The Question of Class

Abstract

I have been edging towards the issue of social class — one that, in the context of the Harry Potter books, has attracted some attention — for a while now. In the previous chapter I have noted that the educational experience of Magic world is apt to be viewed in our world as being specific to a certain social class. This has in fact been the main thrust of observations about class attitudes in the Harry Potter novels, and to this I return later in this chapter. In the previous chapter I have also commented on the manner in which the house-elves’ class characteristics (being servants, the kind of treatment they receive, the spaces they inhabit, their way of speaking, etc.) is made uneasily coextensive with their species-condition of servility. This latter observation arguably has a bearing both on prevailing conceptualizations of class in our world and (to some extent) on the social and political implications of the reception accorded to the Harry Potter novels.