Chapter 5: Diagon Alley
We open up chapter five of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with an owl tapping at a window with a mail delivery in its beak, a giant man asleep on a couch, and Harry realizing he didn’t hallucinate the night before and that he’s really a wizard.
Hagrid casually drops a succession of fascinating tidbits on us, the reader, and Harry, like there is a wizard bank run by goblins, a Ministry of Magic runs their world, and the existence of dragons, all while bemoaning how slow Muggle transport is. As someone who has recently been on a lot of metros and trains…word, Hagrid.
We enter a pub in the middle of London, and here Harry is forcibly reminded that Hagrid just told him that he’s famous while the entire pub insists on shaking Harry’s hand and talking to him for ten minutes, aka my worst nightmare.
(Please be advised that this is a reread and I will be discussing book and movie spoilers.)
Harry meets his nervous Professor Quirrell, who teaches the frightening sounding subject, Defense Against the Dark Arts. Side note, but I have so many questions about Quirrelldemort. Like is Quirrell so nervous here because Voldemort is hissing against the turban to stop shaking that boy’s hand and kill him? Is Voldemort always watching? Even when Quirrell is on the toilet? It’s these kind of scalding hot questions I bring you.
Harry enters Diagon Alley in a scene that is one of the most iconic in the books and the movies, and personally, one that inspires a lot of envy in me. I think this might’ve been the moment I was fully invested in the story the first time I read it. As the title of this blog suggests, I love secret and hidden rooms, gardens, staircases, passageways, drawers, keys, anything, and my imagination was fully caught by a hidden doorway into a land of racing brooms, potions, magical creatures, and bustling witches and wizards.
It’s interesting, because this moment is only so powerful for Harry (and us) because he was raised by the Dursley’s. If he’d grown up with his wizard parents he would’ve been to Diagon Alley many times. Of course, Harry would’ve obviously preferred the later, yet because he got the former, we all experience this magical moment together, bonding us further with Harry. If you can get to Diagon Alley in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park, I highly recommend it. For the huge fan, it’s breath taking, the next best thing to it being real.
Harry enters Gringotts vault with its dire foreshadow-y warnings about robbing the place, and as fast as we’re getting answers and zipping around a cart in this chapter, we keep getting more questions: the package Hagrid takes out of vault 713, what exactly are Slytherins and Hufflepuffs, how do you play this ‘Quidditch’, how a wand is so incredibly cheap in comparison to other magical items when it’s the most important object a magical person owns…
We get our first glimpse of Malfoy, and it wouldn’t be D-Malfs if he wasn’t drawling and looking down at someone, so here’s it Hagrid, and people without parents and kids whose parents aren’t wizards, and people who don’t own diamond encrusted bedframes and eat edible gold flakes on their ice cream and ok, I made those last two up. Harry shuts that shit down fast, and it endears him more to me. It would be so easy for Harry to be unrelateable to the readers. He’s rich, an orphan of extraordinary circumstances, and oh yeah, he’s a wizard.
But Harry is humanized to us through his uncertainty over his fame, his fear of fitting in, his humble nature, and his sense of humor. I can’t quite relate to Harry, but I’ve always liked him.
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Did you find the Diagon Alley reveal as awe inspiring as Harry and I did?
What did you originally think of Malfoy?
What did you make of Ollivander and his super cheap wands?
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