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?

Thank you, this looks great!

I'd agree re finances. Maybe in wizard terms they are poor but in Muggle terms they seem OK.

I also do think that if their situation was really bad Molly would probably have worked? Especially as her kids were away at Hogwarts a lot as pp said.

They can't.

Its similar to the genie laws in Aladdin.

You cant make people fall in love, you cant bring people back from the dead, you cant create money and you can't create food from nothing. Cant remember what the other one is.

I think there are a couple of things going on.

I)HP obviously owes a lot to the Enid Blyton era boarding school, and while sort of set in around 1997, in some ways is set a bit earlier. Part of that is the lack of working mothers, another part of that is the patching up of old clothes in a way that is possibly a bit reminiscent of perhaps the 50s.

II) There are plenty of families who don't set much store by buying the latest clothes etc. We weren't poor growing up in the 90s, money has to be spent carefully and fashion wasn't particularly something my parents considered it worth spending money on. Certainly in primary school I had relatively few clothes and a lot were second hand. My mum worked but certain aspects of The Burrow don't feel massively unfamiliar to me.

It's like the March girls (Little Women) talking about their terrible poverty and how hard they have to work in front of Hannah their servant, whilst also taking "bundles" to the Hummels who were actually dirty poor.

Yes the fact that Nana has to make all of their clothes isnt an issue as that was fairly usual, but the fact that they get the "stuff" from Harrods is!

I take it that she would never dream of frequenting Petticoat Lane!

Agree with this. Given JKRs interest in the Mitfords, I wonder if they were part of the inspiration?

It's the performative poorness of the middle classes. My MIL loved to plead poverty and squeeze every pip from a lemon whilst all her children attended boarding school, they lived in an architect designed house in the SE, banked at Coutts, shopped at Harrods and had drinks parties at least three times a week.

Yep the 90's were when you could bag a week on the med for under £100 each as long as you weren't fussy about where you stayed, even in the school holidays. The good old days of Teletext holidays.

I think I could live with that level of poor!

Is Hogwarts fee paying too?

The uniform and meals look expensive, if nothing else.

It always bothered me that Ron had an old wand. Presumably they bought Charlie a new wand when it became broken. But in any case they should know enough that wants don’t work unless the wand chose you so they sent him off knowing he would not do well in his first year

No it is state (MoM) run but they need to buy uniform and books.

I always felt that Ron was the "that'll do" kid, the one who had the bare minimum but no more. I was that kid so although he was a fucking brat when things got hard, I do sympathise.

I think people are misunderstanding the conjuring up part of magic in HP. You can’t conjure something from nothing that isn’t how it works. You have to have something to start with. So say a chair. You can’t just conjure it up. You have to have the building blocks to start with. Another chair for example. So you can’t have a really crap chair and improve it. But it physically has to exist in some way shape or form somewhere. Even if not with you physically. You have to possess it in some way.

I seem to remember a scene in which Molly conjures up a creamy sauce which flows from the tip of her wand into a saucepan.

I think we’d all have had more holidays in the 90’s if we had portkeys/flue powder and expandable tents. It’s unlikely the Weasleys would have been booking their holidays on Ceefax like us muggles.

I can "understand" JKR's characters perfectly well, as much as necessary, without needing to know any more than we are told. It’s made perfectly clear in the books that the Weasleys are not well off, cannot afford to give their children a lot of pocket money or buy them many new clothes. and are sneered at by richer families like the Malfoys because of their lack of money.

I don’t need to know the precise financial circumstances of Emma Woodhouse or Dorothea Brooke either, and they are main characters. In some books (e.g. Keep the Aspidistra Flying), a character's precise financial standing is an important part of the plot. In most, it isn’t.

The muggle world is a bit de-synchronised.

In general, children at school are learning about the state of the world as it was described in the textbooks when their teachers were at school. This is similar.

I don’t read like that at all, it’s seems very surface level. Obviously you’re given information but surely it’s only natural to do your own character development based on the descriptions and mannerism described. Maybe you just don’t like the book?

No. I love the books. To me it seems that it is you who are operating at surface level, needing to be told every tiny irrelevant detail rather than focusing on the words, behaviour and overall personality of each character. Shakespeare managed to create wonderful, complex characters without us knowing precisely how much money Othello or Hamlet or Lady Macbeth had.

We’ll just have to disagree.

I do not need to be told? My brain automatically forms independent thoughts and I expand on the information read and think on it. Yes let’s disagree, I don’t think character development is surface level.

You’re hung up on Finances. I can think about any element of a character and expound on what I think they are like from my own conclusions and assumptions based on how the author has presented them.

And I don’t think precise knowledge of a character's finances is "character development".

This is a funny chat! Once the kids were all at Hogwarts she should have got a cleaning job there or a job in retail on Diagon Alley.

I always thought they were old money but now I’m thinking about it, Ron in particular has the East London accent and they’re portrayed as being quite low class so not sure. The house and whimsical nature of the family is giving old money for sure.

Molly spent years homeschooling their children, which was absolutely necessary - there was no way Fred and George could have gone to a muggle primary school. I think their priorities are messed up. Ron had a second hand wand on starting school, even before it got broken, even though you always get the best results with your own wand. But they prioritised buying Percy (who had just been made a prefect) brand new robes and I think his owl. Surely ‘their own wand’ should be the first thing you buy your child starting wizarding school? But then Molly’s attitude towards Ron always seems to be ‘that’ll do’ (Voldy definitely knew what he was talking about!).