Harry Potter’s Blue Blood

The other DrC and I are long-time Harry Potter fans, to a not-quite-embarassing degree. We’ve read all the books, listened to them on CD, seen the films, and been to the Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter attractions on both coasts. Plus we’ve won a shipboard Potter Trivia contest.

Writing at The American Interest, Ben Judah does a quick piece of analysis and concludes that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is in fact a Tory; he’s what passes for a conservative in the U.K. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link. Check it out:

Few Americans realize this, but a lot of what reads like fantasy in J.K. Rowling is in fact the British class system with magic wands, house elves and the Order of the Phoenix.

The Hogwarts Express is instantly recognizable as the Flying Scotsman to the Queen’s Balmoral and the prize Highlands shooting estates. The Hogwarts Houses are the Oxford Colleges. Harry’s scholastic shopping trips to Diagon Alley (to get your owl and your magic wand) are so obviously the pricey ritual of stocking up for country boarding school. Platform 9¾ at Kings Cross is, surprise, surprise right next to Platform 10 that takes you “up” to Cambridge. And as for a game of Quiddich, it’s either cricket or the sui generis Eton Wall Game.

Odd, I thought of Quiddich as a mash-up of polo, basketball, and rugby. Polo for the fact it’s played by riders on expensive mounts, basketball because the quaffle is passed by hand and thrown through hoops, and rugby for the relatively brutal amount of injury taken for granted. There are some hockey aspects as well.

Even fewer Americans realize Young Potter is in fact, as I grew to realise, a Tory.

Yet when British readers pick up Harry Potter they instantly recognize it as that most Tory of genres. A piece of public school—and in Britain this of course means not only private but elite education—school days fiction, just with wizards on flying brooms.

J.K. Rowling’s dark, almost reactionary, fairy tales reveal that in Britain the strings are pulled by an dazzling and hidden aristocracy. This is why I still love Harry Potter—as an enchanted adventure hiding a savage warning: Get into Oxbridge, the elite, or you’ll end up a muggle.

Author Rowling started out a poor Socialist and ended up an uber-wealthy Tory, making the classic transition from nothing-to-lose to everything-to-lose. Growing up, Harry Potter travels the same path. Better examples of “where you sit determines where you stand” would be hard to find.