anon yappery but also something I'd be super curious to see you cover in your PS review is like,,, how much especially in PS Hogwarts seems to be a ruin. like you said, there's like 40 kids in Harry's entire school year! in this beautiful crumbling castle full of ghosts that has entire empty wings and rooms that were classrooms in recent memory but are now under a layer of dust and that is so cold in winter that the kids resort to carrying around magic space-heaters! there is one (1) groundskeeper and one (1) caretaker, both of whom have to do their work by hand -- they have neither magic nor technology to help them. the school trustees are a nonentity in PS. there are no extracurricular clubs -- I know Hermione would've joined every single one possible if there were. the teachers are there because they are devoted to Dumbledore or because they have literally nowhere else to go. one of them is an actual literal ghost who doesn't realize he is dead. Voldemort is the main villain but he's also a functionally a ghost. Quirrell is defacto dead and eating unicorns to keep his body running until he can finish his necromancy ritual. it's corpses and ghosts all the way down fr!!
I've been thinking a lot about this ask since I received it, and I think a lot of the elements you mentioned really highlight how isolated the wizarding world has become since its detachment from the Muggle World with the 1689 Statute of Secrecy.
What's really striking to me is the small intimacy of the wizarding world when compared with its Muggle counterpart. Living in an industrialised, globalised world has really skewed our perception of community because it's normal for us to live surrounded primarily by strangers. I've been living in my apartment block for several years now and I don't know any of my neighbours' names; I've been at my university from BA to PhD and I only talk to my equally introverted supervisors; there is literally a loneliness epidemic for a reason nowadays hsdlkfds
Meanwhile I'm researching eighteenth-century Britain and the biggest cities have a population of around 30K, which is NOTHING by today's standards and yet three centuries ago this level of population was genuinely impressive - and people knew each other! It was not difficult to get relatively well-acquainted with your whole town and understand the local scene because the biggest towns were still small (one can only imagine how intimate villages were). I think the wizarding world with its significantly smaller global population and much more archaic way of life as a result of their isolation maintained this level of small intimacy that we lost in our own world with the population boom and industrial migration that occurred because of modernisation.
I also wonder if the global population boom radically changed the ratio of wizards to muggles! Or, as I'm wondering, Hogwarts at the very start of its history did actually open its doors to Muggles.
Not as students, obviously, but castles are very hard to manage well without the necessary manpower. We don't know much about early Hogwarts, but I wonder whether they had access to the house elves and ghosts and other sorts of magical servants back when the whole world was wilder and more free. Like we say "the Muggle world" but that shouldn't have even existed as a concept before the Statute of Secrecy???? Because in the middle ages the world HAD magic; people believed in magic and it was studied as a science, so perhaps in the days of the four founders, muggles just knew about magic and wizards and lived alongside them.
Remember also that Salazar Slytherin specifically had issues with Muggle-born students he literally taught them for a while until he and Godric had their yaoiful breakup but whatever. Do we know whether he hated Muggles like the Blacks - who, I remind you, despised Muggles from the very start - or was he just disdainful of them the same way a medieval lord was of peasants?
"For a few years, the founders worked in harmony together, seeking youngster who showed signs of magic and bringing them to the castle to be educated. But then disagreements sprang up between them. A rift began to grow between Slytherin and the others. Slytherin wished to be more selective about the studenrs admitted to Hogwarts. He believed that magical learning should be kept within all-magic families. He disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to be untrustworthy. After a while, there was a serious argument on the subject between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and Slytherin left the school." - The Writing on the Wall, CoS
This is clearly commentary on the modern British class system, but this also reminds me how pre-industrial European societies were split into orders. Crack open any medieval history book and it will tell you about those who pray, those who work, and those who fight. Could there have been, theoretically, a fourth order in early medieval Britain grouping together those who do magic?
I'm just rambling right now, but it's tickling my funny bone to imagine this massive, beautiful, magical castle supported by the manual labour of Muggle peasants that have set up their villages near it. It could also explain the later proliferation of Muggle-born wizards: morganatic marriages, concubinage, plain ol' abuse of power because a peasant girl is not standing up to a young wizard that flicked his wand, threw her on a bed of grass, and planted his magical wizard DNA into her Muggle descendants etc etc
But then the Statute of Secrecy happens and the world was split in two. No more Muggles working the land and caring for the castle. Instead, you have one old arthritic Squib and an expelled half-giant doing all the maintenance. No more Muggle girls working as maids and cooks; now you've got house elves and actually it's better for the wizards because you don't even need to pay them.
Muggles are not dependant on magic like wizards. For every spell a wizard can cast, you've got a Muggle crafting tools and building machinery to do the same on a more grandiose scale. The wizarding world had also withdrawn right between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Their magic allowed them to stay more-or-less in the past and they are consistently amazed that Muggles have basically caught up to them through sheer wit alone.
Muggles have an equivalent for pretty much every spell and magical object wizards have. It would be incredible to be a witch or a wizard, but it's not necessary and the books carry this message by highlighting the wizards' amazement at what Muggles have created: escalators, phones, airplanes, cars and so on
the teachers are there because they are devoted to Dumbledore or because they have literally nowhere else to go. one of them is an actual literal ghost who doesn't realize he is dead. Voldemort is the main villain but he's also a functionally a ghost. Quirrell is defacto dead and eating unicorns to keep his body running until he can finish his necromancy ritual. it's corpses and ghosts all the way down fr!!
I think this also works for Harry's themes because the entire book series is pulling him into the past!!! He discovers his parentage, then the wizarding world to which his parents belonged, then their feuds and the impact they had on figures like Snape (Mr Arrested Development), then we learn about Grindelwald and the wider wizarding world, TOM RIDDLE'S BACKSTORY, until we are right back at the beginning when Harry sees the ghostly image of parents on his way to meet Voldermort and die for the second time!!!! It's INSANE!!!!
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