#surprise! it's the class system!

[saintsenara]

wait how bougie was Tom Riddle Sr.? How nice would his Manor have been? Was he like an actually Lord with a title and stuff?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

in half-blood prince, dumbledore refers to tom riddle sr. as "the squire's son" - which allows us to state with certainty that he was a minor aristocrat.

however, the word minor is important here.

there are - historically - two levels of aristocracy in britain. the first are the peers of the realm - which refers to families which hold one or more of the titles of duke, marquess, earl, or viscount. these are the elite of the elite - these gradations of nobility were created in the middle ages as a way of distinguishing those who held the titles from other noblemen, usually because of a close relationship [often one of blood or marriage or both] to the king.

the titles are hereditary by male primogeniture, and the holders - while this is no longer the case - used to have political power [such as the right to sit in the house of lords], simply by virtue of their birth.

[this is why they're called "peers" - it refers to them historically being close in status to royalty, and therefore expected to serve as royal advisors.]

there is another class of peer - a baronet - whose title is similarly hereditary, but whose position doesn't come historically with the right to sit in the lords or advise the king by virtue of birth. [baronets may - of course - have been members of parliament, or royal advisors selected at the king's discretion, but this would be separate from their title. a duke, in contrast, could historically expect to request a meeting with the king simply because he was a duke.]

while some families have historically been ennobled at the king's discretion, access to any of these titles is pretty much restricted to the small group of families who've held them for centuries.

but below the peers of the realm, there is a second, more minor class of aristocracy, the landed gentry - of which a village squire is a textbook example.

historically, what is meant by "landed" is an ability to live off of the rental income of one's country holdings, which would be leased to tenant farmers. that is, they are landlords in the original sense of the term - lords of the land. this is what tom sr. tells us his family does in half-blood prince:

“It’s not ours,” said a young man’s voice. “Everything on the other side of the valley belongs to us, but that cottage belongs to an old tramp called Gaunt, and his children. The son’s quite mad, you should hear some of the stories they tell in the village - ”

what is also meant by "landed" is that the family in question is of the upper-classes, but that they are still "commoners" - which in this context doesn't imply a value judgement, but which is a socio-legal term which simply indicates that they don't hold an aristocratic title such as duke, earl etc.

[and gentry families certainly aren't common in terms of financial standing... the most famous member of this class in literature? fitzwilliam darcy, whose ten thousand a year is something like thirteen million quid in today's money...]

gentry families might be very old - they might have received their lands from the king in the middle ages as a reward for knightly service, and it's interesting to imagine generations of gaunts and riddles brought up alongside each other in little hangleton - or they might be comparatively newer - tom sr.'s great-grandfather [feasibly born c.1810] could have been a self-made victorian industrialist who bought the lands from the original holder and established himself as gentry.

by 1900, it was becoming much harder for the gentry to live on rental income alone, and many would also have had jobs. these would have been elite, and very frequently were in politics, the civil service, the military, or the law. tom sr's father - whom the films call thomas, so let's go with that - might, for example, have served as a high-ranking officer in the army [including during the first world war], be the local magistrate, or be the local member of parliament.

in terms of titles, thomas riddle would almost undoubtedly be sir thomas - and this is how it would be correct to address him. but this title would be a courtesy, and it wouldn't be hereditary unless the riddles were also baronets [which it's entirely plausible that they were].

which is to say, tom sr. would not have a title while his father was alive - although he would have the right to be referred to formally in writing as mr thomas riddle esq. [esquire]. the correct form of verbal address for anyone other than friends and family would be to call him mr riddle, although the riddles' servants would probably refer to him as mister tom.

tom jr. would not have a title while his father or grandfather was alive. if the riddles were baronets, he would technically inherit the title after he kills the rest of the male line... but given that tom sr. never acknowledged him and his existence was presumably unknown to the riddles' lawyers this wouldn't be something which happened in reality. the estate's executors clearly took control of the riddles' property, the land was portioned off and sold, and the house became a standalone property for sale.

the riddle house - which is a name used informally for it in little hangleton, it would have a different "proper" name - is described in canon in ways which show that it's a typical manor house, which means it would look something like this:

these houses are obviously very impressive, but they're tiny in size in comparison to the magnificent stately homes - places like blenheim palace, chatsworth, burghley house, holkham hall - lived in by the titled aristocracy. the riddles would entertain - for example - by giving house parties, dinner parties, hunting parties, etc., but they wouldn't have a ballroom or a dining hall capable of seating hundreds.

