AIBU to think the Weasleys were not actually poor?

[Jane379]

With the HBO show coming up I've been rereading the books and on several forums discussing them I've noted people describing the Weasleys as poor, saying they're a good portrayal of a poor family etc
I'd seen this before and assumed I must have missed those details but rereading (although not fully finished the series yet), they don't strike me as particularly poor. They have 7 kids which means money is tighter, Ron has hand me downs etc but overall they seem comfortable. Arthur has a steady job, Molly is a SAHM - presumably if they were really in financial trouble she would get a paid job too. A lot of families might find 7 kids financially tricky, rely on hand me downs etc, not holiday abroad much but is that necessarily poor?

I will say my own experience growing up with a single mother in fairly low-paid work was that we did scrimp on various things including holidays (which we never did when I was a child), but we could always afford good enough food, necessary clothes, had a warm house & books etc that I wanted (living in a place with good libraries and various cheaper services helped). A bit like Ron, I went to a school where a lot of people were much more well-off, but I'd never have considered myself poor. That would have felt insulting given far too many people (even more now) lack money for essentials or have enough for basics but not much else.

AIBU?

Having seen their house, I’d say cash poor property rich! I’d bet there’s plenty of equity in The Burrow!

They definitely have a lot of land

Hermione could’ve used her special mending spell to make the hand me down clothes as new and repair all of their higgedly-piggeldy possessions.

Rude that she never did.

But isn’t it all relative?

A lot of us olders would say we would now have been considered poor. Single father bringing us four kids up, no heating just an open fire (that wasn’t lit often), no holidays etc, but we never considered ourselves poor.

The Weasleys would have looked poor compared to some other families.

I can't really get past the fact that they're magic users so could just magic up what they need ?

Also, I think it's worth noting that probably at least in the late 90s when the first books were written, travelling abroad on holiday was probably a bit less common than now, though budget airlines were also expanding in the late 90s.

I think rich or poor might be measured differently in the wizarding world. Being rich is probably more to do with owning house elves, magical artefacts, hiring other wizards to do spells for you.

It's why the Weasleys house is higgledy piggledy, they have had to conjure it themselves rather than letting an expert do it.

YABU to care this much about the financial status of a fictional family. It’s ridiculous.

I need to check but I think according to JKR you can't conjure up food from scratch?

Good point.

I often wonder what Mrs Weasley did all day. Being a mother of 7 is incredibly busy, but her kids were all boarders so not home most of the time. She used magic to clean and tidy and prep food. I presume she wasn't doing the food shop every other day, could she conjure food? I'm not sure. She could use magic to bring kids to and from activities and they all left home at 11 anyway. By the time Ron started there was only 1 kid left at home. If they were short of cash she could have gotten a job.

You say Molly could have got a job but until Chamber of Secrets she was presumably home schooling the pre-Higwarts aged kids. And she had Bill very young out of school herself, she may not have any work history to fall back on.

I was thinking about the way they have all the house hold tools working by themselves.

You could run a factory like that! No excuse to be poor if you're magic.

I've read a lot of novels from the 19th and early 20th century. I would say the Weasleys are poor in the same way that the Ballet Shoes household is poor. It's all about their income relative to others of their social class, not to others of a lower class. Sylvia and the children have to live in a certain way to maintain their social standing, so they must find the money for domestic staff and the children can't go to the local board school, which would have been free. The Weasleys could probably have made different life choices that would have been less expensive but would have lost them even more status in the eyes of the other wealthy families in the wizarding world.

They’re Mumsnet poor - six figure income but plead poverty.

They put 7 kids through boarding school- wonder how much the fees were?

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
I always wondered how Garnie and Nana could afford to buy fabric and things from Harrods if they were as poor as they said they were!
And they could also afford to employ Cook and Clara! 😁

they’d had their dcs very young, so while Mr Weasley was in a good role at the time Harry meets them, it’s likely he didn’t earn much for the bulk of the dcs years, they might be up to their eyeballs in debt, as others said, Mrs Weasley had DCs young so no career history, no savings etc.

(for school fees, I assumed very good burseries for those who couldn’t afford)

Just think, they'd have had to go to a state school without magic now because Hogwarts has closed down due to VAT on private schools.

The Mum and the kids would have all had to get jobs at McDonald's when they turned 16.

Their house would have been condemned by the local council as unsafe. This means they'd be living in a one bed emergency accommodation property awaiting a council house on a shite estate.

Mum would have been down the food bank.

Or maybe I don't fucking care cos it's not real.

If the pure bloods are meant the aristocracy...then the Weasleys are the poor ones in that sense.

(Like maybe the Bennets in P&P? Still part of the Ton but definitely not the richest).

The Weasleys were wizarding royalty though, purebloods and with extensive magical history. So they are poor for their class. It annoys me that poor Ron has to wear second hand robes and manage with a broken wand for nearly a whole year when Molly doesn't work, despite all her children being either living away from home or away at school. She could have done ANY job because the older kids were around to mind Ron and Ginny when they were all home from school, but despite pleading poverty and making the kids suffer, she stayed at home doing - something, though the house can't have got that bad when all the kids were away, the garden was always a mess and they didn't even have a dog!

Yes, it's a bit like Agatha Christie's autobiography: her family were relatively poor compared to others after her father's death when she was 11 (she had to 'come out' into society in Cairo not London as cheaper) and she & her first husband more so, but they could still afford domestic staff.

I actually read an interesting Substack post on this recently:

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-agatha-christie-could-afford-a-maid-and-a-nanny-but-not-a-car?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

You might like this thread!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1840442-to-think-the-Weasleys-arent-poor-they-are-just-shit-with-money

Did Mr Weasley earn real money or Wizard money? If Molly got a job earning wizard money could she spend it at Tesco?

I think they are probably poor but posh? A bit like those families with big properties and all kids go to Eton or Roedean but they never buy new clothes or furniture and never put the central heating on