Point of clarification...?

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

So I was rereading scenes from HBP for an upcoming essay I have planned, when I came across this line:

"They [the orphans] looked reasonably well-cared for, but there was no denying that this was a grim place in which to grow up." (HBP, 268)

The question is: is it to the orphanage's discredit that the place is grim? Or is it Voldemort's? Or else is it just another way of stressing how overly important and powerful death is that all orphans must be miserable every second so matter how they're treated?

Ideas, anyone?

Comments

Also

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Would love your citation if you can find it--I know there were such recommendations, but not when precisely they were being made, nor the extent to which institutions (as opposed to parents) followed them.

However, even if not.... Mrs. Cole and her underlings were being run off their feet trying to feed, clothe, and keep clean the orphans, making sure their basic physical needs were met without enough money or (in consequence) staff. Playing and cuddling with the babies--who would have time? (Maybe some of the older kids, in fact, if they were allowed--in the orphanage in Daddy-Long-Legs, ca. nineteen-teens, older children helped with younger. But then, another literary reference, Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" has a child sent to a 1930's sanitorium disallowed contact with her parents and separated from a fellow patient because they'd become attached.... And these are both American referents.)

Some babies would demand attention by being fussy or would win it by being too cute to ignore, but Tom apparently had attachment problems from the beginning. And in such a situation, even if the staff didn't subscribe to theories that babies shouldn't be "spoiled," a baby that didn't seem to want or need physical affection wouldn't get it....

Re: Also

[oryx_leucoryx]

Then there was Janusz Korczak - pediatrician, teacher, designer of the orphanages he ran. One never leaves the bedside of a sick child. (That was, reportedly, his explanation for his choice to die with his orphans rather than take the Nazis' repeated offers to save him alone.)