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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 279: “Best of” – “Harry Potter” Book 1, Intro and Ch. 1-2
01:32:14
On today’s episode on The Literary Life podcast, we bring you a special re-mix of our popular series on by J. K. Rowling, with hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. After sharing a little on their own backgrounds as teachers and their...
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- [00:01]
Angelina Stanford
Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.
- [00:22]
Thomas Banks
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast.
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Angelina Stanford
Foreign.
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Thomas Banks
Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast and welcome to our long awaited series on Harry Potter.
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Angelina Stanford
Hear, hear.
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Thomas Banks
Indeed. Now, before we jump in, I'm gonna do something a little different than we usually do. I want to say a few words right here at the beginning because I suspect that this series is going to draw in lots of new listeners to the podcast. So I want to explain a little bit about who we are and what the purpose of this series is for anyone who's brand new. So as I said in the opening, we are Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks and we've been teaching for a combined 45 plus years. I actually just did the math. Is that right? Did I do it right?
- [02:18]
Angelina Stanford
Sure, we'll go with that.
- [02:19]
Thomas Banks
We're gonna go with that. I have a master's degree in English Literature and my husband here, Mr. Banks, has double degrees in Classical languages and English literature, which actually quite amusingly means you have a very similar degree scenario to J.K. rowling herself. Together we founded and run the House of Humane Letters, a business devoted to recovering the lost intellectual tradition of the liberal arts. We have an online academy where we offer everything from year long classes to mini classes to webinars for students of all ages. We host a yearly Literary Life conference, a family retreat, a mentorship program, a publishing house, and more. We also offer two completely free ad free podcasts, the Literary Life Podcast and the well Read Poem. And you can find out more about us and what we have going on at our website and HouseOfHumane Letters.com our third host, Cindy Rollins. As you heard mentioned in the Opening is currently on a much needed sabatical, but you can still find her at her website, morningtime for moms.com and at our sister podcast, the New Mason Jar. Now, as far as who we are and what we do on this podcast, just like the Opening said, this is not another book chat podcast. We are committed to recovering the lost Aristotelian literary tradition as it came down to us through the medievals and the Romantics like Samuel Coleridge, Victorians like George MacDonald and John Ruskin, and into the 20th century through the Inklings. We're doing this series because I believe that that line I just described runs right into the present day through J.K. rowling, who you will find out has that entire line I just said in her list of influences. I hope to make the case here over the next few weeks that the phenomenal success of Harry Potter is because those books are gateways to the vast literary tradition. And when readers read these, the entire world of literature is opened up for them. It gives these books a weight and a depth that most contemporary fiction lacks. This also, I think, accounts for the vast number of adult readers that this series has attracted. Now, these are not works of nostalgia for either, me or Mr. Banks. Neither of us read these books as children and we come to them now as experienced readers and teachers of the literary tradition. Okay, now a little more business before we jump in. I've been thinking about how to approach this and whether or not I should have spoilers or no spoilers. And I think what's going to be happening in this series, just from the feedback we got when we announced it, is that there are two kinds of listeners here. There are people who know these books intimately, backward and forward. I'm sure can chapter and verse me and will terrify me if I say anything wrong. But we also have some first time readers and first time readers who are adults and first time readers who are children. We have nine year olds with their first Harry Potter copy and are going to be listening to the podcast. And so I don't want to ruin this for them. I want them to have the absolute best reading experience that everyone should have. And so we are not going to have any spoilers on this podcast. So I needed to say that up front because we were getting a lot of questions about this. No spoilers. Now that is going to pose a challenge for me in teaching these because one of the things we're going to talk about is how masterfully structured this entire series is. And she's using something called a ring structure which Means book one goes with book seven, book two goes with book six, and on and on. And so there will be things in book one that I am not going to be able to say until we get to book seven, because I don't want to spoil them. So just know as we go through, I'll be talking about all kinds of things, but I will not be talking about everything that there is to be said, because you can't say it until you get to the end. We are also asking for no spoilers in our Facebook group, so please be mindful of that because this will be someone's first time reading and we don't want to ruin it for them. Actually, I have to tell this joke. I. I was talking in my classes and I had. There was a lot of students in there in the middle school class who had never read Harry Potter before and were really excited that they were going to read it this summer for the podcast. And so I was telling them, don't worry, there's not going to be any spoilers. And then I said, you know, I'm definitely not going to tell you that at the end of book seven, Harry wakes up and the whole thing's just been a dream that Dudley has. And I thought that was obviously a joke and they were not sure I was joking. And then I got all these emails from parents later. Yes, I got all these emails from Paris later, laughing about how their kids came out of class and were like, mom, mom, are the Harry Potter books just Dudley's dream is the whole thing. Dudley's dream. So this seems like it.
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Angelina Stanford
Dudley is obviously the kind of child who's spiritually and otherwise incapable of dreaming. So, I mean, Correct.
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Thomas Banks
Correct. Clearly, it's not going to be Dudley's dream. It might be the cat's dream. I'm not going to give any spoilers. But on our Patreon Discord. Okay, if you're just like, I have to talk about the stuff she's saying, and everything she's saying relates to book seven, and everything makes sense now. We do have a place where you can discuss that. In our Patreon Discord. We have a spoiler thread. So we have a non spoiler thread and a spoiler thread. So if you really want to make these connections and talk about what we're talking about and all the good stuff, you can do that over on our Patreon. All right, now, one more point of business. As I said, we're starting this differently than we start our other podcast. That's because I just feel like I need to orient the new listener to what is going on here. This series is also going to be a bit different from other series we've done because we're going to be covering the first book here on the podcast and then I will be covering the rest of the books and in a series of mini classes I will be teaching. And I've called these classes Harry Potter Gateway to the Literary Tradition. So right now we have scheduled for August I'm going to cover books two and three in a one week class and you can register for that now at our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and click on the Mini Class tab and I'll bring you right there. And I'm going to cover the other books over the next year and I'm hoping to finish the whole series by next summer. So you'll want to get on the mailing list again over at House of Humane Letters to know when these other classes are coming out. If you're enjoying this encore presentation of our series on Harry Potter, Book one, then you might be interested in the class I'm teaching this summer. You've heard me say on the podcast that I taught books two and three of Harry Potter in August of 2024. This month, June 2025, I'm teaching another mini class and this time on books four and five of Harry Potter. The class will meet the last two weeks of June at noon Eastern time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Don't worry if you can't make the live sessions, you'll still have access to the class recordings to watch when you're able. I hope you'll join us for what will be a great class looking at how the Harry Potter series is the gateway to the literary tradition. Go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to to find out about this class or last summer's class on books two and three. And while you're there, check out some of our other summer offerings as well. Mr. Banks is going to be teaching a class exploring the Victorian age through the lives of five figures. And Dr. Baxter will be back with a class called how to Read a poem like C.S. lewis and fall in love with poetry again. That's HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to check out our other offerings and see what we've got going on. And now back to our podcast. Well, that didn't take as long as I feared it might. We've got all this business out of the way and now we can officially start. Hi, I'm Angelina Stanford and with me as Always is my husband, Thomas.
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Angelina Stanford
Thomas Banks.
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Thomas Banks
Thomas Banks. Here we go.
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Angelina Stanford
Muggle extraordinaire.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, I think out of the two of us we know, we know who's the Muggle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not a lot of.
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Angelina Stanford
I had children coming up to me at camp and telling me that I was a Muggle.
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Thomas Banks
And it was adorable in a really.
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Angelina Stanford
Charming way, of course.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things we're going.
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Angelina Stanford
To talk about sometimes it's praise, but.
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Thomas Banks
Today is that Mr. Banks has never read these books before. So he is going to be coming at them with fresh eyes. And I'm just really excited for you. And that's what happened at camp at our family retreat. The kids found out you had not read Harry Potter. So you had just hundreds of children.
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Angelina Stanford
Running up to you with evil eye.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah. Calling you a Muggle and then saying a lot of Latin words to you which you will now find out are spells from Harry Potter.
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Angelina Stanford
The other thing is, I mean, I grew up at a time when like you couldn't help but know a fair bit about these. So I know who several of the principal characters are and I think I know the basic arc of the story. And in some ways that's a tribute to what a phenomenon these books are. Were like, like again, I mean, I started reading this one. I think my mother gave it to me when I was 11 or something like that. And after a handful of chapters I decided I despised this. And because it was popular with other kids my age, I figured it couldn't be much good. So I cast it aside and decided to pursue more highbrow things. But nonetheless, I feel like I kind of know these books without having read them the way that one knows Shakespeare, without necessarily having read a lot of Shakespeare. Something like that.
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Thomas Banks
Oh, it's absolutely just part of the cultural consciousness. Absolutely. Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
Kind of a Bible almost in some ways for a generation. But we'll get to that later though.
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Thomas Banks
We will get to that. And I'm glad you brought up your 11 year old snobbishness. When I first asked Mr. Banks here if you had ever read Harry Potter years ago, I asked you that and you said in all honesty, I was an 11 year old snob and I wouldn't read them because they were popular.
- [12:09]
Angelina Stanford
Correct, Correct.
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Thomas Banks
But now you're. Well, actually I wouldn't say that you're less snobby, but you're more mature.
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Angelina Stanford
Sure.
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Thomas Banks
Or your wife browbeat you into reading these.
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Angelina Stanford
Well, I like to think that I'm more tolerant now at almost 40 than I was when I was in middle.
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Thomas Banks
School, one would hope. And perhaps now, because I'm gonna. I'm gonna make some cases here. I mean, like Charles Dickens, sometimes something can be both really popular and artful.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I think there's actually some Dickensian touches in the opening chapters.
