Ch. 1: Five Years Later (p. 55-61)

Thoughts, Vocab, Explanations:

•  Hmm, so I had been picturing Tellson's as Gringott's, minus the goblins.  Apparently it's more like Harry's closet under the stairs: small, dark, and full of something extremely valuable.

• Ooh, social commentary: "Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson's.  In this respect, the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable" (55).  In other words, just as anyone who suggested that Tellson's band should ditch its dirty, tiny building for a newer, nicer one would find himself out on the streets, anyone who tried to get unjust old laws to change would find himself on the wrong side of the government.  The people in power value things that are old simply because they are old, even if they are no good, and they do not welcome even the suggestion of change.  (This is one of the major patterns that emerges in any study of history: if you're in charge, you tend to want to keep things in whatever order they were that allowed you to become powerful.)

• This is a grim way of looking at businesses: in times when many crimes were punished with death, any business that had been around long enough to have many crimes committed against it would be (by bringing charges) at least partially responsible for the deaths of quite a few people (and, I suppose, if its actions brought people into dire straits that caused them to commit crimes, then it would be responsible for those as well?) 
   
• This is why I read Dickens: "When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old.  They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mold upon him"  (57).

• Also this: "His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry" (57).  Dickens might have said "His name was Jerry Cruncher" but instead we get this lovely sentence that makes the familiar (the concept of infant baptism) strange, and also lets us know that Jerry is from Houndsditch, which I guess I really didn't need the note to understand is not a lovely place.  (The note to my edition confirms that, yes, historically, Houndsditch was a dumping-ground for canine corpses.) 

• "Anno Domini" (p. 57)--Latin for "in the year of our lord"; more commonly stated today as "AD" (a method of labeling years before and after Christ.  Sometimes changed to "CE" for "common era" in order to avoid religious connotations.)

• The Cruncher household: a thing of beauty.  Father, mother, and son living together in two small rooms; Father and son going off each day to work as odd-job men at the bank, and mother trying to keep the place clean and say her prayers, which efforts are deeply resented by the other two, it seems.  And then the mysteries of Cruncher, Sr.: how do his boots get so muddy at night, and how do his fingers get so rusty?  Jerry's secrets get curiouser and curiouser--he'd be in a bad way if people started being recalled to life (remember Jerry from early on?) and he's covered in all sorts of mysterious grime...this can't end well.

Takeaways: 

Jerry's back!  And he works (sort of) for Tellson's.  Hmm...