ridiculous multiple-barrelled surnames. My husband does building work for an upper-class family occasionally and the woman’s surname is Booth-Clibburn-Shimmins. The Pythons are doing that thing with their faces because yet another stereotype is that upper-class people talk weird.
