CoS: Page 244
Wizarding social programs, administrative incompetence at the orphanage, the power of the Headmaster, and a deep dive on Ministry spending powers.
Right off the bat, this is an intriguing page.
We’re in the middle of a memory: Tom Riddle is talking to Headmaster Armando Dippet in 1943 or thereabouts. There’s a lot to discuss about the nature of the memory itself — was this something left behind in the diary, for instance, or is Tom Riddle’s soul actively showing it to Harry? — but that’s for later, when we get to that very specific page (look, it’s the format of the newsletter, I don’t make the rules).
Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of a very interesting page. It takes place in 1943. What else is going on in 1943? Roosevelt is president, the Great Depression is abating, and…World War II. E.g…movie four or five of the Fantastic Beasts series?
There’s a lot to talk about here as far as connections to the new movies (assuming they’re made; I hope so!) are concerned. The Basilisk — will Hogwarts bring in Newt Scamander to take a stab (pun) at its beast problem? Tom Riddle — surely he’ll have some sort of role in the conclusion of the Beasts saga? Armando Dippet — maybe?
The point is, there are a lot more layers to dissect now that there’s a series taking place during Voldemort’s formative years. Don’t even get me started on the new layers to Nagini. Seriously, don’t get me started — I won’t get me started. Conversation for another time.
For now, we stick to what’s on the page. And that’s a conversation between Tom Riddle and Armando Dippet.
Wizarding living arrangements
The conversation begins:
“You live in a Muggle orphanage during the holidays, I believe?” said Dippet curiously.
Riddle does, obviously; we know that. The key word there is muggle orphanage. Why doesn’t Riddle live in a wizarding orphanage?
One possible reason, right off the bat, is that there probably aren’t that many wizarding orphans. Poverty and disease are rare in the wizarding world; everyone is pretty much taken care of. So maybe there’s just not enough of a market. That would make sense — if the Wizarding World was strictly capitalistic, which it absolutely is not. There’s no school tuition, and healthcare is (we believe) completely government sponsored; what about the orphans?
Surely, within the wizarding social safety net, there’s room for a government program to house wizarding children without parents. It’s both charitable and practical; obviously it’s a nice thing to do to make sure that children live in good environments, and wizards are also far less likely to be discovered by muggles if there aren’t magical children running amok in orphanages.
At Hogwarts, there’s literally a book that writes down every wizard’s name when they’re born. There’s no logistical problem in keeping track of wizards, because Dumbledore visits Tom Riddle at the orphanage; he’s known where Riddle is the entire time. So it was a conscious decision to leave Riddle exactly where he was.
Remember when Dumbledore drops Harry off at #4 Privet Drive? I don’t remember exactly how this sequence of dialogue goes down — and I’m ashamed of that — but Professor McGonagall says something like “there are dozens of wizarding families who would be proud to have him grow up under their roof!” Where were all those families in 1943? I mean sure…they dodged a bullet. But they didn’t know that at the time!
Anyway, Riddle does live in a muggle orphanage. He stays at Hogwarts for the winter and Easter holidays, and would love nothing more than to stay there over the summer too. Which makes me think of an almost completely unrelated topic: teachers’ families.
Not all the teachers stay at Hogwarts for Christmas and Easter, but some of them do. Even if they don’t, they’re there for a long time, and we never see their families. Professor Flitwick is a catch; where are his many devoted relatives? Does being a Hogwarts teacher basically mean you’re condemned to nine months a year of living alone, besides school breaks?
Of course, this might be confirmation bias; as readers, we only see the teachers at Hogwarts, so we assume they’re always there. Maybe there’s some sort of teachers’ village in suburban Hogsmeade (I could tell you a story about crazy ideas for staff villages, believe me…). Imagine the parties. But the point remains: the teachers (and Filch, but honestly, he seems like a net negative) have to maintain a living environment for a bunch of students for nine months, while completely sacrificing their own.
Record-keeping in both worlds
Riddle explains his situation: he’s a half-blood, with a muggle father and witch mother. His mother showed up at the orphanage and gave birth, then just before she died, gave instructions about what his name would be.
Is that how it works?
To be fair, I have no idea. But surely, this should have set off some alarm bells. Merope literally gave the orphanage the names of Riddle’s family; did the orphanage try to track them down (you know, to figure out whether Riddle was actually an orphan)? Riddle himself tracks them down years later and systematically murders them. In fact, by page 244 of CoS, he’s done so already.