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Thomas Banks
Oh, huge. Charles Dickens. We'll get into that in just a second. All right. Well, the way we usually start this podcast, if you're new to it, is we start off by sharing a commonplace quote. And if you don't know what commonplacing is, it is an ancient tradition habit of writing down interesting quotes and passages from things you read. So sometimes we share things that are just random stuff we're reading, and sometimes we share things that are a little on point for what we're talking about, but that's how we started off. So, Mr. Banks, why don't you start by telling us your commonplace quote, and then I will give you mine.
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Angelina Stanford
So I was doing some background reading on the. The late Victorian Edwardian school story, and a classic essay on this subject is Boys Weeklies by George Orwell, who grew up reading, you know, the Boy's Own magazine and things like that. And he's talking about the importance of this particular story form, and he writes to what extent people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally, I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films, and so forth. And that from this point of view, the worst books are often the most important.
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Thomas Banks
Ah, okay. Oh, that. That's very appropriate for what we're going to talk about today, because we'll be getting to British schoolboy stories here in just a few minutes. Oh, well, very good. And I've got a quote from C S Lewis. So if you've been listening for a while, this will come as no surprise that I'm quoting C.S. lewis. And if you're new, you will learn that when you talk about the literary tradition, C.S. lewis and Tolkien, who's weirdly to me, probably to no one else but me, what they are most popularly known as was not actually what their lives were devoted to. They are popularly known as the writers of fiction, great writers of fiction, and of course, very influential books. And influential not only in general, but in particular to this series we're going to be talking about, but their day jobs are. They were both English professors, and they spent a whole lot of time talking and thinking about how stories work and why do you read and what are good ways to read and what are Bad ways to read and what is the purpose of literature and story. And so I'm often quoting them, and you'll hear about them a lot today because I think they have a lot to say on this kind of topic about fantasy. But I quote from them often as just kind of guidepost on how to think about these types of stories. And so I've got a quote here from C.S. lewis from the Weight of Glory, and here's what he says. Do you think I'm trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am. But remember your fairy tales spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. And actually, it's been almost 100 years since he wrote that. So 200 years of an evil enchantment. And one of the things that I hope to show in this series is I think that this is part of what J.K. rowling is doing as well, that she is trying to break the evil enchantment that we are under. But we'll have to wait until we get a little further into the book before we can start talking about that. So, Mr. Banks, you said that you did not read these as a child, but yet you had an awareness of them.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, yes.
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Thomas Banks
My. My history with Harry Potter is they came out at a time when I was too old to have noticed them, and my kids were too young for them to be on their radar as well. So it kind of just fell through the gaps. But even that, even then, I mean, here I am, a young mom raising kids, and I'm not really checking out what's the bestseller list of, you know, children's literature when I'm trying to moo cow all day. Right. They were still on my radar, like you said. Like everybody knew. And I was just sort of watching this phenomenon unfold. And I didn't know really anything about the books, but I was delighted in the phenomenon. Like, I remember reading about kids dressed up and waiting at Barnes and Noble at midnight to get the new release.
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Angelina Stanford
I remember. Yeah. I mean, it was a Hastings in my town, but yes, I remember, like, that phenomenon of seeing, you know, this line looped several times around the same building at odd hours. And, you know, it seemed to consist mostly of 10 to 12 year olds. And I don't think any other book at that time had quite that impact.
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Thomas Banks
Absolutely not. And so just watching it, that by.
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Angelina Stanford
Itself is not a proof of its greatness. I mean, popular things can be trash and often are all the time. But yeah, that's. That's one of those. It is an example of a rare book that changed the way that all sorts of people of a certain age lived, thought, saw the world, and changed.
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Thomas Banks
Quite a few things in the world of publishing as well. And we'll talk about a few things about that as well. I mean, just, it's literary and artistic value aside, just as a cultural phenomenon, a publishing phenomenon, it's certainly worthy of notice, you know, just for that. But I think not only for that, for other really, really good reasons. But I didn't know anything about the books, but I remember thinking, I don't know what's in those books, but anybody who can get kids to line up outside of a Barnes, and Noah being excited about a newly released book, like, I just thought, that's amazing. Good for him. I know nothing about this woman. And, you know, good on you that you're doing this. And I also was noticing that the books were getting increasingly long.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah, you look at them on a shelf, right? Yeah, the first, the first one's fairly short. I mean, you could read this, you could read this in a couple hours if you had nothing else to do.
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Thomas Banks
But they just kept getting longer.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah, they get almost to, like Tolstoy in length.
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Thomas Banks
That was something else that got me so excited, just thinking, all right, kids are lining up to get a thousand page book. This is amazing. And that was all really, really exciting to me. And then I guess about halfway through the series, it was before the series was over, maybe we're at book four by now. I was now a headmistress of a classical school. And so even though my kids at that point were too young to be reading the books, I had students who were old enough, right. And I. And I. And some of them were reading it and talking to me about that. And it also came on my radar at that point that there was a great deal of controversy surrounding the books, especially in the Christian culture in the United States. And there were very interesting things going on. I had not read these books, but I knew of them. And I was very focused on getting this. I was very focused on getting this school started, which meant, you know, I'm spending there with, you know, figuring out who's going to be my Latin teacher, and I'm putting together book lists of classics, works of literature. So again, a brand new book is not on my radar at that moment. But we kept getting so many questions from parents, you know, and, and I was getting phone calls from strangers asking me, what's your position on Harry Potter? And I remember saying, oh, well, I don't have a position. I haven't read the books. And, and I remember this one.
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Angelina Stanford
You're a headmistress and you don't have a position.
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Thomas Banks
I don't have a children's book. Yeah, right. Really? I know the flaws.
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Angelina Stanford
How did you even being exposed.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, this is turning into True confessions of the 1990s. But no, but I was, I was getting lots and lots of questions on that. People just coming up to what's your position on Harry Potter? I was like, I don't have a position on Harry Potter. I'm, I'm teaching, you know, medieval literature right now. I have a position on medieval literature. But it just kept getting something I was asked over and over and I started to read a few articles here and there. I knew that people were very concerned about the magic in the book. I knew that there were people that were concerned about some of the behavior of the kids. And we'll, we'll get into all of that in just moments here. But I, I had, I had a very bizarre conversation on the phone one day with a mom who was, I was actually a grandmother called me. She was interested in putting her grandchild in our school. And I had, I had been getting all these questions about Harry Potter. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna outsmart them. Fool that. I was, I was young, Mr. Banks. I was so young and foolish. But I thought, I'll just have a pre prepared answer anytime somebody asks me about Harry Potter. So this woman called and she says to me, what's your position on Harry Potter? And I said, ah, well, we're a classical school. We focus on classic literature. And so actually we don't read any new or contemporary books in school at all. So if you're, if you're, if you have concerns, Harry Potter will never be on a required reading list. And I thought, look at me, I sidestep the issue. I've, you know, I've calmed her down. Don't worry, your grandchild will not be forced to read a book you don't approve with. And she came back with, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what's your position on Harry Potter?
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Angelina Stanford
As though there were some kind of index.
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Thomas Banks
It was. And so I said, well, I said, I said, well, well ma' am, I don't have a position on Harry Potter. I've never read the books. And she said, well, I've never read them either, but I have a position.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, okay.
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Thomas Banks
I said, well, thank you for your time, ma' am. I'm not sure your grandchild is going to be a good fit here. Click.
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Angelina Stanford
But am I unjust her presuming that this was a woman who probably didn't read very much to begin with?
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Thomas Banks
I'm not even going to touch that with a ten foot wand. Okay, but thank you. Well played. But it was because of things like that that I thought, okay, I'm just going to have to read these. I'm just going to have to read these. And I think, I think book five was just about to come out and I found out at that point that my younger sister, again, she was an adult. So not like so young. I did have a sister who was the age of the books that were coming out, but this was, this was an older sister. She also master's degree in English literature and somebody I really, really respected as, as a reader. And I think she had been teaching English somewhere and some of her students were reading Harry Potter. So she started reading it and she was a fan and she had pre ordered book number five. And I thought, okay, okay, if my sister likes them, you know, I bet they're pretty good. Let me just, let me just give them a try. And I started reading them and was just delighted, just absolutely delighted. And ended up I think pre ordering 5, 6 and 7. And so I ended up reading those as they came out and was just, I mean by the time I got to the end I was absolutely blown away. And of course now I'm as you know, I'm a huge, huge fan of her Corman Strike series. My husband, every time a new Corman Strike books comes out, you always say, well, I'll see you in three days because you know, I'm going to disappear.
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Angelina Stanford
It's actually funny. That's something. My mother was the person in our family who most loved the Harry Potter books and she's a big fan and she would always get a copy as soon as it was out and yeah, gobble it up in a few days.
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Thomas Banks
And you know, her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith are, are the only contemporary fiction writers that I have pre ordered books and eagerly await. And I'm all excited when there's a new announcement and yeah, because you know, I only read dead authors.
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Angelina Stanford
That's true. I, I actually, I think I, well actually, never mind that that's going down a rabbit hole, but, well, it's quite fun.
