Class and House Structure

One of the interesting questions about Hogwarts is how you would handle an extra 29 or 30 students per house per year. At 10 students per house per year, the common rooms hold 70 students; at 35 they hold 245. The former figure is big enough it does not sound like it would really work - how would that many students actually survive trying to occupy that space as their primary place to relax every evening? The latter is frankly impossible. It means that each common room has nearly as many people as the entire school does at the 10/house/year figure.

Like I do when I look at teachers, I am tempted to use Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling as a secondary source to course correct. That book had what sounds very like a common room per year for the younger students, with the older students of each house broken out into “studies” - groups of 3-5 students sharing a common living space. Several references make it sound like they sleep in the studies, but others make it sound like they have dorms separate from them.

Gryffindor does not seem to have any corollary to Stalky’s studies. However, it seems reasonable that it might have multiple common rooms, the rest of which are shutdown and disused. Having pre-teens mixed in with your upper form students studying for their OWLs and NEWTs seems less than ideal, on the other hand having a common room maintained for 30 or 40 students when each can (apparently) hold 70 probably means too little supervision given the proportionate lack of staff.

If you put 1st and 2nd year together, 3rd and 4th year together, and assume not everyone came back for NEWTs, then you have 3 common rooms, 2 at 70ish each, and one that is variably sized depending on the size of the two NEWT classes. However, it probably works reasonably well as NEWT students are too busy (not to mention being older anyway) to be too rowdy. Assign a junior teacher to monitor the junior forms for the day time hours in shifts, and the prefects are responsible for keeping the house quiet after curfew. That might work.

For comparison, I tried looking at Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and King’s School (the one in Canterbury). Most of these were selected from the list at “Famous Boarding Schools In The UK”, though King’s is not there and I am not sure why I looked into that one and not one of the others that is on that list. The problem I hit was two-fold. One, it is actually fairly difficult to get a description of the living conditions for the students from any authoritative source that is also easily found online. Two, having done so, it is fairly apparent that the current living conditions are unlikely to match those from the early 1900s; Hogwarts is likely to lag behind by at least that much in its attitudes towards what is both acceptable and desirable. In “A Brief History of Boarding Schools” it is put this way:

In life, as in fiction, boarding schools were part of the backbone of the empire, educating its military officers, senior clerics, lawyers, and administrators. They used the means that were popular for the time. Ben MacIntyre writes that Durnford School “epitomized the strange British faith in bad food, plenty of Latin and beatings from an early age.” At the school “there was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape. Today such an institution would be illegal; in 1925 it was considered ‘character-forming.’”

School practices reflected a popular belief in social Darwinism—survival of the fittest—and that academic, moral, and physical strength were gained through challenge and adversity. Strict discipline, discomfort, even bullying was considered a necessary experience in the progress of moral and physical development. Royals experienced these things, too, not just students who came from poor families or who attended sub-standard schools. Thankfully, over the course of the 20th century, all of that would change.¹

As best I can tell, the schools I looked at all have, like both the fictional school in Stalky and in Hogwarts, multiple houses. Unlike the numbers I compute for Hogwarts, 245 students per house, these schools seem to run 60-70 students per house. I was able to find information on how these students are accommodated for only a few of the schools I looked at. It seems that some of them have one or two person rooms for all ages, while others use a mixed model. From the videos, I am confident that none of them use dorms like Hogwarts describes for all students. One school, I forget which, sounded like they use dorms for the youngest students and transition to lower density rooms within the house as the students get older. My guess is that the fictional school in Stalky is in some transitional state between Hogwarts and this graduated approach to housing students.

All of the schools I looked at talked about having a house master, a matron, and in some cases, an assistant or associate master in charge of each house. Most of them sounded like they had some equivalent of Hogwarts’ prefects. It is important to keep in mind however, that, as the Our Kids article states, Nicholas Nickleby is based on a school that really existed.² While that was an extreme that was unacceptable even then, I agree with the article’s author that there was tremendous change in what was considered acceptable across the 1800s and 1900s. Hogwarts would not have changed at the same rate.

That being said, the numbers still do not work. Even allowing for something more like a Charles Dickens school, none of the schools, even in Mr. Dickens’ novels, put nearly 250 students in a common room. Something, even if not the three common room split I propose above, has to be done to make Hogwarts work if you try to put it in context of a larger student body.