I realized last night why the Wizarding World is so strange and why it doesn’t feel quite real: Rowling essentially took the Upper Ten Thousand of English society and made them magical. It’s an insular community with bizarre class structures because there really aren’t any.

In Rowling’s world, as she constructed it, everyone goes to the same school. So a shopkeeper’s child is rubbing elbows with the Malfoys of the world. That child could be just as pure blooded as a Malfoy, too. Her world has 0 real class distinctions, which would be interesting if it was intentional, because we don’t see those children in the books. We don’t meet the kids of people who go to Hogwarts but live and work in Diagon Alley.

Everyone we meet seems to have 1) family working in the Ministry or 2) independent wealth. Where are the Fortescues or the Borgins or the kid whose parents own Flourish and Blott’s? They don’t have to be a main character, but a mention would have helped to round out the world she presented. As it stands, we’re told Hogwarts is open to all, but we don’t see that in the text (unless I missed something).

It’s one of those weird little bits of world building that gets overlooked because ‘it’s a children’s book series’. But a good editor should have picked up on this as the series progressed.

This is one of the problems with letting authors loose without a good bit of editorial oversight once they get popular.