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Thomas Banks
It's quite fun. And I, and, and I enjoy it. So anyway, I, I came to really love these books, but I want to go back, okay. And talk about the elephant in the room, which is that there is controversy about the book. So let's, well, let's just go. Let's, let's just jump in. We did a full episode on Magic previously a couple years ago, and I'm going to link that in the show notes because I don't want to have to repeat everything here that I said in a 90 minute episode on the Magic issue. But we episode, we did a whole episode on how to think about magic and stories, fairy tales, fantasy, all these things. And I very carefully in that episode defined my terms and explained everything. And I'm just going to link that episode rather than repeat it. But I do want to say just a couple of things about this before we, before we jump in. I'm imagining that anybody tuning in is either a huge fan of these books or is open to the books. And that the sort of person who wants nothing to do with Harry Potter probably is not listening to this podcast. But, but, you know, people who are fans often run into those kinds of people. And, you know, you might be wondering like how, what should I say to somebody who says, I can't believe you're reading a book that has magic in it? So the first thing I want to do is I just want to have it both of us kind of publicly affirm here that we are not mocking anybody who has concerns about what their children read. And I know out there there can be a lot of mockery, like, you know, oh, it's ridiculous that you're worried about Mag, or, you know, you're worried about what God thinks or you're worried about with an old book like the Bible thinks and just kind of scoff and mock. That is not the position that you and I are coming from. We would both say, and I said this a lot in the Magic episode too, it is absolutely right for a parent or for any person to thoughtfully engage with what he reads. And, and it is good to ask ourselves, you know, am I reading something that's potentially dangerous to me? Am I reading something that's potentially harmful to my soul? Like, those are, those are good things to ask. But I think that there is a bit of confusion here because we don't understand what certain words mean. CS Lewis, he talks about how when we're reading old books, it's not the words we don't know that are the problem because we'll stop and look those up. It's the words that we think we know that are the problem. He calls those false friends. And I think the word witchcraft and magic, I think those words are false friends. I think we think we know what those mean when we encounter them in old books, but we don't. And that that causes all kinds of confusion. And I do think there is a lot of confusion in this issue. So, again, we have a whole entire episode devoted to this. And I'm not going to be going over everything. And if you want to hear my whole argument about fairy tale magic and magic in books, that's where you need to go. This is not that argum. So don't argue back with me because you're not getting my full argument. I just want to point out a couple of things. Basically, the issue is that some American evangelical Christians feel like witchcraft is forbidden by the Bible and this book is about witchcraft, and therefore we should not be reading a book about witchcraft. My response to that is those are not the same words and that magic is not the same word as the word that is being explicitly forbidden in the Bible. And it's one of those things where, and I don't want to be snarky about it, and this is probably going to sound snarky, but when someone says to me, look, it says right there in the King James Bible, you shouldn't practice witchcraft, I say, it doesn't say that. The Bible doesn't say anything in English. It says it in other languages that have been translated. So you'd have to understand what did the Renaissance translators of the King James mean when they put that word, and is that the same thing that we think they mean now? And is it the same thing as fairy tale magic? And so that's why it's really important to define these terms. Again, I'm linking below the whole episode we did on magic, and I would direct you to that. So, you know, as we said, we're very sensitive to any concerns parents might have. And if you have those concerns, we do direct you to that other episode. The only thing I think I'll say is that C.S. lewis, in his Oxford History of the English Language, makes a whole bunch of distinctions between medieval fairy magic and Renaissance witchcraft. And I'm going to be trying to make the case as we go through the book that the Harry Potter stories are fairy stories and fairy stories as understood by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories, and that what we are, what we're calling witchcraft in the Harry Potter books is really fairy tale medieval magic, which has always been understood as symbolic in the tradition that Rowling is quite deliberately working in, and that this is not witchcraft in the sense that the King James Bible means. And. And I can understand why there's confusion about that, but it's not the same thing. In fact, Lewis and Tolkien both thought that technology has more in common with the witchcraft forbidden in the Bible than fairy tale witches and wizards do. So, anyway, if that, what you whistle and you're interested in more about that, you can check out that other. That other episode. All right. Well, obviously, if you looked at the schedule, this is Harry Potter, chapter one and an introduction. And we are going to be taking a look at these first two chapters, but we're also going to be talking about how we should approach this book from the literary perspective, which is always a part of a larger conversation facilitated by this podcast on how to read. So we're going to start by putting this book both in its historical background and its literary and artistic background, and then we're going to take a look at the form of this novel, because as I like to say in my classes, form informs. That is, when you know what kind of novel you're reading, it sets your expectations for how to read. So I want to start actually with the backdrop of the 1990s. So we've already kind of alluded to the fact that part of the backdrop was kind of an American evangelical Christian, you know, concerns about witchcraft. But I want to actually talk about what the landscape of children's literature was like in the 1990s. And I actually read a book about this, the Publishing History of Harry Potter, which was quite interesting to me because, as I said, I was. Well, in the early 90s. I was getting a master's degree, so I wasn't paying attention to children's literature at all. And then I was having my own children, you know, who were. Who I was just reading classic fairy tales to. So I really didn't know too much about what was going on here. And I. I found the whole thing. I was fascinating.
- [30:18]
Angelina Stanford
I was growing up at that time, and I would have been like. I mean, yeah, like I said, I was middle school age when these books started coming out. And, yeah, the 90s was kind of a wasteland. I. I think, anyway, maybe that's just.
- [30:28]
Thomas Banks
A function of nothing live, but research supports that.
- [30:32]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I. And that's not to say that nothing good came out then, because, I mean, you did have things like, oh, I think the Giver came out around that time, and that there were other things like holes, if you remember. Do you remember that book by Louis. Yeah, there were so. Yeah, there were things that everyone read that, you know, weren't bad, I suppose.
- [30:55]
Thomas Banks
But I look at the publishing Trends of the 90s because I think it's going to help us to understand how what she did was so revolutionary. Like, for example, you referenced how short you think the first one is. Okay.
- [31:09]
Angelina Stanford
Comparatively.
- [31:09]
Thomas Banks
Actually, when she wrote the first book, the industry standard for a book for nine year olds was 45,000 words. And this was 95,000 words. Yeah, and again, like twice as long.
- [31:24]
Angelina Stanford
The people who come up with those standards, again, you sort of wonder, were they children ever?
- [31:28]
Thomas Banks
Oh, I know, but it made the book a hard sell because twice as long as any other book. In fact, I've got some stats here which is just fascinating to me. So the Goosebumps books, which were super popular, you remember those? Okay, so those had 22,450 words per book and about eight words per sentence. So let's compare that to something like Heidi. So a classic children's book. 93,600 words in a book and 19.6 words per sentence. So a much a big jump in difficulty. The Hobbit, again, another classic work for that age. 18 words per sentence and about 97,500 words in the book. Something like the Hunchback of Notre dame, we've got 15 words per sentence and 126,000 words in a book. By the time you get to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, she's writing about 13 words per sentence and 181,000 words in book.
- [32:32]
Angelina Stanford
I'm kind of amazed that they count the Hunchback of Notre Dame as a children's book. Well, to some kids, I guess to.
- [32:39]
Thomas Banks
Some kids, probably because a Disney movie came out about. That's probably why they were thinking that. But just in terms with the length, she was pushing against the industry standards. I mean, I think she had more trust in her readership than they did. But you know, the story of how she got the idea how the. For this, this series is, you know, the stuff of legends. Now she's riding on a train in 1990 and she's looking out the window and she sort of sees a boy and a scar. And so she's like, oh, how did he get this scar? She kind of imagines the whole thing there. But when she's getting the idea for this book, this is at a time when children's publishing was extremely politically correct. This is actually, I've worked at a publishing house in the early 90s and we published a book about political correctness coming out of Duke University. So this was a big thing. And nobody in publishing was publishing any fairy tale type books. The most popular books coming out at that time were books about ponies for girls and sports stories for boys.
- [33:43]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, it seems like there was like triviality was kind of the order of the day. I mean, there were the choose your own adventure books. I mean, I think those went back to the 80s probably. And the. Oh, you mentioned goosebumps, which are mostly, I think, marketed at boys. But the. Gosh, what pabulum. What was the girls series? The babysitters clubs. Yeah, yeah. I think if you were a girl my age, they probably had the Sweet Valley High Sweet. Oh my gosh. Actually, maybe girls had it worse than boys.
- [34:13]
Thomas Banks
It's not a good time for anybody. But 90s publishing for children was all about real life stories and very much message fiction. They wanted books that could teach kids about life. And they felt like a book about a boarding school, like this was elitist and they thought the books were too British. They thought the sport was confusing. They thought the title was too long. The book was too long and it got rejected because it was not a quote, problem book or quote issue book.
- [34:45]
Angelina Stanford
It was not an issue.
- [34:46]
Thomas Banks
It was not an issue book. I love that. I love that. So she, she writes just an old school medieval romance right in the middle of 90s when everybody's like, no, no, we need real life problem books. And you know, I guess getting shoved under the stairs by your, you know, aunt knuckle is not, not considered a problem book. But she was amazing because she just kept putting the book out there. And she eventually found a publisher who was willing to take a chance on her.
- [35:14]
Angelina Stanford
And did she have an agent when she was. She did marketing the first book.
- [35:19]
Thomas Banks
She did. So she basically had a hand typed copy that. Just sending to. She was sending people champ. She was sending people sample chapters with candy.
- [35:28]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [35:28]
Thomas Banks
I just love this. Right?
- [35:29]
Angelina Stanford
And she makes it memorable.
- [35:30]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, she's just mailing candy and. And first few chapters. And she finally found an agent who was willing to take a chance on her. And he was somebody that was actually kind of just like, you got to be kidding me. Like, we can't publish a decent book anymore. This landscape's terrible. He was looking for something different. He was looking for something to take a chance on. And so he did that and just really, once he read it, thought, okay, this is something super special. And he found a publisher who was also kind of like, I'm burnt out on the stuff we're doing. And I'd like something different too. But even then, they didn't have a ton of high hopes for this book. Well, really, they don't have a ton of hopes for most books that are published. If you know anything about publishing, it is the rare person that has a breakout hit. Very, very rare. So the first printing of this book that they took a chance on was 2,500 paperbacks and 450 hardbacks.
