Re: Aging Characters: Harry Potter - Swallows and Amazons


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Posted by Katharine Edgar on June 24, 2003 at 10:26:09 from 81.96.140.67 user Katharine.

In Reply to: Re: Aging Characters: Harry Potter - Swallows and Amazons posted by Jim McDowell on June 24, 2003 at -1:19:50:

This is my first post, so hello everyone!

I'm fascinated by what people are saying about the S&As maturing - I was never particularly aware of it, but now I come to think of it they do go on to get better and better at all those things (sailing, cooking etc) that they're so impressively good at in the first book! I would be interested to hear other ways people have noticed them growing up.
However I think the fact that it's not particularly noticeable is one of the things I like about Ransome. He doesn't constantly remind you that they're kids, you just see them as people. Ransome's illustrations help with this impression - children aren't drawn as particularly different from the adults, just as a group of people of slightly different sizes.
The contrast with Harry Potter, and all this business about Harry suffering from hormonal bad temper and interest in girls, is interesting. I once read somewhere that teenagers were 'invented' in 1940s and 50s America, the way childhood has been described as being 'invented' by the Victorians - not that children or teenagers didn't exist before those times, but that they were not conceptualised in the same way. When Ransome was writing people weren't so obsessed with teenagers and their hormones as they are now (judging by the early reviews of The Order of the Phoenix, anyway....)


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