That’s not to say that some orphanage investigators could have easily tracked down the Gaunts, seeing as they’re wizards. Maybe in the ‘30s, it could even have been difficult to find the Riddle family, seeing as there was no way to instantly search a database for family names. But this does seem like the kind of thing that should have gone beyond the orphanage itself. If you get the police involved and tell them “his father’s name is Tom Riddle,” then eventually baby Riddle probably gets back to his family. They take him in, because you can’t really say “yes, he’s Tom’s son, but no thank you!” He grows up in his father’s house with family around him, and hears the Riddle family’s side of the story of his birth; they hate magic, so maybe they go the Dursley route and try to stomp the magic out of him. Then one of two things happens: Either A) he becomes an Obscurus, in which case he probably does a lot less damage than he does the way things actually played out because he’s pretty much guaranteed to die by age 25, or B) Dumbledore comes and rescues him at age 11 just like he did with Harry.
Let’s say he doesn’t become an Obscurus. Say Dumbledore shows up when he’s 11 or so and invites him to Hogwarts. At that point, the path forward gets pretty hazy. Who knows what that looks like? Does Riddle react differently? Having not grown up in the orphanage and bullied the children, do things go completely differently? I mean…who knows?
It's really hard to play out the scenario. Am I saying that if not for some mild administrative incompetence in a 1920s British orphanage, two Great Wizarding Wars could have been averted? I mean…maybe?
Hogwarts as an anarchic dictatorship
Ok, maybe that heading is a little much. But it’s not completely wrong! It’s the only way to explain this line:
“The thing is, Tom,” he sighed, “special arrangements might have been made for you, but under the current circumstances…”
Yes, that’s the headmaster of Hogwarts explaining to a student that in any ordinary year, it’s completely plausible that a kid could live at school over the summer just because they wanted to.
I mean, obviously these are different circumstances and this is sort of a cheap logical tactic, but imagine this same thing happening in an ordinary Muggle boarding school. A kid comes to the headmaster and says “I don’t like where I live over the summer, I want to stay here instead,” and the headmaster says “yeah, maybe!” Keep in mind: this isn’t some summer program where 24 elite students stay at school for six weeks and learn lessons in effective leadership and communication. This is just a single kid not moving out.
Has Dippet thought even the slightest bit about the logistics here? Say Riddle stays at Hogwarts over the summer. What does his day look like? He wakes up and goes down to breakfast — or does he? Does normal food service continue over the summer? Does he have to go to Hogsmeade every morning for an egg sandwich?
He eats breakfast, somehow or other. Then what? He reads all day? Wanders the castle aimlessly? Spends all day in Hogsmeade? Okay, let me actually stop here for a second — spending a summer in Hogsmeade sounds absolutely awesome, A+, no notes. Imagine just hanging out in the Three Broomsticks, going out to whatever summer stuff the villagers put on to amuse themselves, watching some truly spectacular fireworks displays, the whole deal.
As much fun as it sounds, though…it’s not the right scene for Tom Riddle for a bunch of reasons. For one, he just doesn’t have the money. He probably has close to zero money, since he doesn’t have any parents from whom he could get money; all he has is what he’s gotten from the school to buy books and supplies. He can hang out at the Hog’s Head, but he can’t pay for any food or drinks. He also doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would enjoy “hanging out” with anyone at any location, which brings us back to “wandering the castle aimlessly.” Which is probably what he wants — to search for secret rooms to store his soul, you know, who among us hasn’t — but Armando Dippet should absolutely know that that’s not a good idea.
Which brings us back to the headmaster’s shocking statement: paraphrased, he basically says “yeah, we could do this if we wanted to.” Which seems true — but it also seems ridiculous!
Let’s put it this way: what, if any, checks are there on a Hogwarts headmaster’s power? We know of two: the school governors and the Ministry. But we’ve only seen them get involved in truly huge ways: the governors fire Dumbledore after Lucius Malfoy blackmails them into it, and the Ministry intervenes when Fudge is convinced that Dumbledore is secretly raising a student army. What I’m actually wondering is whether there are any day-to-day rules that headmasters have to follow. Is there a handbook? A set of bylaws? Anything that governs how faculty actually behave with remedies beyond “the board of governors steps in to fire you”?
