An apocryphal synopsis of Samuel Griffiths life
June 13th, 1851
1862
1869
1870 - 1876
1877 - 1885
1885 - 1894
Stages of life in depth
AAge 0 - 11 -- the child
It was not longer than until his fourth year of life that containing the boy became the bane of his governess's existence. Whichever room you left him in, the windows and doors were wont to spring open in a mysterious manner. The knave, on his little legs, was a runner. The thought of the tiny fugitive ending up under the wheels of a carriage or drowned in the garden well was his mothers constant anguish.
Little Samuel, in his first eleven years of life, is an agile, slight boy. He sits quietly with a toy or book for hours, then suddenly bursts into flurries of activity. He runs up and down the house, climbs into the attic and onto the roof, and escapes through windows and doors left ajar.
His parents and the servants try to contain him, worried about his wellbeing. But Samuel reacts terribly to being restricted, with rage and crying. This interference with his wishes makes him feel unloved and misunderstood.
When he is six, his mother gives up. Fighting her son, who is only growing more adept at using his magical abilities against them, is a lost cause. She allows him to go, as long as he tells someone when he is leaving and when he intends to return. "That is the polite thing to do!" she drills into him. She would never allow this for a daughter, but he is going to grow into an independent man anyway, if he survives his boyhood.
Samuel is free. For the next five years, he runs around his London neighborhood and comes home with banged-up knees and pockets full of trinkets from unknown origins, but with glowing eyes and full of life. An urchin girl becomes his best friend. In their secret hideaway in an abandoned garden, they exchange chaste kisses. He starts collecting (and sometimes stealing) interesting bits and pieces like a magpie. His family is none the wiser. The servants just sigh and run a bath when he returns.
Age 11 - 18 -- the student
“And who do we have here - a boy, so young, yet so fully determined to leave his mark,” said the talking hat, as soon as he was dropped on Samuel's head. “I see much power, yes, much potential. But so great a danger to turn terribly wrong. I could put you in Gryffindor, I could. You are brave. You would be wanted there, supported - enabled even. But alas, your true being belongs to Slytherin. You have to prove and harness your power yet. You need to be true to yourself despite all adversaries. Pursuing truth may save your soul.”
— at the sorting ceremony, 1862
The last statement of the talking hat to eleven-year-old Samuel Griffith would prove to be true. He arrives in Slytherin a self-assured and independent boy who makes no attempts to hide his brilliance.
Soon his peers notice that he takes the spotlight from socially superior students in class, cares little for their opinions, is not jovial, not well-connected, and surely not well-bred, looking at that muggle mother of his. His only saving social grace are the good manners said mother had impressed on him. But his severly tainted blood is seen as a very grave defect in Slytherin.
The opinion takes hold in the heads of his classmates, and also some faculty members, that this boy needed to learn his place in the social strata.
In his first year, he runs around the castle grounds on his own like he is used to doing at home, going into places that are off-limits for students like him; he gets into terrible trouble with the Head of House, the prefects who had failed to notice his absence, and the house matron, when he takes a hike and wanders into Hogsmeade alone.
His peers discover that they can get under his skin by attacking his family. He is not a target for outright bullying due to his habit of fighting back, but he catches slights left and right from the pureblooded upperclass boys whenever an opportunity presents itself. By the middle of the second year, he is relegated to the margins of his social group and spends much of his time alone, which he does not mind too much.
Punishment, which he had scarcely known from home, becomes a constant in the first three years. Some he catches by ignoring restrictions and rules, others just for doing the same things his peers were doing. He gets wise to the fact that he is held to a different standard and that his infractions provoked more severe reactions from his superiors.
By the beginning of the fourth year, the constant conditioning has taken hold. Samuel becomes calmer, quieter, and more agreeable. He spends more time with books and ceases running around the grounds. With others he is polite and considerate to a fault, and learns to control himself when antagonized. His yielding is rewarded with greater social acceptance, new friends, and better relationships with teachers. His time at Hogwarts becomes much more pleasant. In academics, he excells now.
But deep below the surface, resentment for this breaking of his spirit bubbles and truly never goes away.
Puberty sets in kind of early for him and he grows tall and his body takes well to the beginnings of its adult form. Suddenly, he is interesting to some in a way that he was not, before.
In fifth year, he has his first experience with a boy from school who has befriended him. It happens rather spontaneously and disturbs Samuel profoundly. For a while, he thinks he may be an invert, as they called gay men at the time, and a deviant.
He takes up relations with a girl working in a shop in Hogsmeade to test his hypothesis and determines that the feminine variety appeals as much to him as it ought to. Relieved, he decides that he had a temporary lapse of judgment and tries to forget. He distances himself from the boy and takes up with a rougher, meaner crowd. They are nasty to the boy, partly due to Sam suddenly ending their friendship, which he explains away with some sort of made up disagreement. The nastier they are, the more it bothers and saddens Sam, but he is confused and ashamed and pretends that this does not concern him. When things come to a head he finally puts an end to the bullying, but then withdraws from his Slytherin mates altogether and isolates for a while.
He makes new friends eventually with students in a potioneering and alchemy club, most a year older than him and from mixed houses. Here, he is quite happy.
The rest of the fifth, sixth, and seventh years he spends well-adjusted and focused on his studies, generally liked and respected by his peers. Samuel becomes president of the club but is overlooked for prefect for more prestigious boys, although the faculty deliberates it to reward him for his trajectory from troublemaker to role model student.
He graduates with stellar grades, having his sights set already on pursuing Alchemy.Age 18 - 30 -- the decade of experiments
“How did he perish? Now look at me! Be frank, you must.” Rosenberg was so pale as though death had touched him, too.
