Sorcerer's Stone: Page 88
Chocolate Frog illustrations, ordinary days with the Dursleys, the original Hedwig, and what counts toward the Statute of Secrecy.
Good Morning! Welcome back to another issue, and what an issue it is. Today we cover page 88 of Sorcerer’s Stone. What do Mary GrandPre’s illustrations tell us about Chocolate Frogs? How did the Dursleys treat Harry on normal days? What’s the deal with Hedwig? And what does the Statute of Secrecy say about owls? We explore all that and more — enjoy!
Let’s talk about Chocolate Frog cards. Specifically, let’s talk about the illustrated Chocolate Frog on page 88 of Sorcerer’s Stone. Two things: A) the card is square, and B) the card is a lot smaller than the frog itself.
That conflicts with what we know of real-world Chocolate Frogs in two ways. For one, all of the most official frogs that we’ve seen are pentagonal; you get the high-end ones that come in the metal tins, and the less expensive boxes made of cardboard, but either way, the most authentic chocolate frog cards are pentagonal, not rectangular. They also sell rectangular ones, but they’re just wrapped in plastic, and clearly less authentic. Also, even if the rectangular ones are canon, the frog is still wrong, because the rectangular cards that you can actually buy are the same size or bigger than the frogs they come with.
There’s one other problem with the illustration: Dumbledore’s beard isn’t long enough. It’s maybe six inches to a foot, which is pretty long for a beard, but pretty short for Dumbledore. It’s more like Jude Law in Fantastic Beasts 3 than Dumbledore in movie one. This one is actually probably the most glaring of the three issues. The other two are probably fine; Mary GrandPre illustrated the frogs, then later, the Warner Brothers people manufactured frogs that didn’t look very much like them. This one, on the other hand, conflicts directly with the description of Dumbledore that we’ve already seen in the first chapter of the book. Dumbledore looks less like an old wizard and more like a middle-aged lumberjack.
This is all from the start of chapter six, “The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters,” which is fun, because it has an illustration. There are — I’m going to take a strictly educated guess and see how close I get — about 194 chapters in the Harry Potter series? (Interlude while I look it up: WOW, it’s 198, that’s seriously impressive on my part, isn’t it?). That’s 198 illustrations, which seems like a lot, except there are also — here we go — 4185 pages in the series? (Actual answer is 4224 — am I qualified to write this newsletter, or what?). That means that fewer than 4.7% of all pages in the series have illustrations, which means fewer than one in 20 newsletters will feature illustration analysis...so once again, this is a nice opportunity.
For instance: GrandPre has chosen to draw the frog with a shine to it, as if it’s some sort of glazed chocolate; you don’t often see that in Muggle candy. It’s also a lot taller than the Muggle frogs that you see, which are usually pretty much flat. It has what looks like a paper wrapper, not big enough that it could have surrounded the frog fully before being unwrapped. The implication is that the frog is wrapped tightly in the outer display wrapper (not pictured), then sits in the crinkled paper or foil wrapper with a roughly square footprint, on top of the card.
Does anyone find this interesting? I don’t know. This is basically what I do here, give or take. If you don’t find deep-dive looks at Harry Potter illustrations interesting...you’re in luck, because as far as I can tell (but no promises), that’s the last we’ll say about it for this issue.
The text of the page begins with something interesting: Harry is spending his last month with the Dursleys, after buying his school supplies with Hagrid but before going off to Hogwarts. Notably, we don’t see any of this in the movie. Harry goes straight from Diagon Alley to King’s Cross. This actually makes far more sense than the way it happens in the book: after Hagrid has seen just how bad Harry has it with the Dursleys, you’d think that he’d get Harry out of the Dursleys’ house as quickly as possible. There’s the issue of him having to stay in a home where his mother’s blood resides, or whatever that wording is, but the way Dumbledore explains it, all he has to do is come back home once a year; there’s no reason he can’t leave Privet Drive a month early, especially given that Voldemort isn’t remotely back yet and he hasn’t taken Harry’s blood to weaken the protection.
Harry isn’t having the worst time he’s ever had: the Dursleys are terrified of him. “Dudley was now so scared of Harry he wouldn’t stay in the same room, while Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon didn’t shut Harry in his cupboard, force him to do anything, or shout at him,” Rowling writes. “In fact, they didn’t speak to him at all.” The shame is that we don’t get any fantastic moments of Dursleys content here. As I’ve often said, some of Rowling’s best writing comes at the beginnings of the various books when she’s portraying the absolute absurdity of Harry living with the Dursleys. My favorite example comes in book five, when Harry is listening to the news, and he and Uncle Vernon get into an all-time great argument: Uncle Vernon proudly insisting that Dudley doesn’t know who the Prime Minister is, Harry explaining that he keeps listening to the news because “it changes every day, you see,” Uncle Vernon seizing on Aunt Petunia’s good point as if he came up with it, Harry restraining himself from saying something rude, only to ultimately fail.
Here, though, we get almost nothing. There are a few lines later on, but it’s mostly grunting; we don’t get the kind of isolated, multi-page conversation that so perfectly illustrate what the Dursleys are all about. They were “half terrified, half furious,” so “they acted as though any chair with Harry in it were empty.” The saddest part is how Harry reacts to it: “although this was an improvement in many ways, it did become a bit depressing after a while.”
