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?

Lol, also wanted to jump in and say plenty of family foreign holidays happening in the 90s! I went on more then than I've taken my own kids in their late teens!

It really annoys me that they made Ron go to the ball in those awful, embarrassing dress robes.
I don't believe that with all those big brothers there weren't any better ones he could borrow or someone couldn't have used some magic to make them look better.

Molly must have been having The Life of Riley when all the kids were at Hogwarts and she could use magic to do the housework.
She reminds me of someone at my work who is always going about all frazzled and moaning about being stressed while not actually doing much 😂

But that isn't what I said. I said ' travelling abroad on holiday was probably a bit less common than now'.

I didn't say they were not common. I said they were probably a bit less common than now.

Stats back me up on that.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40847390#comments

Exactly- poor Ron!

Yes, Molly should be having quite an easy time in the term time. Being Fred & George's mother is hard work but she gets plenty of time to rest at least.

I think a pp said that food couldn't be conjured from nowhere according to her rules?

I do agree that her world building does have quite a few inconsistencies.

But arguably a lot of that is because the books got increasingly complex as they carried on, she probably didn't initially envisage the series as being as complex ad it got- or the level of analysis fans would put in!

Interesting...re having a lot of kids, isn't it implied that at least part of the reason for that was that Molly wanted a girl? Thus Ginny is the youngest.

Yeah they seem upper middle coded to me. Dursleys lower middle..

I'm not a JK hater but she is a bit of a snob in some of her writing, although she hates actual aristos!

There’s a really great podcast by a guy called Professor Julian Wamble called Critical Magic Theory, he’s on instagram too which is where I first came across him. He deconstructs the characters and themes so brilliantly, and has Q&As/surveys, which he then does an episode on the results. It’s simultaneously silly but also in-depth and interesting, he has a whole series on the various Weasleys. He really breaks it down like people do with say the classics which, as it’s so ubiquitous, why not really?

FWIW I don’t think they were poor either, one of the things that always stuck in my mind was Ron saying he had hundreds of chocolate frog cards, which must have been a lot of pocket money! Parents travelled to see them, and sent them things regularly, food was always sumptuous, and no amount of guests was ever too much for them. I think they just didn’t have extras for frivolous extras, they cut their cloth seemingly well. They went to visit Bill in Egypt with the money they won, but if they were that strapped then a holiday would have been lower down on the list of priorities. Didn’t they also, on one of the holidays, visit the other dragon tamer son in Romania? The kids and their physical and emotional needs are what the money they have goes on. They have a warm and cosy roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and successful kids. Sounds rich to me!

I don’t know if it’s mentioned in the linked thread but someone once worked out how much will have been spent on chocolate to get Ron’s hundreds of chocolate frog cards and it was a lot.

The Weasleys live on a country property with a lot of land and apparently Hogwarts is a state school. That means a lot of the children’s food is covered each year, plus there are no club / activity fees - unlike most boarding schools, it appears to be all inclusive.

They may have cash flow problems because they are bad with money but I wouldn’t mind being ‘poor’ like they are!

In real life, at the time, they'd probably have qualified for some benefits, and free uniforms etc. But would the mum have been expected to work?
And if magic could cook their food, couldn't it have made their old things look new?
Problems of equating it to the real world!

Well, there are the in-world details, and there are the ways the HP world resembles or aligns with our world.

The Patel sisters are also stereotypical in many ways.

Coding and stereotype are a kind of energy saving technique for recongisability/relatability in fantasy writing, perhaps.

I always thought they were poor for a pureblood family. But not in the grand scheme of things. Compared to the Malfoy’s who seem nouveau riche coded (agree Lucius married up as get very so posh I don't give a shit vibes from Sirius).

I always think of the Blacks as the kind of family whose poshness was established before the Norman conquest.

I thought the hogwart feasts appeared from nowhere.

Back in the 90s we did 3 weeks in Florida, trips to France for eurocamps and all sorts. My dad used to love checking Ceefax and Teletext holidays on the TV searching for flight deals and cheap ferries.

They do seem to but they are prepared in the kitchens by the house elves and then transported magically up to the great hall.

yes the house elves make the feats and there are identical tables I think under the great hall, they lay them out and then magically transport them up to the corresponding tables above. I’m actually amazing myself with my memory of these random things 😂 please nobody ask me to answer an important email or know where my keys are, though!

There’s a law I remember Hermione saying and Ron repeats it later, something like Gant’s Law of transfiguration or similar. You can increase the quantity, but you can’t make food appear from nothing.

Thanks, that's interesting! But hang on : could food not be transfigured from something else?

The economics and sociology of the Potter universe have never held up.

I don't think they are really Fantasy books in the true sense, they are much closer to Enid Blyton or even something like Nancy Drew. There is no world building, and ime serious fans of fantasy don't tend to be Potter fans.

To some extent agree...definitely the books became more complex as they went on and arguably various factors (including some degree of hype) made (at least some) fans make them out to be much more complex than they are.
When you say Fantasy, are you thinking of High Fantasy, set within a self contained fantasy world? They seem more (esp early books) like Low Fantasy to me in some ways, where magical elements intrude into the everyday world (unless I've misremembered the definition!). A bit like an E Nesbit story, for one.

Nothing. Education was free.

Don’t think so, although as pp just said, the world doesn’t really hold up for various reasons. I mean, even the way Harry is unable to do basic first aid (which is slinging a bottle of dittany at something) never makes much sense. They can barely do anything you’d expect for their ages/world and make what for some wizards is basic, seem impossible. What were they doing in those hundreds of lessons? Like you’re telling me Lupin wasn’t clever enough to get the hang of the Wolfsbane potion and only Snape could make it? When they’re travelling in Deathly Hallows, there were loads of things they could have done to make life easier and it never seemed to occur to them. When Ted Tonks did ‘accio’ to salmon on the riverbank, nobody seemed to be blinded by the realisation they should have been doing that all along 😂

Once they realised house elves could come and go from anywhere, why didn’t they summon Kreacher to help them? It’s definitely not high fantasy, or high literature really at all. It’s an extremely mild Bildungsroman that fits in a tonne of tired tropes. Philip Pullman is a genius in comparison to JKR, but her accessibility and sheer expanse of the wizarding world seems to tick a lot of boxes for people.

They didnt summon Kreacher because Yaxley could maybe get into the house, and they didnt want to risk that he would use the same trick (hanging on to someone apparating) if they did.

That said, I have always wondered how Kreacher ended up at Hogwarts after they had to leave 12 Grimmauld Place. Surely he would have just stayed there waiting for them?

What I don’t get is why any wizards would be poor. They can literally magic up anything they want??