- [36:22]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, my goodness.
- [36:23]
Thomas Banks
Isn't that amazing? Wow.
- [36:26]
Angelina Stanford
They're really hedging their bets. That's like, why even bother with that? Like, either publish it or don't. But I know, like, what's that? That's not even 3,000 copies.
- [36:35]
Thomas Banks
3,000 copies for a book that went on to break every possible record that there is, to break weeks on the bestseller list. Books sold international contracts, movies, just every. Everything.
- [36:47]
Angelina Stanford
Some of these publishing agents and bigwigs are sort of joining the ranks of the high school basketball coach who told Michael Jordan, young Michael Jordan, that you're not quite good enough.
- [36:56]
Thomas Banks
Can you imagine all the conversations now about, hey, wait, aren't you the guy who turned down Harry Potter?
- [37:01]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [37:03]
Thomas Banks
Like, how do you live that down?
- [37:06]
Angelina Stanford
Well, it's at the same time I'm thinking, like, even T.S. eliot, working at Faber and Faber, turned down Animal Farm. That's true. So I guess even great Homer cannot.
- [37:14]
Thomas Banks
Yes, correct. Correct. So she, she was a very. I just love this about her so much because here she is, you know, the single mom. She's struggling and there were people willing to publish this book if she made changes to it. And she fought. She fought and just said no. One of the big fights was over the title of the book, which is why this series, this episode series is called Harry Potter Book One, because it has different titles depending which country you're in. And so I want to address that here. But she also fought for some key scenes, which I won't say because I'm not going to spoil, but when we get to them, we talk about how important this scene was in terms of the story and we'll talk about the fact that the publishers wanted to take it out. And she fought for it. She really fought for everything. So the book as it's published in the United Kingdom is called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. If you're in the United States, you have a book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you're in France, you have a book called Harry Potter and the School of Magic.
- [38:19]
Angelina Stanford
And the retitling of books from one country to another is a mini piece of the publishing business that I find fascinating. And I read an article about this a while ago, and it gave the title of 30 or so bestsellers and the different titles they had been given in different countries and languages, because obviously some things you just can't translate. So my favorite was the Fault in Our Stars, and I think it was like the Russian title was changed to whatever the Russian is for. The universe is not a factory for manufacturing dreams. It was something like very grim. And. Yeah, life is hard. Grow up. Yeah.
- [39:04]
Thomas Banks
Drink some vodka.
- [39:05]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Oh, really? You're a young person diagnosed with cancer. Right. You know, and you've fallen in love. Do you think you're the first person this has happened to?
- [39:14]
Thomas Banks
Well, when we get a little further into the book, because, again, no spoilers, we're going to talk about why she fought so hard for the title to remain the Philosopher's Stone. That there's an entire medieval storytelling tradition behind this idea, and she. She was tapping into that. And the fact that the Americans didn't want that is extremely problematic. In fact, I think they're calling it the Sorcerer's Stone is part of what happened with getting American evangelical Christians concerned about the book, because there's actually no sorcery in any of the books. But you wouldn't know that looking at the first title. So what happened there is. So it's published in England, and then the Americans get ready to publish it and they tell her. Which is, I guess, kind of insulting, but also correct. I don't. I have mixed feelings about this. They tell her, yeah, American kids are not going to know what that is, and it's just going to be confusing. And no American is going to buy a book with philosophy in the title because they're going to think it's a.
- [40:09]
Angelina Stanford
Philosophy book, even though we very clearly have a young boy riding on a stick.
- [40:15]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And, yes, it's probably Philosophy for dummies or something. So they wouldn't do it. So it was actually the American publisher who first suggested the title Harry Potter and the School of Magic, which. Which became the French title. And she fought and fought and fought with them, and they just wouldn't give. And they kept telling her, Americans won't understand and Americans won't buy this. And so she compromised and agreed to the compromise title, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. But she went on to say later that she regretted that compromise because she thought the story of the Philosopher's Stone was super important. And she said that she Thought it was a real shame to lose that in the American version. And then again, like I said, I think it caused a ton of confusion about whether or not there was actual sorcery in this book. So, anyway, that's a little bit of the publishing history there that I find quite fascinating. So here she is in the 90s, and she does not write in any conceivable way a typical 1990s kids book, but rather she writes a new old book, steeped in the literary tradition. So here's just some of the old books that I think are foundations for this series. I just made a list of everything I could think off the top of my head. I've read this series I don't know how many times. Not as many as the superfans out there. Maybe this will be my third time through, but it could be my fourth time through. I don't remember that.
- [41:40]
Angelina Stanford
Still wouldn't qualify you as a super fan.
- [41:42]
Thomas Banks
No, I. I know I'm a newbie here, totally. But what I did over the last year, because I knew I was going to be doing this podcast and the class, I got the audiobooks and I listened to them all the way through, just back to back, because I wanted to have the whole story shape in my head before I started back on number one. And it just really struck me, all the influences. So I jotted down a little list and I'm sure there's going to be things I add to it as I go. But speaking of the audiobooks, I should point this out because there are. There are differences between the American versions and the British versions, and it's not just the title. They. They change a lot of things that they think Americans will be confused about, which just really annoys me because as an American, one of the reasons I love reading British books is that they sound British and they have different words and different slangs, and I love that about it. But, you know, I'm not an American publisher, so there you go.
- [42:34]
Angelina Stanford
That's just the way the biscuit crumbles.
- [42:36]
Thomas Banks
That's it. Oh, wow. Well played. Pip, pip. Cheerio. That's a nice jumper you have on there, sir. But the Stephen Fry audiobooks of the UK version have finally become available in the United States. Just a few months ago, I bought them all. And being the nerd that I am, I'm actually listening to him read the British version while I have my eyes on the American version. And I'm hand correcting my American books and changing it to the British one. I mentioned that the other night. In our Patreon event. And people said, wait, there are more differences in just the title. Indeed. Indeed there are. Indeed there are. All right, so here's. I'm just going to run through like a quick list of all the things I thought of and then we're gonna. We'll jump into what these books are and help to introduce our audience to the books that are sort of the underpinning of the Harry Potter book. So the first one is what you alluded to in your commonplace quote, the schoolboy stories tradition. So we'll talk about that today. Big time. Medieval romance and its subset, the adventure story, detective stories. I mean, my gosh. So here I am right now. I've gone through the Corman strike books way more than I've gone through the Harry Potter books. And it was really interesting to have gone through all seven of her detective novels and then reread Harry Potter because I kept laughing to myself saying, oh, she writes it the same way. These are all detective stories. There's all this mystery. She's setting it up the same way. And it's just amazing. And oh, I made a note to myself to say this and then didn't say it for anyone listening. The Corman strike books are grown up books. They're hard boiled detective books. So, you know, this is, this is not for your 10 year old to pick up. So now I've said that. Detective stories. All right, Gothic novels. We'll be talking about that as we go. Lots and lots of Jane Austen style stuff. I found out Jane Austen is J.K. rowling's favorite writer. She reads them over and over and over. And so there's a lot of that kind of manners and morals kind of Austin stuff there. There's a lot of satire, a lot of Jonathan Swift style stuff. Obviously fantasy, Tolkien, Lewis, George McDonnell, Elizabeth Goudge. She's tapping into the tradition of orphan stories, which are usually connected to the building foundlings. Foundlings, yep, I wrote that too. Which is connected to the Bildunsroman, which is a. It's a novel of development. So something like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre. It's a story that starts with a child and the story goes through from their childhood to their maturation. It's the journey of their development. So actually, I'll say this now since I'm talking about it now. Another way that she was really different in this series, as opposed to all the other 90s authors, is she has her characters grow up, up. And the other stories, like your Sweet Valley High and your babysitters club. They stayed the same age and they just keep having more and more adventure. So she was very intentional on having this story be the story of these kids growing up. She. She's quite deliberate in doing that. You also just see a. A ton of Shakespearean drama that's also referenced in here. As I said before, she's trained in classics, and that comes through. I mean, there's actually an entire scholarly book written about all the classical references in here, but you'll see references to Aeschylus, Ovid, Homer. A ton of Ovid and Homer. You'll have to keep reading the series because you'll enjoy that. She also is trained in the French language, which means she read a ton of French medieval stories. And so you see that, too. There's so much King Arthur and, you know, the whole. You know, the whole cycle of the. Is the Arthurian legend on Back on the British side, you see references to Sir Gawain, to Chaucer, to Shakespeare, to all that kind of good stuff. So, yeah, it's all here. Like. So, you know, I said about her detective novel, I mean, she. She writes detective novels. She actually said about the Harry Potter books that they're whodunits and they are absolutely structured as detective novels. She was. Is. See, I'm so used to talking about dead authors, I'm going to accidentally keep talking about her in the past tense. My apologies. J.K. rowling. You are very much still alive, and you need to stay alive. You write all the Corman Strike books. But she is a huge fan of the Golden Age detective novel. She, in particular, she's very influenced by Dorothy Sayers, who, of course, was sort of inklings adjacent to. And in particular, what strikes me is that Dorothy Sayers, she really elevated the form of the detective novel into a novel of manner. She's quite deliberate about that. In Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night, she wrote essays about that, that it's a whodunit story, but there's something more, and I feel like that's a big influence on Rowling now. She also is a big fan. You bought me this book. Do you remember? You bought me the Marjorie Allingham book the Tiger and the Smoke. And you gave it to me and said, this is one of J.K. rowling's favorite books. And I don't even know how you knew that.