I’m not a child psychologist, but I would say there are some sad dynamics at work here. Harry can’t quite decide whether it’s a net positive or a net negative that his caretakers no longer acknowledge his existence. It’s a sort of interesting parallel with scenes later in the books when Harry and Ron get in fights, and neither will have anything to do with the other; in those moments, Harry likewise sees the positives, but also can’t avoid the fact that overall, there’s something fundamentally wrong.
It also makes me wonder: what was life like for Harry at the Dursleys’ before all the magic started? We see a little of it, in the short few hours before Harry lets the snake out of its enclosure, but that’s already the Dursleys on a bad day; Harry isn’t even supposed to be with them at the zoo, but Mrs. Figg broke her leg. I’m wondering about the other days, the more normal ones. What was it like, say, when Harry and Dudley came down for breakfast in the morning before heading off to school? Obviously, Dudley was still going to get the better treatment, but was it as bad as what we see in the later books? Did Petunia and Vernon ask Harry what he did at school, even in passing, after they spent a bunch of time on Dudley? If the Dursleys sat down to watch a movie on a Friday night, did Harry get to watch? Did he get any popcorn? Did Harry get to play youth football (soccer)? If Harry’s primary school teacher asked the class to bring in $20 each for the trip to the aquarium, would the Dursleys give him the money?
We’ve seen Harry’s teenaged years with the Dursleys, and we’ve seen his impressions of the Dursleys, but what we haven’t seen is how those years really went. Now obviously, they were bad — but it would be really interesting to actually see how bad. Were the Dursleys actually evil, real Cinderella-type villains, or were they more like regular parents who got a big, unwelcome surprise, and got stressed about it, and slowly but surely let that stress turn into animosity?
I’ve written before that while the Dursleys are clearly antagonists in the series to varying extents (in terms of villainy, Uncle Vernon > Aunt Petunia > Dudley), but there’s one reading of the series that casts them more empathetically. Vernon and Petunia are two socially conservative but fairly normal people who have just had their first child, and just as they’re starting to figure out how they want to raise him, a wizard baby gets dumped on their doorstep. Clearly, they react badly to that, and no one is saying that the Dursleys are somehow exonerated from all the bad things they’ve done. What might be true, though, is that while they’re certainly to blame for where things ended up, it’s not entirely their fault that the stress and animosity started in the first place. They’re not purely bad people like Voldemort or Umbridge; they’re people who had what might be called “quite a shock.”
Because the Dursleys are completely ignoring Harry, he keeps to his room; he’s getting to know Hedwig, who he’s named after someone he read about in A History of Magic. Do we ever learn who that original Hedwig was? Maybe it’s listed on the Harry Potter Fandom Wiki because it was written out in the development credits of the Fantastic Beasts companion coffee table book or something, but to me that doesn’t even count; the books never address this Hedwig again. Sure enough, the Harry Potter Fandom Wiki lists this person as “Saint Hedwig,” and the source on that is “Glossary at harrypotter.scholastic.com (Archived via Wayback Machine).” So this was something that J.K. Rowling wrote in 1999 or something, and someone added “Saint” as an afterthought, and now there’s a whole extra layer to the story, and there’s someone named “Saint Hedwig” who probably did something really important in Wizarding history that we’ll learn about some random day in nine years. Such is life.
Harry spends his nights lying in bed, staying up late and reading about magic. There’s a nice sweet moment of innocent discovery; it’s basically the magical version of a kid staying up late listening to a baseball game on the radio under the pillow. Hedwig swoops in and out of the window as she pleases — do you think the neighbors ever noticed that a Snowy Owl started swooping around everywhere? I wonder if the Statute of Secrecy has anything in it about non-magical signs of wizarding activity. It’s not magical, for instance, to have an owl swooping around carrying letters. It might not be magically revealing to plant things in your garden that are more common in wizarding homes, but it’s probably a hint to the neighbors that something weird is going on. Do you think there are laws about owl use, for instance? Do you think the Statute of Secrecy, in addition to saying “you can’t use magic in front of Muggles,” also has a whole complicated section on what kind and frequency of owl use is allowed? If you do what Hagrid did and use an engorgement charm to make your Halloween pumpkins the size of boulders, but you do the charm where no one can see the actual magic happening, does it violate the statute of secrecy to display those pumpkins in front of your house? If no one can see the magic, but it’s clear that something outside the realm of the usual happened, has the Statute been offended? Hedwig also keeps bringing home dead mice, and Harry thinks to himself that it’s lucky that Aunt Petunia doesn’t come in to vacuum anymore. Interestingly, that answers part of the earlier question: Aunt Petunia did once vacuum Harry’s room. So it’s not like the Dursleys left Harry completely without familiar support; Aunt Petunia may have been cold, but she still helped Harry keep his room clean.
The page ends just as Harry is mentioning (in his head) how every night before he goes to bed, he ticks off another day on his calendar counting down to September 1st. Actually, the page ends before he says the part about ticking off the days counting down to September 1st. But it’s close enough, and it’s a short page, what with the illustration, so we’ll let the thought reach its natural end. Soon Harry will leave for Hogwarts, and the real magic of the series will commence. We’ll experience Quidditch, charms, and potions; we’ll meet the teachers and all the characters we’ll grow to love. We’ll learn all the little things that make the Wizarding World what it is — starting with the shape of a Chocolate Frog card.