[they would probably also own a property - probably a flat or small house - in london.]

they would have servants, but not colossal numbers - they would undoubtedly have a butler but not footmen, and the upstairs maids would report to the butler since they probably wouldn't have a housekeeper. they canonically have a cook, who probably had one or two kitchen maids assisting, and they canonically have a gardener - frank bryce - who probably doesn't have any assistants. they may, depending on the size of the estate, have a gamekeeper. sir thomas undoubtedly had a secretary and a chauffeur, and his wife might have a lady's maid. tom sr. would have had a nanny and then been educated until at least the age of eight by a governess, but would then have attended a prep school [either day or boarding] until the age of thirteen, and then gone to a boarding school, from which he likely went on [on the basis of social class rather than talent] to oxford or cambridge.

the family would have enormous social influence locally. most people - and also businesses - in little hangleton would be their tenants, and they would also probably have a say over the appointment of the local clergyman [an important figure in the community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], since the parish church is likely to have been something called a "living" - the thing which turns up again and again in jane austen - which means that the church and its parsonage technically belongs to the landowner, but is granted to the vicar as a freehold while he's in post.

gossip about the riddles' doings would also be the main source of local interest - the servants were dining out for months on tom sr.'s elopement and return.

so they're something resembling celebrities - but they're local celebrities. nobody in london - and even nobody in cities we can imagine are nearer to little hangleton, such as liverpool - would particularly know or care who they were. tom sr. might have made it into the london gossip columns if he was part of a particularly scandalous "set" [a group of friends] who socialised in the capital, but these mentions would have been fleeting - and the press would have been much more concerned by the doings of members of his set who were genuinely titled or who were legitimately famous.

[this is the reason why mrs cole doesn't recognise the name. if merope had said her son was to be named cecil beaton after his father, she may well have been prompted to hunt him down...]

so tom sr. is elite - but he's elite in a way which is extremely culturally-specific, and which is [just like the portrayal of aristocracy in the wizarding world - the blacks, for example, are far less aristocratic than the riddles in terms of canonical vibe] often exaggerated into the sort of pseudo-royal grand aristocracy which the british period-drama-industrial-complex makes such a big deal of.

and tom jr.'s character is affected by this in a series of extremely interesting ways.

by which i mean that, in terms of blood, he's probably the most aristocratic character in the series - the absence of grand aristocracy in the wizarding world would mean that [were he raised by his father] he would come from a social background which was equivalent [even as it was divided from them by virtue of being muggle] to any of his fellow slytherins, and would help him easily blend into their society because the manners, genre of socio-cultural reference points [he would recognise, for example, that quidditch heavily resembles both rugby and polo], accent and way of speaking etc. that he would possess would be broadly indistinguishable from those of his pureblood peers.

[this is why justin finch-fletchley and draco malfoy speak in essentially the same way.]

but he would then be given the enormous boost in cachet - one which would genuinely elevate him above the rest of his cohort - of his maternal line.

and we see in canon that this does bestow some privilege on him among his peers while he's in school:

Tom Riddle merely smiled as the others laughed again. Harry noticed that he was by no means the eldest of the group of boys, but that they all seemed to look to him as their leader. “I don’t know that politics would suit me, sir,” he said when the laughter had died away. “I don’t have the right kind of background, for one thing.” A couple of the boys around him smirked at each other. Harry was sure they were enjoying a private joke, undoubtedly about what they knew, or suspected, regarding their gang leader’s famous ancestor.

where he's let down socially is that people like slughorn - to whom he can't reveal his slytherin ancestry and hope to maintain cover for his wrongdoing - don't think he's come from anywhere particularly special. this is because he has a muggle father - absolutely - but it's even more that he has a muggle father who, since he left him to be raised in an orphanage, was presumably working-class.

what the young voldemort lacks is any socio-cultural familiarity with the muggle class performance which the class performance of the wizarding world parallels. abraxas malfoy boasting about how important his father is would be something a tom jr. raised by the riddles could match - "oh yes, my father gives to all sorts of causes too. in fact, he was invited to buckingham palace because of it." - establishing himself as an equal in terms of class and social influence even if he isn't an equal in blood.

what actually happens in canon is that the orphaned tom - with his uncouth manners and his working-class accent - has no hope of gaining any sort of social equality with his posh peers.

so he becomes determined to outrank - and humiliate and control - them.