- [47:37]
Angelina Stanford
I don't remember saying that, but I'll take your word for it. I'll take credit.
- [47:40]
Thomas Banks
You did. You should take credit. You did. And I read it, and it was fantastic. And I do see it as an influence. And she has so many nods to the golden age detective novel in her work and people. I can never give examples because there'll be spoilers for her books, but it's kind of if, you know, you know, like, it's just, it's amazing. It's amazing every time. I'm just going to gush here, but I'm going to do it anyway. When I read those Corman strike books, I'm just constantly blown away by how well read she is. I just cannot believe, believe the depth and breath of this woman's writing. And it comes through in the Harry Potter books too, but like more kid friendly, you know, kind of scaled down, but just. I'm just blown away and. And her understanding of how story works. I like listening to those Corman strike books over and over again because when I know who did it, I'm even more impressed with her writing there. How good she is at the misdirect, how. How good she is at burying the clues. I mean, she just, she's just fantastic. I also think those books are more than just a who done.
- [48:43]
Angelina Stanford
She likes. From what you've described to me, she likes to bury clues under certain layers and strata of literary elusiveness. I get the impression, I mean, and I've read none of these books, but everything you tell me about them almost has me thinking that she's like another Umberto Echo, almost with, oh, yeah, the Name of the Rose is. It's a game where, you know, how you read a particular line of Aristotle or something like that will have a bearing on. It's not just a piece of the atmosphere because it's set in a medieval monastery, but it's key to the book itself.
- [49:20]
Thomas Banks
That's something that I feel like a lot of modern readers are missing about those books is they don't understand how every little thing is so significant. Yes, I know this is a podcast on Harry Potter, but you're just going to have to let me gush on J.K. rowling here. But there was this horrible Amazon review that said these books would be good if they didn't have those long quotes at the beginning of each chapter and it just slows down.
- [49:40]
Angelina Stanford
And who has time for epigraphs? Come on, we're living in the modern.
- [49:44]
Thomas Banks
World here because those are never random. And that's where I get so impressed. I mean, if she's going to. If she's going to reference a line from the Fairy queen that she's about to tell us about the female knight and you know, like, she's just brilliant that way. And there's so many layers. And like Harry Potter, it operates on just like, this is a fun, thrilling tale, and you don't have to know anything to, you know, understand it and be entertained. But if you know more, there is more there. There are so many layers of the literary illusions, and it's how tightly constructed they are. If you're new to this podcast, you should know that I'm absolutely obsessed with story structure and. And she's a master of it. It's very exciting for me to look at how she structures her stories, and Harry Potter is no exception. What's so impressive to me is she sort of comes out of the gate with this ability to structure. I mean, one of the things we're going to talk about is that when she gets the idea for the book, she spends five years planning out the entire series before she wrote one word, like, there is nothing in book one that's an accident. It all. It all was pointing to book seven and just. Just an absolute genius that way. Obviously, there's big a Charles Dickens influence. We talked about that. I mean, you can't. You can't talk about an orphan story and not talk about Charles Dickens, some orphan who's being mistreated and he's downcast and.
- [51:02]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, it's never an orphan being treated well by his adoptive or foster parents or, you know, the unwilling uncle and aunt who have sort of inherited him.
- [51:11]
Thomas Banks
Exactly, exactly. So some of these references, I can't get into too much because they'll be spoilers, but as we get to them through this series, I will draw your attention to different things that are going on. And some of them, we won't talk about it all in book one because we'll need to get a little bit further in the book for me to, like, I think, bring out tons of the King Arthur stuff, but we'll do a little bit here. But there is something I do want us to talk about in depth, and this is something that I think is super confusing for Americans in particular who read this book, because this is a British literary tradition, not an American one. We don't have it at all. And it causes some problems, and that is that we don't understand the tradition of the boarding school stories. So let's talk about those. That's another book that you bought me. You brought me Tom Brown's School Days.
- [51:57]
Angelina Stanford
Which is kind of the. The godfather of the genre.
- [52:01]
Thomas Banks
And I had never even heard of these books before you introduced me to him. So Tell our listeners a little bit about the schoolboy story.
- [52:07]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, so in the mid to late Victorian period you start seeing more and more of this particular type of story that's set in a school, usually a private school or public school, as they would, they would say, and dealing usually, usually with life as it is lived outside of class when you know, the boys are getting into some kind of mischief or other. Rudyard Kipling also wrote one of the most popular of these called Stocky and Company, if that title rings any bells with anyone. The essay I quoted from at the beginning of this episode by George Orwell. Orwell himself, you know, had gone to this type of school, received a particularly English type of boys, you know, public school education and was able to sort of appreciatively dissect the particular sort of story that filled so many Boys Weekly magazine. So from about 1900 to 1940 they were still being published at the beginning of World War II. And something he noticed about them is that the atmosphere of the stories and the character types really did not change that much from Tom Brown down to, like I said, the beginning of World War II when Orwell wrote the essay on boys weeklies and he thought that that was kind of an anomaly in the publishing business that multiple generations of British readers could appreciate these stories at the same level. And anyway, that, that set him writing that essay.
- [53:51]
Thomas Banks
So she is very deliberately writing this tradition. One of her favorite authors growing up was Enid Blyton, wrote boarding school stories. She was quite obsessed with those.
- [54:01]
Angelina Stanford
Were there everything written for girls? No, I mean we have a co ed school here that we're going to have in Harry Potter. But yeah, it always seems like it's boys.
- [54:09]
Thomas Banks
It is boys. I'm glad you brought that up because as we talk about the boarding school tradition stories, I want us, I'm just going to lay it out there and then as we go I want to see, you know, where is she? Where is she changing it? Where's the variation? And that is one of the ways that it's a variation. Typically there was a trio of friends, but it's always boys. And we're going to have to see if that changes in these books. Is she, is she changing it? A little bit. But one of the hang up that American parents had about these books and maybe they still have it, is that in these early books the kids are naughty and they break rules and they disobey teachers and they sneak out of class. And parents felt like these books were teaching kids that bad behavior is rewarded. I actually remember Reading an article back in the day from the Bob Jones Homeschool catalog that made this case that the kids were naughty and they, they got away with it.
- [55:03]
Angelina Stanford
But the reason article written presumably by someone who never had a childhood.
- [55:09]
Thomas Banks
But those concerns come from an ignorance on a very specific British literary tradition that anybody in Britain would have recognized, namely that, well, that these are stock behaviors, but also that the stories always focus on the whole journey of the students. So it starts when they just started school around age 11 and then goes all the way to the graduate school. And they go from being naughty to being not naughty. I mean, it's. They're growing, they're growing up. And so, I mean, I understand she was a new author and I mean, I don't know that I would have necessarily trusted a new author to be having the literary tradition. But, you know, she's not a new author anymore. The books are finished. We know the characters are on an arc. And for those of us who finished it, we say you can trust her in the first book. These characters are on a journey. And just because at 11 they're a little bit naughty doesn't mean they're going to grow up to be naughty. They have to learn to grow out of that. But this is how one critic described the schoolboy stories. This is a quote from a book I quite enjoyed called Harry Potter's Bookshelf, and it's about the literary influences by a writer named John Granger. And this is a quote, he's quoting somebody else. Every public school novel. So that means if you're American, that means private school. Every public school novel, of course, be it a boys or girls school, has a hero or heroine that goes to school, grows up there and departs at graduation. A much transformed person. The details of the formula are not so complicated that they too are not easily summarized. A boy enters a school in some fear and trepidation, but usually with ambitions and schemes. Suffers mildly or severely at first from loneliness, the exactions of fag masters, the discipline of masters and the regimentation of games. Then makes a few friends and leads for a year or so a joyful, irresponsible and sometimes rebellious life. Eventually learns duty, self reliance, responsibility and loyalty as a prefect. Qualities usually used to put down bullying or over emphasis on athletic prowess. And finally leave school with regret for the wider world stamped with the seal of the institution which he has left and devoted to its welfare.
- [57:16]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, that's another thing. Sports will figure much more largely in this type of story than, say, academics will. Yeah, and the main character will usually be the captain of the rugby team or will become the captain of the rugby team or something like that.
- [57:35]
Thomas Banks
The book you bought right there, Thom Browne in Rugby. Yeah, I'm pointing to it if you can't see it at home. John Granger actually has a chart in this book where he breaks down Tom Browne's school days books with Harry Potter book one, like point by Point.
- [57:49]
Angelina Stanford
And Orwell also notes that even though some of these stories, and he says, like, this is a sort of literary escapism for good and for bad, and they're written for a masculine audience who are usually a little bit younger than the characters in the book. And one thing he says, one area where it shows is that none of the boys in the stories will be interested at all in girls. So they'll still have like the mindset of 10 or maybe 11 year olds, even though there'd be 15 or 16. Because also you have to have like sort of maintain an innocence. He's. And Orwell said that even though he found like, you know, these sort of stories, like, yes, they're kind of ridiculous, you're not dealing with, you know, literary quality on a very high level. He said that they had kind of a, an innocence born of naivete that was, that was the unique property of the generation that grew up right before the outbreak of the world wars. So he says you don't, you don't find the atmosphere of fascism in these books.
- [58:51]
Thomas Banks
Even though PG Wodehouse that you're describing actually. Yeah.
- [58:53]
Angelina Stanford
And actually even the characters names. He says that one of the most, one of the most popular characters in the Rafflestorus was a guy named Gussie. And there's always like sort of the foppish, overdressed character. There's another, another type is the Billy Bunter clumsy kind of cowardly and awkwardly character. And we, we see I think a version of that in the Harry Potter stories as well. So yeah, these, these stories have a longer lifeline than we might, than we might imagine.