If you’re the head of a muggle boarding school and you’re hiring a new science teacher, you can probably hire whoever you want, but first you have to follow the established procedures. You need a good interview and references; you probably need the approval of the department chair or a faculty council. If you want to introduce a new class, you need buy-in from the academic office or the curriculum committee. If you want to do something truly wacky — you know, just throwing it out there, transform a spare classroom into a forest, hide the Sorcerer’s Stone behind a series of themed obstacles beneath an unused hallway, give out 160 House Points in 30 seconds on the last night of the year, etc. — you have to go through a process. You can’t just do things.
But at Hogwarts…it sort of seems like the headmaster can. Dippet is literally just riffing off-the-cuff about having a student stay over the summer. Later on, when a different headmaster starts forming fascist police squads and interrogating students with truth serum, maybe people will start to re-examine the “the headmaster can just sort of do whatever” model of school governance.
A brief aside on legislative structure
Dippet says that “the Ministry of Magic is even now talking about closing the school.” I have to wonder, through what avenue of power can they do that?
Part of the problem is, we don’t even know how magical legislation works. I was going to write a sentence that started with “if some back-bench wizarding legislator brought up a bill…” but we’ve never even seen confirmation of that legislature existing. (I’m sure that somewhere in a Pottermore entry, J.K. Rowling referenced some law passed in 1633 and explained the legislative process there, but that’s beyond the scope of what we do here). I’ve previously written that it doesn’t seem like the Ministry follows any kind of constitution; they just sort of decide what the law is.
So what can the Ministry do to shut Hogwarts down? They could just do it: they could pass a law saying “Whereas the Ministry has determined that it’s dangerous for Hogwarts to be open, and whereas 2/3 of members duly chosen and sworn have voted thus, Hogwarts is hereby closed.” It could also be a unilateral order: “I, the Minister of Magic, hereby close Hogwarts.” But there are also funny, indirect ways they could do it, the kind of thing you see all the time in politics in order to avoid doing things that you overtly can’t do. They could pass a law saying “Hogwarts can definitely stay open, but completely separately, we’ve decided that we’re deprioritizing education, so Hogwarts funding is going down to zero effective immediately.” They could say “no entity may continue to operate which gathers 50 or more wizards aged 11-17 in one place for more than seven months of the year.” Actually, there’s a whole bunch of complicated legal precedent there, about statutes being facially neutral and different levels of Constitutional scrutiny and a case called Lukumi, but who knows how English magical courts would even work in that situation (the fact that the Courts seem to be controlled by the executive himself is yet another issue; no wonder the government is constantly on the verge of catastrophic failure).
This doesn’t really matter — the Ministry could definitely close Hogwarts if it wanted to, so the actual mechanism isn’t that important — but it’s an interesting element of the Wizarding World to think about. Imagine being the lawyers who have to figure this stuff out.
What actually ends up happening
“Sir,” Riddle asks, “if the person was caught — if it all stopped —”
For one, that’s a pretty foolish thing to say on Riddle’s part. He should be able to deduce on his own that based on what Dippet has said, if the person opening the Chamber of Secrets is caught, the odds of his being able to stay at Hogwarts for the summer increase substantially. As it is, he asks this question really eagerly, and even Dippet — who doesn’t exactly seem to be the brightest candle in the great hall — realizes that Riddle might just know exactly what’s been going on. Dippet doesn’t act on it at all, but he at least gets slightly suspicious.
As it is, though, we know that the person presumed to be behind the attacks — Hagrid — was caught. The attacks stopped. So in the end, despite the attacks stopping, Voldemort didn’t get to stay at Hogwarts over the summer.
Maybe Dumbledore talked Dippet out of it, or maybe Dippet didn’t really mean what he said, and was just trying to placate one of his favorite students. Either way, it seems like in the end, they finally came to their senses and didn’t let this random kid spend the summer at Hogwarts.
Remember, by the way — this scene takes place in the early ‘40s. So the war with Grindelwald is still going on! It’s just one more layer of ridiculousness. Imagine Dumbledore at Hogwarts that summer, using his office as a base station to plan an international effort to take down the most dangerous dark wizard of all time to that point, and then having to also say “get to bed Tom, it’s getting late. And it’s hot out, so make sure you’re wearing sunscreen and drinking enough water.”
However it happened, though, Riddle didn’t get to stay. Thank goodness. Although that summer in Hogsmeade does sound truly fantastic, and I don’t even want to imagine how good magical alterations could make a Three Broomsticks egg sandwich.