![]() But then if Kendra was indeed Muggle-born, this would hardly be surprising. The Dumbledores seem to have been fully conversant with Muggle fashion, apparently. If Ariana was a baby in arms when high-necked day dresses and little boys’ Fauntleroy suits were popular, that would have the photograph taken somewhere around 1885, give or take a bit. Albus could not have been more than 5 years older than Ariana, and seems to have been more like 4. The scandal took place when Ariana was 6. We are told that the scandal over Percival’s arrest and imprisonment was still fresh when Albus started Hogwarts, about a year after it took place. High-necked “Sunday best” day dresses only really became popular from the ’70s on, cumulating in the whale-boned choker-style collars of the ’90s and 1900s. Indeed, back in the 1840s the most distinguishing features of a woman’s costume would have been the billowingly full sleeves and the sloped shoulders. And you would not have seen that specifically high-necked style of day dress much before the 1890s. Get-ups resembling what are referred to as Fauntleroy suits had been worn by little boys with fanciful mothers for a good long while over the 19th century, but they are particularly associated with the 1880s, after Frances Hodgeson Burnett wrote her tale of 7-year-old Cedric Errol, Little Lord Fauntleroy (serialized in St Nicholas magazine in 1885). A classic late Victorian family portrait. The two boys appear to be wearing what are unmistakably Fauntleroy suits. Their mother Kendra is described as wearing a high-necked silk gown. We get a family portrait of the Dumbledores when Ariana was a baby “about the size of a loaf of bread”. A Gellert Grindelwald who launched his bid for power in the 1860s would certainly be 100 years earlier than a Tom Riddle who did the same in the 1960s.īut until September 2007 we were flummoxed. And she was already stuck with 1945 as the year that Albus put a stop to it.Īlthough this particular muddle might explain those otherwise inexplicable comments in the first couple of books about Tom Riddle being “the most dangerous Dark wizard in a hundred years”. It would have been difficult to justify an ever-growing Dark rising in Eastern Europe that lasted from approximately 1860 to 1945 that no one seems to have ever had any cause to mention over the course of the series. We cannot be altogether certain just what the rationale was for changing these dates, but most fans attribute it to the otherwise implausible length of time before Albus could be shamed into finally confronting Gellert Grindelwald and taking him into custody. It took place in June, remember? Harry’s 6th year only began in 1996. Although it only came out to that by her flubbing the date of his death, which her site stated to have been in 1996. Well, as Rowling finally ’fessed up, he wasn’t any 150 years old, after all. Everything she showed us was from the wrong period altogether. Because nothing that Rowling showed us in DHs matched up with her claims, some years earlier, that Albus had been about 150 years old at the end of GoF. Until the first of September 2007 when Albus Dumbledore was featured as the Wizard of the Month on JK Rowling’s old official website we also had the unanswered question of just what time frame all of this backstory was taking place in. Because it is obvious that she does, but it is unclear as to where, or how (or why) Second: there is Albus’s fatal brush with wizarding Supremacist politics.Īnd, third: where does Bathilda Bagshott fit into it. At least three major ones as far as I can make out.įirst: there is the question of just what happened to Ariana. I can live with that.īut in any case we’ve got some problems here. Or maybe she deliberately wants us to do the heavy lifting ourselves. Maybe backstories just aren’t Rowling’s forte. Or, for that matter, the Potter backstory, or the Snape backstory. You will just have to excuse me for pointing out that I do not find the official Dumbledore backstory significantly more complete or any more convincing than the official Riddle backstory. We now have the “official” Dumbledore backstory. Most of it was in response from prompts made by the others, however. The following has been reworked from my own contributions to this exchange. Much of the following was explored over the course of a 4-way e-mail exchange with the LiveJournalists Professor_Mum, Swythyv, and beta–elf, over August and early September, 2007. Trying to make the Potterverse make sense since 2003! Note:
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