- [59:23]
Thomas Banks
And I'm, I'm curious what she's going to do with the schoolboy story. We'll put it like that. Is she, is she going to elevate it to something else? Now, if you're listening at home, I should say that the podcast series, like the book book is for all ages and will operate on a number of levels. So if you're nine years old listening to this saying, I don't know who P.G. woodhouse is, don't worry, don't worry. There's plenty for you to. We're throwing. We're casting a wide net here so that you can know the world of literature that she's operating in.
- [59:48]
Angelina Stanford
One other thing I should say, I guess we do have our own or we did when I was a kid. I don't. I don't even know if it's really around anymore, but Highlights magazine, I think was kind of a late descendant of the.
- [59:59]
Thomas Banks
I had a subscription to that.
- [60:01]
Angelina Stanford
You know it. Yeah, I hated Highlights. That was, that was. I. My memories of it were just of this kind of condescending steer them into the paths.
- [60:09]
Thomas Banks
I really like that there's two pictures. Find the difference.
- [60:13]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. Like they. They seem to be written with the understanding that all children are a little bit slow. I don't know. That was. That was.
- [60:21]
Thomas Banks
I, I think, you know, dumbed down 90s version. I had the 70s version.
- [60:25]
Angelina Stanford
Maybe like in the 70s there was the clown classic era before it debased its standards.
- [60:30]
Thomas Banks
Correct.
- [60:30]
Angelina Stanford
Went commercial. Yeah.
- [60:32]
Thomas Banks
Kids today. Yeah. I want to go back to what you said about competitive team sports in these schools. So typically in the school boy stories, and if you've already read Harry Potter, you're going to be chuckling at this, there are inter school rivalries which earn points that accumulate towards some kind of annual championship and the whole school year kind of, you know, operation gearing up.
- [60:54]
Angelina Stanford
For the Big Game.
- [60:54]
Thomas Banks
The Big game? Yeah, the British version of the Big Game.
- [60:57]
Angelina Stanford
Right.
- [60:57]
Thomas Banks
Yes. There's also a number of stock characters in these schoolboy stories as well, which we'll have to see what she does with these because I said, you know, sometimes she'll be building on it, like very deliberately and specifically. And other times it'll be a variation. So we'll see what she's going to do there. But some stock characters you see in a schoolboy story include identical twins who are practical jokers.
- [61:18]
Angelina Stanford
Oh.
- [61:19]
Thomas Banks
And they provide comic relief and a lot of confusion that gets resolved. We have headmasters and teachers. We have prefects. We also have a stock character in a schoolboy story. Drumroll, please. A sadistic teacher.
- [61:34]
Angelina Stanford
Another one that Orwell mentions. There's always one, like one kid who's obviously evil, whom nobody likes, who comes back year after year even when he's caught doing something horrible.
- [61:45]
Thomas Banks
Yep. There's some kind of bully. There's definitely a bully. We're going to see that too. That's right. Even cousin Dudley is a stock character. We'll just have to. We'll have to let him grow up a little bit before. For me to point that Out. But he's also a stock character. There's often a special tie between the hero of the story and the headmaster. There is usually some kind of schoolboy code of honor. When there's like a lot of moral dilemmas about do I break this code of honor? It often includes students who don't fit in, so the kind of awkward misfit student. And there are moral dilemmas for the kids, like rule breaking, tattling and skipping classes. You will see that the students in the books will experience unjust accusations and unjust punishments. And often in these stories, the kids have to solve some kind of mystery. Like there's a theft or some vandalism in the school and they've got to.
- [62:36]
Angelina Stanford
The rugby trophy has been stolen from the case.
- [62:39]
Thomas Banks
Precisely precise.
- [62:40]
Angelina Stanford
Someone has been stealing biscuits. Yeah, exactly.
- [62:43]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, exactly. The Teton has gone. Has gone missing. You also will see in this book class rivalry, which, again, Americans are going to struggle with. You're going to see some snobbery and bigotry, and usually there's some kind of unpleasant and incorrigible character. That is what you were referring to. The kid who's bad who comes back. Often you'll see these schoolboy heroes defending the weaker kids from bull. Bullies. That'll be part of that, too. But there's also a tradition that school stories are moral tales, and we'll have to get to the end of the series to see what she does with that. But British readers would have known that the character arc of the schoolboy story is from when they enter school to when they exit at graduation, as I said. Okay, actually, I already said that. Moving on. All right, so Gothic romances, man. Just in the first two chapters, were you feeling Jane Eyre?
- [63:36]
Angelina Stanford
Maybe something of that type.
- [63:38]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So an orphan who is a beautiful. What? An orphan that's abused by an aunt and uncle and. And a sadistic cousin. That's Jane Eyre. It's the beginning of Jane Eyre.
- [63:48]
Angelina Stanford
You're right.
- [63:50]
Thomas Banks
We will talk more about the Gothic elements when we get a little further into the book, because I don't want to give spoilers, but that the Gothic romance is definitely under here. There's a lot of Brontes, a lot of Dracula. I mean, Harry Potter has a scar on his head that's straight out of Dracula. If you went. If you listen to our series on Dracula, we actually made some Harry Potter connections. So that's basically under there, too. Fundamentally under there, I should say, a lot of Jekyll and Hyde, all that. We'll talk about the Gothic setting of the books when we get further in. But we want to remember that Gothic novels are highly, highly symbolic. So this is. This is another evidence that we're dealing with a fairy story the way that Tolkien means it.
- [64:28]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, another thing. And this could be. Well, I would say this is kind of Dickensian. The kid who doesn't know his own family background that well.
- [64:38]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes, we're going to get into that. Has questions about his idea.
- [64:41]
Angelina Stanford
Serious beginnings.
- [64:42]
Thomas Banks
Yep. The hero of mysterious origin. Yep, we'll talk about that. So really, it's almost like she has.
- [64:47]
Angelina Stanford
A gothic schoolboy story and she begins in media's race. I mean, Harry is almost killed in the beginning chapter, so she kind of sets out every. Everything. Well, everything. No, but we know that there are high stakes from the very beginning of this tale, even though it begins in a kind of nondescript suburb somewhere.
- [65:05]
Thomas Banks
And we'll get to that in just a second, too. So. And lots of. We're going to see lots of references to fairy tales, medieval mystery plays and medieval everyman plays. So obviously the first thing you could talk about with this book is that it's a fantasy novel. So just to give a little bit on the history of that, if you listen to our episodes on Fantastes, we get the history of that because George McDonald's Fantastes was the first fantasy novel. And what made it a fantasy novel, as opposed to like an older fairy tale or a medieval romance of a knight on a quest, is that Fantastes was the first novel that started with the main character in this ordinary world. And there's a portal that takes him to another world, which is a fairy world, the world of magic and this, you know, mysterious world. And then he has an adventure in there. And then he, at the end, he comes out of that other world and he's back in the real world. So they're there and back again stories, and typically they have a lot of medieval elements. Again, we'll see that as we go through. So. So we can expect, even though this first two chapters start in this ordinary world, we should expect that since this is a fantasy book, that that's not where it's going to stay, that there's going to be some kind of journey to a fairy world. All right, well, shall we jump in?
- [66:25]
Angelina Stanford
Yes.
- [66:26]
Thomas Banks
Usually this is where we would start by discussing a title, but because the title here is a plot point, we'll wait until we get a little further in the book. We'll let her tell us the significance of the title when we get a Little further. So let's open it up to chapter one. And would you read the first sentence for us? Our first two sentences, the first paragraph.
- [66:45]
Angelina Stanford
Mr. And Mrs. Dursley of Number 4 Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal. Thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.
- [67:01]
Thomas Banks
Okay, so I remember what I thought when I read this, like, 25 years ago or whenever it was, that I read this 20 years ago. No, it's more than that. Anyway, I remember what I read. I read the first sentence of these books that had been lambasted to me as dangerous and terrible and bad. I read the first book and I started laughing and I said, this is the Hobbit.
- [67:25]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, well, yes. I didn't. I didn't make that connection.
- [67:30]
Thomas Banks
Bilbo Baggins. I don't want any adventures, thank you very much. I'm a respectable Hobbit. We don't have adventures here.
- [67:36]
Angelina Stanford
No. I could imagine the Dursleys being the type of people who like reading books about things they already know, like when in fact they do read.
- [67:46]
Thomas Banks
He's used to drills. Because he says, you know, he's talking about drills. So, I mean, just the first paragraph, I thought, okay, I get what she's doing. This is the Hobbit. This is going to be about ordinary people in the ordinary world who do not want adventures. And somehow they're going to be dragged into an adventure. That is how the Hobbit works. Now, we won't talk about this in this episode, but you'll want to pay attention to the names in Harry Potter because they're all deeply meaningful. And the Dursleys, and he works at a firm called Grunnings. Like, you know, like, you're just. You're grunting your way through with it. It just. It sounds. It sounds awful. So they're these ordinary people. Now, you'll notice that this book also starts at Private Drive. It's the first sentence, Privet Drive. And typically in a fantasy story that is, especially if it's based on a medieval romance. Again, a romance. We'll talk about this more as we go. But it's a. It's a questing story. So our hero goes on some kind of quest best. And doesn't have anything to do with falling in love. That's. That word has changed over time. That's another one of those false friends that C.S. lewis talks about. You think you know what that word means. And when you encounter an old book, you're just confused because it doesn't mean what you think it means. But we'll want to pay attention to the fact that it starts on Privet Drive and if it's a There and Back again story, then it should also end on Privet Drive. So we'll have to see how she does there. And we'll also have to see if the other books follow that same pattern. So I should stop right here and ask you something because you came in right before we started recording, so I should ask you this. You came in and told me this and I want you to repeat it. What did you think the first time reading these two chapters?