[bookwyrminspiration]

i cannot emphasize enough how much my entire academic situation is currently hinging on receiving an email from one (1) person

[funnierasafictive]

My irl friends (we’re not out as a system to them) like to joke about me being my source because I look so much like it…. Sometimes they’ll just call me by my actual name and not the body’s name as a joke and I’ll just freeze like “HOW DID YOU KNOW-

Oh that reminds me of how our hair in real life looks very similar to Simon Petrikov’s! It makes cosplaying him easier, haha. =)

[faaun]

critical thinking is taught in literature and/or philosophy classes you're just usamerican

king i think you might be the one lacking reading comprehension skills i'm a philosophy undergrad, i was raised in iran, i live in the UK where we ARE taught to think critically, have never once been to the usa, and i'm talking from my own perspective as an asian person combined w that of all my peers from diff asian countries who all have had the same experience/perspective on this . if you read the tags on that post i say clearly that i'm iranian :)

[doccywhomst]

.

[contraspem--spero]

Listen I'm about anti-natalist as you can possibly get but like if you'd learn pedagogics and it's history and realise how much of it was invented by Men maybe you'd understand a lot about why our education system is the way it is

[transingthoseformers]

So I've been reading this fic for four days, right? And it's roughly 268k?

That's around 67,000 words a day, not even counting how many other much smaller fics I've been reading all of this time.

I must make every literature oriented teacher so proud yet aghast

[punksonic]

i don't think it's appropriate for me to really speak much as to the current shortages of adderall and other medications associated with treating adhd but i feel like i should.

yes these medications are abused, but no one wants to look into why someone who doesn't have adhd would take it. why do you think some supposedly neurotypical college student elbows another who has adderall and asks for some to study for an exam worth half their grade?

the DEA is out of touch with american society to the point it still thinks marijuana is a C1 drug but doesn't want to declassify it to C2 so that the process can be overseen so people don't get their marijuana accidentally laced with something else. you'd sooner prescribe someone a blood thinner than a medication that would actually help them focus, but i guess that's not up to me.

it's ridiculous. maintenance medications shouldn't be held to this degree of scrutiny.

[saintsenara]

One thing that confuses me about the Dursleys is how they're supposed to be a parody of the British middle class, but isn't Vernon like director/chief of a company? Like, he owns a business and it doesn't seem to be a failing one so wouldn't they be more accurately described as upper class? Maybe it's just me who's dumb but it's something that really confuses me lol

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

the dursleys would never be thought of as upper-class, because that implies a certain aristocratic or gentry connection which they evidently don't have.

the most they could be is upper-middle-class - which is one of those fun british class-brackets which has a very specific "look" in the wider cultural imagination, and which defines itself as something vastly different from being middle-middle-class or lower-middle-class in terms of its vibe.

which is to say, this intra-class division isn't really financial [although that is a factor - just not the only one] so much as it's based in performance. how one changes social class [which is possible, these class divisions aren't immutable] isn't by becoming rich, it's by learning how to perform. mundungus fletcher, for example, could be a billionaire, but the way he presents himself to the world would still read as working-class. the teenage voldemort has nothing in his bank account, but he behaves in a way which is indistinguishable from his posh pureblood friends.

the dursleys' class performance - the way they dress and speak, the way they behave, their attitude towards their possessions [such as vernon's pride in his car], the places they want to go on holiday - indicates a bang-in-the-middle vibe, simultaneously aspirational to someone like petunia [who grew up below it] and hilariously unimpressive to someone like james potter [who grew up above it].

the best illustration of this is to compare them to the grangers, who are clearly upper-middle-class. the financial difference is negligible - vernon, as a company director, could feasibly be on a salary which was in the same ballpark [or which potentially even exceeded] what a dentist who only or mainly took private clients [which is the case for many dentists in the uk] could expect to earn - but their performance of class is totally different.

the grangers go skiing and spend their summers in the south of france; the dursleys' ideal holiday destination is majorca - which, while this is very unfair to a lovely bit of spain and the lovely people who live there, is used by jkr because it has that sort of middle-tier association in the british cultural imagination [posher than going to the costa del sol, rougher than staying in a converted farmhouse in cantabria]. the grangers name their daughter "hermione" - which, whether they get it from greek or from shakespeare, is a statement of their class performance - while the dursleys name their son "dudley" - which is the same.

