Bathrooms at Hogwarts

Mrs. Rowling explains that the Chamber of Secrets was not always hidden under a sink in a girl’s restroom.¹ This is one of the places where Mrs. Rowling is particularly hard to make consistent. She has dated the remodelling of Hogwarts to include bathrooms to the eighteenth century,² but Dumbledore was born at the end of the nineteenth century, and references finding a collection of chamber pots.³ So far so good, who knows how long that collection has sat unused for, it could be two years or two centuries and there would be little difference. It becomes impossible to reconcile when you add in her statement that Wizards “relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence.”⁴

Her dating of its conversion in the eighteenth century is probably the common mistake of forgetting that century numbers are a digit in advance of the printed date, so the eighteenth century would be the 1700s, a bit too early from what I read.⁵ That aside, her explanation⁶ for what they did instead is, in my opinion, a historical exaggeration because potty humour appeals to many young readers. While chamber pots and outdoor privies⁷ may have been the norm for Britain when Hogwarts was built, a magical society connected enough to have a concept of “International” in 1298⁸ should be sufficiently in touch with Byzantium to still have a Roman understanding of public latrines based around running water.⁹ Indeed, this is hinted at by the very passage that states that bathrooms are a late additions to the building, it says that the plumbing “became more elaborate,” not that it was entirely new.¹⁰ If the plumbing system pre-dated the second floor bathroom, for what was it used?

In For Want of an Outfit CmptrWz provides a an amusing viable alternative that is clearly attempting to work within the limits that Mrs. Rowling’s explanation for the Chamber creates. CmptrWz proposes that Hogwarts did primarily use chamber pots, and thus had no male or female restrooms until their introduction in 1815.¹¹ CmptrWz then has the amusing idea that while the prefects designated two of the converted rooms male restrooms and two female, the faculty failed to actually create any official rules around this. The thing is that I can almost see some ancient (in terms of personal age) headmaster somewhat bemusedly authorising his prefects to install these modern contrivances while being personally nearly as isolated from the school as Dumbledore is. Such a headmaster might well have failed to fully think through the implications of replacing chamber pots with restrooms and thus fail to amend the school rules to prohibit males in the female restroom and vice versa. This is almost as whimsical as Mrs. Rowling’s potty humour, I suppose, but I find a mentally deficient headmaster failing to create rules around student safety to be totally in line with Hogwarts, whereas a general lack of hygiene is just … distasteful. This also explains away a second inconsistency: The Founders, or at least a subset of them, were clearly very worried about the fact that Hogwarts was a co-ed school. The girl’s dorms are protected such that boys cannot enter, and yet the girl’s bathrooms are not? Right or wrong, the current furror over bathrooms indicates that the concern would occur.¹²