- [69:20]
Angelina Stanford
They were funny.
- [69:22]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, you said they were funny and you really liked them.
- [69:24]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I, I did. I. They were. They were funnier than I. Than I anticipated there being.
- [69:30]
Thomas Banks
You also told me the other day because I was, I was. I've been. I've just put so much pressure on myself for this series because you haven't read them and I really want to convince you to like them. And I said something to that effect the other day and you said, no, I expect that I'm going to be charmed.
- [69:45]
Angelina Stanford
I have been so far.
- [69:46]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've been laughing with my students who are all listening to this podcast, so shout out to my House of Humane Letter students. But I've been laughing with them all through this last school year that on every episode I was going to be telling you, they get better as they go. They get better as they go. Don't judge the whole series by this. Not that I think that book one is bad. It's not. It's good. But it gets better. She gets better and better and you start to see how much more intentional she is about things the further you go. So I just really hope you read them all. But that's my plea. Okay. So she sets up actually just like the Hobbit. So the Hobbit sets up all these tensions, right? So you have the Hobbit side and the Took side and the Took is like the disrep, you know, the adventurous side. And it's not very reputable. I see the same thing going on here with the Dursleys and the Potters.
- [70:35]
Angelina Stanford
They have the sister and brother in law that they're ashamed of.
- [70:37]
Thomas Banks
That's right. And we don't know anything about them except they're shameful and there's some kind of secrets and.
- [70:42]
Angelina Stanford
And they run around, around with the wrong crowd.
- [70:45]
Thomas Banks
The wrong crowd.
- [70:45]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [70:46]
Thomas Banks
That's right, whatever. The Dursleys was considered to be the wrong crowd. And here we notice just on page two that was. They go along on their very ordinary day. He's got his briefcase, he's getting the kiss goodbye, that he doesn't notice that there's a large owl floating around during the day. So whatever is going on with these people, they don't seem to see things, which is quite interesting to me. In particular, they don't notice a cat reading a map. But he, he thinks he sees it, but then he talks himself out of it. And he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to think about any of that stuff. Instead he's going to think about drills. I love that. He's going to say that a few times. So we're going to have to come back to that. I love that. So something's going on. Like you said, it's in media rest. So it, you know, a Homeric or even a Virgilian, anytime the epic starts in media rest for our listeners, that's in the middle of things and it's not arbitrary. It's typically that the author is, is, he's plopping us down like a crucial moment. So whatever is happening in this ordinary life is going to turn out to be a crucial moment. But it's a crucial moment happening and they're completely unaware of it. And other people are thinking this is the most important day ever in the history of the world. We're all celebrating, but the Dursleys don't even notice and they're just going on with their ordinary lives. And when he does notice a couple of people, he just, they're kind of dressed strange, he just calls them weirdos and he dismisses them. And he had a perfectly normal owl free morning. So this line on chapter five. I'm sorry, page five made me, made me chuckle here. So he gets hugged by a complete stranger. There Mr. Dursley stood rooted to the spot. He had been hugged by a complete stranger. He also thought he had been called the Muggle, whatever that was. He was rattled. He hurried to his car and set off for home, hoping he was imagining things which he had never hoped before because he didn't approve of imagination. All right, so now we've seen something set up as an interesting tension in the first chapter. He likes to think about drills, but he does not like imagining. So I wrote in my margin, drills versus the imagination. So this is actually a super common thing in fantasy that often when you have an Otherworld novel where it starts in this world and it goes into the other world. The whole point is to give you new eyes to see your world. It is not to escape this world, but it's to escape the illusion of this world. Is the idea that drills and money and the ordinary things of our existence, that that's what's real. It tries to shake us out of that and show us that there's. There's other things that are more real than that. And. And often what the fantasy novel is doing is trying to show you that the material world is not the only reality. And typically, you know, the other reality is going to be the fairy world, which is going to be highly symbolic. And on page nine, when you see in this book that, you know that there's these weird people talking and there's owls. It's coming up here in the next couple pages. This is the first introduction that we have. There's another world going alongside the normal thirsty world, and that. That largely this other world is invisible in some way to this everyday world. That's actually a common Celtic otherworld tradition in the Hellenist tradition. So, like Greek myths, the other world is a physical geographical location, right? Like, you can go to Mount Olympus, I can see the gods. I can found Mount Olympus on a map. I can even found the cave that leads down to the mouth of Hades. I can find it on a map. Yeah, you can find it on map. You can find Troy on a map. These are. These are geographical locations you can travel to and have a supernatural experience. The Celtic tradition works differently, and J.K. rowling is Scottish, so she's quite steeped in this. But the Celtic storytelling tradition is that there is an invisible other world that operates alongside this world all the time. It's just invisible to it. And that there are places and points of contact, like thin places, where the other world kind of of pokes through. And usually there's a portal that will bring you from one world into another. So I'll think, you know, lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, that kind of idea. There's a portal that brings you into that fairy world, but that fairy world is happening all the time alongside you and you just can't see it. And we'll talk about what the symbolism is behind that as we go. But on page nine is the first time that we get an idea that something like that is going on, which is that these mysterious professors have shown up and that this one professor had been a cat and turns into a woman. And it's all very strange. And what's happening and what's going on. And then we see that these two people, this Professor McGonagall and this Dumbledore are having a conversation. Anything you want to add about that?
- [75:52]
Angelina Stanford
Not so far.
- [75:53]
Thomas Banks
Not so far. Yeah, there's not a ton going on in the first two chapters here, but definitely setting up some stuff. So we find out that there's been some kind of battle between good and evil. We don't really know who these characters are yet, but we know this guy Voldemort is being presented as the bad guy so much so that they don't even want to say his name. And that Dumbledore seems to be some kind of good guy. Especially when McGonagall says, well, you could have defeated him, but you have powers that you. That you're too noble to you. So again, there seems to be some kind of code of honor here. And then they, they're talking about that the Potters have been killed and they have a son, Harry, who's an orphan. And again, they're saying a lot of things that don't really make sense to us at this point. Like, like Voldemort tried to kill him and he couldn't kill him and that broke his power. And we don't know who these people are, what's happened. We're confused. That's often how detective stories start, actually, in a moment of like a disorientation. And that's okay, that's how it's supposed to work. And then they're saying, well, we've got to take him, he's an orphan now. And we're going to bring him to the only family. He has this aunt and uncle who we've already met who don't want any adventures, thank you very much. And Professor McGonagall saying, We can't, we cannot leave him here. These people will never understand him. He, he's going to be famous. People are going to be celebrating. There's gonna be Harry Potter Day in the future. And Dumbledore says, well, that's exactly why I want to put him here. It's not going to be good for the lad to have grown up like that.
- [77:18]
Angelina Stanford
By the way, something I suspect but can't prove. The word Muggle is that that is related to the religious sect the Muggletonians. Oh, is that.
- [77:29]
Thomas Banks
I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
- [77:31]
Angelina Stanford
It seems like too all of her names otherwise.
- [77:33]
Thomas Banks
Tell me what that is. All of her names are so meaningful.
- [77:36]
Angelina Stanford
If you read the religious history of 17 century England, the Muggletonians were one of the weirder enthusiastic sects who briefly flourished during the time of the Civil wars and after. And all that chaos that we associate with the interregnum. And they, amongst other things, believe that true believers on this earth participate in the choosing of the elect and the reprobate. And to this end, they. They believe that they could recognize the saved and the lost just by looking them in the eyes and would deliver, I kid you not, writs of impending damnation to people who they believed were not elect. And they also had their own sort of special canon of the Bible, which was just the Bible you're probably familiar with, with the works of Solomon, removed because those were too worldly. So no Proverbs or a Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, worldly proverbs. And yeah, and they. They still existed. There was still a Muggletonian chapel as late as 1940 in London, but it was tragically, I guess, destroyed during the Blitz. And I would bet that that JK someone seems pretty well instructed. Like JK Rowling would know who these people were, I bet you. And they were just kind of known as a harmless nuisance. I think I know that Walter Scott wrote something in one of his novels that offended them. And he's one of the last recorded people to receive one of their writs of impending damnation.
- [79:17]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I want one of those. Ritz.
- [79:19]
Angelina Stanford
I'm sorry, I don't think they. Yeah, they exist anymore. I. I could. We could find someone too.
- [79:24]
Thomas Banks
Muggletonian. That's amazing. Well, I'm not going to give anything away for the rest of the story, but just what we've seen in the first chapter, I would say that the Dursleys, these Muggles, feel very confident in their ability to separate the wheat and the chaff.
- [79:38]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, yeah, they seem to.
- [79:42]
Thomas Banks
They think they know they're well named.
- [79:43]
Angelina Stanford
If there was someone who deserved to be Muggles, it's definitely the dirt leaf.
- [79:47]
Thomas Banks
Definitely that.
- [79:48]
Angelina Stanford
Especially their kid.
- [79:49]
Thomas Banks
All right, he's got a scar on his head. We'll talk about that shortly. And at the end of the chapter, they're laying this baby right here on the door. So he's not just an orphan. He's going to be a foundling. They're going to open the door and find a baby. So there's a huge literary tradition of orphan stories.
- [80:06]
Angelina Stanford
And also the physical talisman of some kind that makes Jason, you know, in. In. In the Argonauts with his, you know, the. Beware the man with one sandal. And all that kind. Oedipus with his injured foot.