and - of course - the grangers are dentists, which means they went to university. vernon makes drills - but is not an actual builder; which, while a blue collar job which would be understood as working-class, is also understood as something authentic - and clearly did not.

the interesting thing about the dursleys' class-status, though, is that vernon seems to have gone down from a childhood which was upper-middle-class. not in the same way as the grangers - apparently city-based, europhile, undoubtedly voted for tony blair in 1997 - are upper-middle-class, but in a way specifically associated with posh people who live in the country - whose poshness is considered to be more parochial and more politically conservative.

marge dursley - with her tweed and her bulldogs and her brusque manners - is a perfect stereotypical example of this. so too is smeltings, the fee-paying boarding school which both vernon and dudley attend - it wouldn't be unusual within the dursleys' class-bracket for dudley to be privately educated, but it is unusual for this to be at a school with the vibe that smeltings [whose uniform, for example, is so obviously based on that of schools like eton and harrow] has.

it's really interesting to think about why vernon might have ended up shuffling down to the middle of the middle, especially because there are plenty of careers for a man from that country-posh bracket which would retain his class-status without requiring a university education - above all, going into the army. that he doesn't do this - that he becomes a managing director, a job which has financial but not cultural cachet as an upper-middle-class signifier [if you care about these things - which i do not] - has a certain degree of deliberate choice behind it.

and this provides a fascinating comparison with petunia - who was clearly raised working-class and has ascended into the middle through performance, and who then becomes desperate to retain her status by continuing to perform "correctly". vernon also lives behind a mask, which also depends on the correct performance of a class-bracket which he wasn't born into, even if his class journey is one of descent.

vernon and petunia's fear of magic relates to this - they're both terrified that the neighbours will learn, if they discover the existence of magic, that they're not as bang-in-the-middle normal as they claim to be.

and this is fundamentally because magic is something eccentric and strange. and eccentricity [especially in dress and manners - the thing that vernon hates about wizards] is read as either a sign that someone is very posh or a sign that they are very much not.

but not as something in between.

[belltherad]

yes the point of english in US schools is a media literacy class but also the content and quality of education in the US not only varies from school district to school district but from level to level (e.g. AP/IB/honors kids getting more respect and funding and quality education from teachers and schools)

[notthatjaded]

I surprised a teacher in elementary school by using the word "thwart" in some answer I wrote for something in history class. And she was like, "where did you learn that?" and I had to be like, "some advertisement for a home security system in a magazine."

have i ever told y’all about the greatest moment of my academic career

i was a freshman in college and i had this history teacher who was ~edgy~ and his hotness level on ratemyprofessor was off the charts and he was the first teacher i ever heard use the word “fuck.” anyway he would do this thing every so often where we’d have a “quiz” and the first two questions were always really easy and the last one was hard - they were all similar questions, and the point was to show what you learn about history and what you don’t. 

so one day he’s like okay kids time for a quiz and the first question was who killed abraham lincoln. the second question was who killed JFK. third question was who killed william mckinley. 

we all take a few minutes and write down our answers, and then the teacher asks the questions again so we can shout out the answers. everybody answered the first two with really no problem.

now, keep in mind that this class was at 9 a.m. and i was exhausted All The Time during my freshman year of college so i sat in the back in my sweats and never said a word and the teacher definitely had no clue who i was. 

so you can imagine his surprise when he asked the class who shot william mckinley and without missing a beat i said, “czolgosz,” pronounced correctly and everything. 

my teacher froze and in a very stern voice asked, “what was that? what did someone just say?”

i repeated: czolgosz.

my teacher: “who said that?”

i raised my hand, and my super cool history teacher glared at me. he then asked me how the hell i knew the answer. he said that in the TWENTY YEARS he’d been teaching this stupid class, nobody, not A SINGLE PERSON, had ever known the answer to that question.

i then had to quietly explain to a room full of people that there’s a musical called assassins and there’s a song about czolgosz shooting william mckinley at the great pan american exposition in buffaloooooooo (in buffaloooooooo)

[seronefada]

"Were very sorry sir. The children thought your people were from the government."

A small DP/DC promp

Casper high is on a field trip in Gotham.

Danny is in the team with Tucker, Kwan and Dash as most of the time.

They have a picture hunt around Gotham.

After a while they notice strange people in white following them. White jackets, black ties.

As Amity park kids the of course thought, these were GIW agents they don't know.

Everybody knows Danny is having to much ecto in his system. They sometimes see his eyes change color. No surprise if you think of the Fenton Parents lap safety.