“His heart burst out of his ribcage as though he were a bird stepped on by a giant,” Samuel said with very flat affect.
“Be serious! This is not the time for speaking in poetic figures!” his master cried out.
“I am not,” was the barely audible answer.
“Never—never!—should I have allowed you boys to run unfettered as you did. I shall regret it forever. You, however, have yet a great deal more to answer for, Samuel Griffith.”
— Alchemist Oldrich Rosenberg to his apprentice Samuel on the death of K. Novak, 1877, Prague
This part of his history is not widely known in Britain
School ends and Samuel returns to London. Here, he feels more acutely what he saw coming since his early teenage years. There is a vacuum in the Griffith household. It is calling his name. The family is missing an authority figure that will provide for its future. His philandering father is not adequate to lead the family, that much is obvious to him at this age. His older brothers are similarly not stepping up. This vexes Samuel terribly. Here he is, 18 years old, with dreams that are more academic than profitable. And as it is looking, it shall be up to him to be the man of the house.
Begrudgingly, he takes up a position as an assistant at the bureau of the Minister of Magic that might allow him to rise trough the ranks quickly. On the side, he experiments with advanced transmutations, which are inherently dangerous. Consequently, something goes wrong.
When he wakes up in St. Mungo's with a few broken ribs, his father and brother entreat him to give up on Alchemy and focus on his job at the Ministry. In Samuel's eyes, once again all doors fall shut around him. Once again, he is to be held prisoner in a place he does not wish to be in.
This will not do. Samuel leaves St. Mungo's the same night, 19 years old, and takes off to Europe.
He travels around for a while, then takes an apprenticeship with the Alchemist Oldřich Rosenberg in Prague.
It might not surprise that it is easy to ignite young Samuel for that cause.
He works tirelessly under Rosenberg and is soon joined by a similarly radical young apprentice, Kazimír Novak. They become inseparable. Truly, Kaz is Samuel's first, and so far only, great love. Allowing himself to love Kazimír, first with great trepidation and then with conviction, brings peace to his heart and reconciliation with the struggles of his adolescence. It tells him that shedding the norms he grew up with might lead into a life he could feel at ease with.
Kaz, scarred by the tragic loss of his family in his youth, is obsessed with studying the Alchemy of life, death, and the particulars of souls. Samuel is more interested in the proto-souls needed to give life to homunculi and other synthetic life-forms, but their interests overlap and they assist each other.
They lose themselves in these pursuits. They scar themselves with transmutation circles engraved into their own flesh, believing to harness ever greater power by acquiring the ability to transmute freely and without the materials and instruments of their craft, using their own bodies as conductors.
But life is fickle. Just when they believe themselves at the precipice of synthesizing the element that binds the soul to the body, and thus being able to cheat death, Kazimír dies during an experiment the two of them conduct together.
Samuel's world collapses. He and his master Rosenberg have a terrible falling out over who is responsible for his apprentice's death. Once again, Samuel packs his bags and takes off, this time to Paris.
He works under the famous Alchemist Nicholas Flamel. But mainly, he seeks to make sense of what happened to him in Prague. He takes stock of all their work and publishes the paper “The Soul-Synthesis Conundrum” to reviews ranging from terrified to astonished to jubilant. But it does not give a sense of purpose to his grief.
Now 26, he falls in with a crowd of occultists, artists, and revolutionaries gathering in the hotbed for new thought that is Paris at the time. They live lives attempting to shed all that is considered normative for magic and research and art and also regarding love and sex. This, of course, interests Samuel. He experiments with these concepts at least as much as he does with alchemy in the laboratories of Flamel. For a few years, he has a rather non-commital arrangement with a sophisticated married woman 10 years his senior, Germaine.
Age 30 - 40 — the age of responsibility
In his early 30s in Paris, Samuel finds himself trapped in a hedonistic sinkhole. The allure of avant-garde posturing has faded. Pursuing ever greater and more depraved pleasures only results in ever greater desensitization. For years now, all that interested him was growing his magical powers and abilities by any means and making himself feel good, also by any means.
He senses himself drowning. It is not right. He is not well. Nothing has been solved by this. Something is ending and at a dark place, he gets the idea that he needs to make a decision about where his life is headed, or he might languish in this city forever, or even perish there.
It is time to come home.
Samuel returns to London and finds the family estate in disrepair. His father only protests weakly, and ostensibly for show, when his youngest takes the reins into his hands.
The alchemist opens a laboratory in London. By now, his apprentice days are long behind him and he ascends to a master of his craft.
The bitter fruit of his deadly experiments in Prague is an unrivaled knowledge about the creation of synthetic life and complex organic transmutations. Samuel opens a makeshift laboratory in London and starts selling Golems, Chimera, and Homunculi to wealthy families. These silent servants and guardians have extraordinary lifespans, have their own limited magical abilities, and can be fashioned into almost any desired form.
He gets a contract with the ministry and furnishes the entire wizard enclave in Doubt Street in East London with living gargoyles, who protect the street and houses and ward off lost muggles. This gets the family out of the worst debt.
For much of the decade, he is hard at work. Since he provides for his family, which lived above their means for a long time and continues to do so, building his own wealth is scarcely possible.
Nonetheless, when he turns 40, the Griffiths' finances are in order and they have enough of a reserve to survive for a few years and provide a dowry for his sister, should he die in an untimely manner.
His father is aging and losing his mental faculties, which has the advantage that he can no longer go out and spend as much. About his mother, a pragmatic and smart woman in good health, he needs not to worry.
So, at 43, Samuel closes up his laboratory. Tired of the lonely work, he decides to take up teaching and heads for Hogwarts.
