Hogwarts Professor

In yesterday’s relatively lengthy post about the intertextual connection between Harry Potter and the Molesworth books of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, I chose Searle’s illustrations for decoration without mentioning what a part they play in the four schoolboy satires. Molesworth is almost a comic book or graphic novel; Searles pictures of the faculty, headmaster, Grabber the Headboy, and our anti-hero Nigel fill up as many pages as Willans’ text. As important, the spidery, grotesque figures, all of whom look like refugees from a Gothic feature film back lot, color the acidic commentary of boy Molesworth on life at St Custard’s and give it its third dimension.

Late last month, a frenetic period at Pottermore, Jo Rowling dumped eight pictures she drew while writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for our amusement and consideration. You can see the whole set of illustrations at TIME magazine’s online post about the event. It seems clear from Rowling’s work that at one time she thought of making the book either a relatively conventional children’s book with a host of pictures to guide the imagination or another Molesworth, i.e., a book for adults about childhood which children might also enjoy.

Three quick notes:

(1) The existence of these pictures is not news. There are more to be revealed, a lot more. Rowling sold an annotated and illustrated copy of Philosopher’s Stone at auction for charity in 2013, a copy with 43 pages of notes and pictures. If I had paid what the winning bidder did — just over $200,000 — I’m not sure how I’d feel about her sharing what I paid that much to own as my precious. Probably hopeful that she’d just raised the re-sale value.

(2) Rowling has said that she does not see Daniel Radcliffe’s face when she thinks of Harry Potter, one more thing to put in the file ‘Things Only True of The Presence.’ Her early pictures bear up this statement, if those of us whose imaginative idea of Harry was forever obliterated by Warner Brothers Harry can see boy Radcliffe if we squint. Du Pre’s pictures seem to derive at least in part from these sketches.

(3) You gotta love the pointy hats and monastic rasson everyone wears, right? Imagine if that look had survived in the book illustrations and the movies. Would Fandom cosplay require the stiff, conical black hat of Rowling’s original conception? Would you see them in the streets of larger cities on the heads of devotees? Ah, if only…

Please share your comments, questions, and corrections below!

Jo Rowling has been quite explicit about the origin of the name of the School for Witchcraft and Wizardry in her Harry Potter novels. In a 2001 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, she told us ‘Hogwarts’ comes from a plant she encountered at a public garden:

Do you put images from your dreams into your books?

Ideas come from all sorts of places and sometimes I don’t realise where I got them from. A friend from London recently asked me if I remembered when we first saw Hogwarts. I had no idea what she was talking about until she recalled the day we went to Kew Gardens and saw those lilies that were called Hogwarts. I’d seen them seven years before and they’d bubbled around in my memory. When Hogwarts occurred to me as a name for the school, I had no idea where it came from.

All well and good, even thought provoking about the interplay of the unconscious memory and the creative mind.

But it is almost certainly rubbish, perhaps even, if your mind works in a pathetic, conspiratorial way, an attempt to deceive.

As early as 2000, critics in the UK were noting that the name ‘Hogwarts’ appeared first in a series of illustrated satires of English Public School life, what we in the States refer to as ‘Prep’ or ‘Boarding Schools,’ collectively called Molesworth.

Unlike his 1990s successor, Harry Potter – the name of Potter’s school, ‘Hogwarts’, is surely derived from ‘The Hogwarts’, a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus – Molesworth does not have adventures; instead he daydreams, ruminates and observes. (Thomas Jones, February 2000)

It might be a straight lift, or perhaps it is a remarkable coincidence. But it is certainly the case that Hogwarts, the name of the world famous school for magicians in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, has been used before.

Hogwarts, it turns out, features in one of classic 1950s Molesworth books written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle.

The connection between Harry Potter and Molesworth has been discovered by Oxford classics professor Richard Jenkyns – whose literary scoop appears in this month’s issue of the intellectual magazine Prospect.

In the Molesworth book How to be Topp, says Jenkyns, “there is a cod Latin play, ‘The Hogwarts’, by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus, and Hoggwart is also the name give to the headmaster of Porridge Court, a rival academy. As far as I know, no one has yet noticed this.” There are other parallels. “Even Harry Potter’s appearance, with his round glasses and perpetually untidy hair, seems to be modelled on Molesworth as drawn by Searle,” says Jenkyns. (Jane Robbins, September 2000)

In the context of Harry Potter, the above might call to mind anything from Quidditch matches to a certain Gryffindor with a terrier Patronus. There are many similarities between the Harry Potter novels and Tom Brown, but that novel isn’t the only identifiable influence on Rowling’s series. There is another schoolboy whose educational experience very obviously inspired Rowling—a schoolboy who calls his favorite jokes “wizard wheezes,” who fears brainy and athletic girls with names like Hermione and Millicent, and who was once forced to perform in a Latin play entitled “The Hogwarts.”

 That boy… is Nigel Molesworth.  (Molly Tanzer, June 2015)

As we see, not only Hogwarts comes from Molesworth. The reader of the satirical blunderbuss meets Scrimgouer, Wizard Wheezes, “and brainy girls named Hermione” as well. Are we well beyond the possibility of coincidence?

I think so and I’m not alone. All those quoted above drawing the Molesworth/Potter connection assume, despite Rowling’s assertion to the contrary about where she first encountered the hogswart flower, that Molesworth was something The Presence was very familiar with.

The good news is that there is bullet-proof evidence that Jo Rowling has read, enjoyed, and is not afraid of citing Molesworth as a text she and thoughtful UK readers have in common.

[Read more…]

As a relatively accessible Potter Pundit — my email address is in the introduction of every book I’ve written with an invitation to write and this website has a ‘Contact’ page — I receive what I’m guessing is a disproportionate share of student correspondence asking for help with their papers. I think what they really want, sadly, are filler quotations for 3-5 page composition exercises more than answers to the burning questions that keep them up at night. To stave off such cynicism, however, I do my best to send prompt responses to their requests for help.

I received the four questions below the jump from a self-described “journalist student (sic) writing a trend story on Harry Potter.” Let me know where you think I go wrong in my answers and what I’ve got right, maybe even a better way of asking the question. Thanks in advance for your feedback on this exercise — and for writing in with your questions! [Read more…]