So as the people get closer and one of them grabs Danny's arm. Dash hits him before they can speak.

They got in a big fight.

Penguin gets called cause his Goons are fighting a school class.

Things calm down quick as Oswald came. The Teacher told them to stop.

As he was talking to Mr. Lancer the Teacher said:" The children are very sorry. They thought your Henchpeople were part of the Government."

Penguins Goons are also very sorry:" We thought it was a Wayne kid."

Penguin has also some Questions in his head like: why would high school kids get into a fist fight with the Government?

And why did the Teacher think that was a reasonable explanation?

[tornadodyke]

you can tell that my college's engineering building is aged because the bottom floors don't have women's restrooms. there's a women's restroom on the ground floor but not the bottom floors. or if there is a women's restroom it's so well-hidden it may as well not even exist

[so2uv]

i hate sinus infections

[somuchstrdst]

i think i just caught a colleague doing something wrong with a class i assigned him a couple of hours ago just so he could avoid teaching it and i'm shooketh with his audacity but i don't want to rat him out because the class will go back to me but really i'm completely baffled that he did it

[trans-axolotl]

one of the reasons it's really hard for a lot of intersex people when intersex topics are on the news cycle is because the public's reaction reveals how little anyone knows or cares about intersex people, including people who call themselves our allies. almost every time intersex topics are trending, the discourse surrounding them is filled with misinformation. people who only learned today what the word intersex means jump into conversations and act like an authority. endosex/dyadic/perisex people get tripped up over things that are basically intersex 101, with tons of endosex people incorrectly arguing about the definition of intersex, who "counts," DSD terminology, and so much more. i've seen multiple endosex people say today that they've been "warning intersex people" and that we should have known that transphobia would catch up with us eventually, which is an absolutely absurd thing to say given the fact that consistently over the past ten years, it has often been intersex people sounding the alarm on sex-testing policies and also the fact that many, many intersex people are also trans, and already are facing the impacts of transphobia. there is an absolute failure from the general public to take intersex identity seriously; people seem not even able to fathom that intersex people have a community, history, and our own political resources. instead, endosex people somehow seem to think they're helping by bringing up half-remembered information from their high school biology class which usually isn't even relevant at all.

and this frustrates me so fucking much. not because i want to deny the impacts of transphobic oppression--i'm a trans intersex person, trust me when i say i am intimately aware of transphobia. this frustrates me because there is no way we can achieve collective liberation if our "allies" fail to even engage with basic intersex topics and are seemingly unaware of the many forms of intersex oppression that we are already facing every fucking day. if you are not aware of compulsory dyadism, if you are not aware of interphobia, if you are not aware of the many different ways that intersex people are directly and often violently targeted--how the fuck do you think we're going to dismantle all of these systems of oppression?

if you were truly an intersex ally, you would already KNOW that this is not new, and would not be surprised--interphobia in sports has been going on for decades. you would know that we do have a community, an identity, a history--you would have already read/listened/watched to intersex resources that give you the background information you need for allyship. you would know that although there is a really distinct lack of resources and political education, that intersex people ARE developing a political understanding of ourselves and our oppression--Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr and their framework of compulsory dyadism is one example of how we're theorizing our oppression. It's absolutely fucking wild to me how few people I've seen actually use words like "interphobia" "intersexism" "compulsory dyadism" or "intersex oppression"--endosex people are seemingly incapable of recognizing that there is already an entrenched system of oppression towards intersex people that violently reshapes our bodies, restricts our autonomy, and attempts to eradicate intersex through a variety of medical and legal means.

you cannot treat intersex people like an afterthought. not just because we're meaningful parts of your community and deserving of solidarity, but also because intersex oppression impacts everyone!!! especially trans community--trans people will not be free until intersex people are free, so much of transphobia is shaped by compulsory dyadism, the mythical sex binary, all these ideas of enforced "biological sex" that are just as fake as the gender binary.

it makes me absolutely fucking livid every time this shit happens because it becomes so abundantly clear to me how little the average endosex person knows about intersex issues and also how little the average endosex person cares about changing that. i don't know what to say to get you to care, to get you to change that, but we fucking need it to happen and i, personally, am tired of constantly being grateful when i meet an endosex person who knows the bare minimum. i think we have a right to expect better and to demand that if you're going to call yourself our ally, you actually fucking listen to us when we tell you what that means.

okay for endosex people to reblog.