Harry Potter Hullaballoo - Diagon Alley

Diagon Alley

In which Harry comes into a small fortune and, without heeding the proverbial saying, spends it all in one place called Diagon Alley.

Something I never picked up on the first hundred times I read the books was that Diagon Alley is like splitting apart the word "diagonally." Knowing this bit of information makes spelling it just that much harder. I like to the think of the street as a diagonal street though, where nothing is the same size and the people who built it did so without a level or a T-square. I also never imagine there's a sky in Diagon Alley; like, there are so many things happening at ground level that one's eyes could never reach so far as to see the sky. 

When we left off we were still with the Dursleys in the shack on the deserted island. But when morning comes Hagrid takes Harry to London where they enter a tiny place called The Leaky Cauldron. This is the first time Harry runs into a crowd of admirers including Doris Crockford, who I always thought was a guy despite her female name, and Quirinus Quirrel, Harry's soon-to-be Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor. Now it says Quirrel shakes Harry's hand in this bit. He may be wearing gloves or something, or else Voldemort and Quirrel haven't united yet. (I'm not exactly sure what we call this uniting . . . conjoinment, splicing, cuddling?) As we learn later, Voldemort can't touch Harry without being destroyed. 

"Welcome back, Mr. Potter, welcome back." (69) That is a great quote, one of my favorites, like a giant WELCOME HOME, HARRY.  

Then Hagrid does a tappy magicky thingy and the brick wall transforms into a passageway to Diagon Alley. One of my favorite settings in Harry Potter is Diagon Alley. Just the thought of a street full of owls, enchanted objects, magical candy, quill and parchment shops, and apothecaries blows my wee Muggle mind. 

First stop, Gringott's. With the creepy little goblin poem that Harry seems to disregard entirely. After getting gobs of gold from his vault, they delve deeper into the underground, and Hagrid retrieves a package for Dumbledore. To Harry this seems fairly insignificant, but as we all know, it is what the entire book revolves around. In other words, pretty damn significant.

Harry meets two important people in Diagon Alley, one being Draco Malfoy and the other being Garrick Ollivander. And I let out a huge gasp of "what the blaszoozle?!" when looking up Garrick's first name because I could have sworn it was Oliver. Malfoy first. I think it was important for Harry to meet Malfoy now, or at least before the sorting, because if he decided his dislike of Malfoy just because he was a Slytherin, I don't think their mutual hate of each other would be as meaningful. 

Then on to Garrick. I feel like he's a human encyclopedia of everyone in the wizarding world, knowing their name, age, wand-type. The man has a knack for remembering things. And when the phoenix feather wand chose Harry, he knew a feather from the same phoenix resided in Voldemort's wand . . . curious. 

Last thing that happens is that Hagrid and Harry eat hamburgers, and Harry takes a train home. This is by far the most important part of the story. Hamburgers. 

Back to the Table of Contents