- [80:23]
Thomas Banks
Yep, yep. So typically with these kinds of stories, you are tapping into the mythic trope of the hero of mysterious origin, that there's something about him that you don't know. And in myths, of course, you know, like he probably was. You know, Zeus looked at his mom too long and, you know, the rain shower comes and now there's a baby. That's how it plays out in myth. In more realistic fiction, it tends to show up as an orphan. So you've got an orphan and there's something mysterious about his background. He doesn't know the truth of it. Of course, in Chapter two, we know that young Harry Potter here does not know anything about his parents or what happened to them. There's some vague story about a car accident, but he. He doesn't really know. And typically when you have a character with that kind of opening, then they are going to be on what Northrop Fry called an identity quest. So they're going to be on some kind of journey to figure out the truth about themselves, who they are. Often, if it's a myth, they will be marked out for some kind of special destiny, like you were saying, Jason or Orpheus. And. And usually there's some kind of token of identity on them, something which can unravel the truth about their identity, but they don't really know what that is, like Oedipus foot or Odysseus scar, or even, as some of my students have been, want to say, Little Orphan Annie's locket. So there's always some sort of token identity. Maybe there's a letter in the basket with the baby or something about a blanket, but something that Northrop Fry says will serve at some point in the story as some sort of birth certificate, some sort of proof of identification. So Chapter two starts ten years later, and here we. We have. We have our abused orphan trope that you see in Charles Dickens, that you see in Jane Eyre, that you see in a lot of Gothic novels. So he's sleeping in a cupboard. He's in a cupboard under the stairs. And he has dreams about a flying motorcycle, which, of course, is what happened in Chapter one. But they. They don't want to hear this.
- [82:25]
Angelina Stanford
I've read somewhere that for English men and women of a certain age, who would have been, say, young people during the early days of World War II, sleeping under. In a cupboard or under a stairwell or something like that was actually kind of common because so many kids were, in the early 1940s, sent to live with relatives or friends in the country. And, of course, I mean, in England, I mean, so many of the houses are not going to be that big. That. Yeah. Sleeping in a stairwell or something like that was something. Oh, yeah, that happened to me, too. And that was a. A sort of almost like a generational experience for Londoners and that kind of thing.
- [83:02]
Thomas Banks
Interesting. Interesting. Well, what also struck me, too, is the fairy tale quality of all this. He's. He's very Cinderella. He doesn't have a bedroom, he's in a broom closet. She's, like, shoved in the fireplace in the kitchen because she's cleaning all the time. You know, abused by the surrogate parents. The family that's not family. Who abuses him and. And who treats him basically, as a servant of the family. So I was getting a lot of Cinderella vibes off of this. And we know that in the 10 years that have passed, there have been some weird things that has happened which have caused the Dursleys to be very concerned and very mean and constantly tell him, stop being naughty. Stop misbehaving. We also learn more about Dudley. Dudley's growing into a. Just a. An A1 brat whose first words were in the English. In the American version, won't. But if it's the British version, it's shant, which is shall not, which is hilarious. Dudley's first words are, I'm not gonna do it. And. And Dudley has grown up to be selfish and cruel.
- [84:09]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [84:10]
Thomas Banks
And just doted on ridiculously by his parents.
- [84:12]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [84:16]
Thomas Banks
I mean, the whole birthday thing, you know, he's about to have a fit because he didn't get enough presents.
- [84:24]
Angelina Stanford
And Harry's sort of been forced to raise himself as much as he's been raised at all.
- [84:31]
Thomas Banks
Yep. Well, I mean, he's as close to a street urchin as I think you can get here.
- [84:34]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [84:35]
Thomas Banks
A Dickensian, you know, street. And he's always getting kind of thing.
- [84:38]
Angelina Stanford
Not just at home, but also at school. He's getting into trouble for. He has odd powers that he can't explain. He's getting chased one moment and finds himself on top of a building the next.
- [84:47]
Thomas Banks
Right, right. And he's basically bullied at school. He's definitely a misfit. He said he had a dream about a motorcycle flying. And Uncle Vernon starts yelling, motorcycles don't fly. And we know also that Harry is not allowed to go on the family trips or the family outings, that he's usually stuck with a babysitter where he can not get into trouble. And the babysitter is not available and so he is going to get to go to the zoo with Dudley for his birthday and very excited and he's on his super best behavior because he does not want anything to go wrong and get in trouble and ruin this. I thought the thing about his hair was really funny that they cut all his hair off and then it grew back and then they punished him for it. So there's definitely something odd about this kid. Something mysterious again that put. This is the idea of the hero of mysterious orphan. Sorry, mysterious origin. So he has an encounter with, with a snake. Dudley and his buddies are like. I mean they are the people for whom the sign do not touch the glass or tap on the glass. They're the reason that sign is up there. So they're tapping on the glass and Harry looks over at the, the snake and they apparently have some kind of.
- [86:00]
Angelina Stanford
A secret language that.
- [86:02]
Thomas Banks
Well, well first there's this eye contact, the snake wink sentence, kind of like, yeah, I hear you buddy, that guy's an idiot. And then Harry and the snake are able to communicate with each other and some kind of secret language and people are losing their minds and yelling what's going, what's going on? And the next thing that Harry knows, the glass is gone. Somehow the glasses disappeared.
- [86:23]
Angelina Stanford
He's let the boa constrictor out and.
- [86:25]
Thomas Banks
And the snake has high tailed it with a. Thanks, I'm out of here.
- [86:27]
Angelina Stanford
Do you know the myth of Melampus?
- [86:29]
Thomas Banks
No, tell me.
- [86:30]
Angelina Stanford
Melampus was a Greek. He was the prince, I think the son of the king of Pylos or something like that, that. And one day he discovered that he knew the language of animals. And he, I think it was. He had laid down to sleep in a field one day and two snakes licked his ears so clean that he could understand the speech of all beasts and birds.
- [86:59]
Thomas Banks
Oh yeah, we shall see if there's.
- [87:02]
Angelina Stanford
You know, of course talent came to save his life on certain occasions. So.
- [87:06]
Thomas Banks
Well, interesting.
- [87:07]
Angelina Stanford
Anyway, I have no idea.
- [87:08]
Thomas Banks
So possibly she's bringing in another mythic reference.
- [87:12]
Angelina Stanford
Possibly. I don't know if that's what she had in mind or not.
- [87:14]
Thomas Banks
We shall see. So yes, Harry gets in trouble for this and is punished. He has to go to bed without any meals because he was talking in a language to the snake. And the chapter ends with him lying in the dark and reflecting that he's been living with the Dursleys for 10 years. Ten miserable years, as long as he could remember. Ever since he'd been a baby and his parents had died in that car crash. He can. He couldn't remember being in the car when his parents had died. Sometimes when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision. A blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead. This he supposed was the crash. They couldn't imagine where all the green light came from. He couldn't remember his parents at all. His aunt and uncle never spoke about them. And of course he was forbidden to ask questions. There were no photographs of them in the house. That's also a very, very fairy tale opening that someone can't remember. That's all part of the identity quest. And then it ends with that last paragraph. Very, very common in the orphan story that he's dreaming. My parents are alive. They're going to come and get me. I don't really have to be with this. Maybe there's some other family member who's alive who can come and rescue me. And he thinks, you know, there's been some weird things that have happened. One time this guy that was dressed weird kind of saw me and, and tipped his hat to me and bowed and Aunt Petunia, Uncle Dudley like lost their minds about it and the crazy woman was waving at me. The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Harry tried to get a closer look. At school, Harry had no one. Everybody knew that Dudley's gang hated that odd Harry Potter and his baggy old clothes and broken glasses. And nobody liked to disagree with Dudley's gang. So that's how it ends. Things are not looking too good for young orphan hero of mysterious origin, identity questing, Cinderella, Harry Potter.
- [89:05]
Angelina Stanford
The only thing I find hard to buy about those chapters is that Dudley would be popular at school.
- [89:14]
Thomas Banks
It's a fantasy, Dean. Yeah, it's a fantasy. You wouldn't be popular with you.
- [89:18]
Angelina Stanford
I know, I know.
- [89:20]
Thomas Banks
All right, any final thoughts about this? I know that this, this was a lot of introductory memorial.
- [89:25]
Angelina Stanford
I enjoyed this.
- [89:26]
Thomas Banks
But I'm hoping that what we said today is going to be really helpful and useful as we go into these chapters. So next time come right back here. Next week we're going to do chapters three through seven and stick around to the end of this episode because Mr. Banks always closes each episode with a poem. And you can register for the Harry Potter mini class@houseofhumaneletters.com and if you are listening to this podcast after the class has already happened, it's okay, you can still register because everything we do is recorded and if you purchase this class, you have lifetime access to the video, so even if you can't make the live session, you can still own the videos. I think this is going to be a class that is going to blow a lot of people's minds because I'm saving my best stuff for that. But I hope that this has been fun and useful and giving you a sense of how we're going to approach this book. And then we're going to get into the really fun stuff in 3 through 7 as we find out about this other fairy world that is existing alongside of the ordinary world and see if we can understand symbolically what all that means and put this all together. All right, so as I said, stick around to the end for Mr. Banks's poem. If you're interested in joining our Patreon discussion, you can go to patreon.com backslash the literary life and find out how to get part of that. And until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at morning time. Join the conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [91:42]
Angelina Stanford
Selection from a School Song by Rudyard Kipling. Let us now praise famous men, men of little showing for their work continue with and their work continue with Broad and deep continueth greater than their knowing. And we all praise famous men, ancients of the college, for they taught us common sense, tried to teach us common sense, truth and God's own common sense which is more than knowledge.