Frederick’s arrival in the world transformed two uneducated and struggling adults into The Townsend Family, who managed to eek out a living in one of the shadier areas of London. His childhood was peppered both by the frequent arrival of new siblings and their occasional departures, mostly of illnesses that, since they go undiagnosed, are called by enigmatic names like ‘the chill’ or ‘the fever.’ Really, the cause is being poor. When Frederick receives a Hogwarts letter his father is determined to send him for as long as the family can afford, believing that an education will give Freddie a chance at a better life.

Fred enjoys Hogwarts and makes friends quickly, although he has a reputation as something of a scamp and is thoroughly avoided by the wealthier children of his year, as though poverty were contagious. He struggles to keep his grades up due to his lack of prior education, but manages at least a partial scholarship through the first few years. Because of this, his younger brother Matthew is able to attend Hogwarts as well, though there is very little hope that the family will be able to send any of the girls. Matthew’s continued attendance is very much dependent on Frederick’s continued scholastic performance, which is an amount of pressure Fred doesn’t much care for. He starts looking for excuses to leave the school as young as thirteen, and hears that the Daily Prophet will take interns as young as fifteen.

The Daily Prophet is more or less Frederick’s dream job. With two mostly-illiterate parents, it is a career they are sure to be proud of but unable to actually involve themselves in, which suits him, and it doesn’t require any hard magic or in-depth knowledge of subjects he isn’t keen on, like history. In fact, all it seems to require really is charm and eloquence, which he already has in spades. He leaves Hogwarts after his fourth year and secures an internship shortly after his birthday, which, as anticipated, delights his parents.

With an uncanny ability to talk himself in to places he has no right to be and a flair with words, Frederick flourishes as first an intern and later a crime and politics reporter for the Daily Prophet. By all accounts he has a bright future ahead of him, until in 1870 he covers a crime scene for the paper and discovers halfway through the assignment that the victim is his oldest sister, Ruth. After suffering something of a mental break while on the job and having to take some time away from work, he eventually returns to the Prophet but switches to more mundane assignments as a staff writer. Some at the paper hold out hope that this change will be temporary and he may eventually get back on his feet, instead of squandering his talent in the same department past-it reporters go to die and relatively talentless young reporters go to try and learn how to write, but it becomes increasingly apparent to everyone that he has no particular intention of leaving the staff writer position, and seems doomed to spend his days covering weather phenomenon and minor misuses of Muggle artefacts.

Along with his career ambitions having seemingly evaporated, Frederick has also started drinking and chasing women, at first in rather mild way and finally to the point where his various family members feel the need to express their disapproval. A warehouse accident in 1876 brings his father’s life to an end and leaves Frederick the uneasy head of the household, a responsibility he shirks from with more booze and women. Luckily, Matthew seems capable and willing to fill in. When Hogsmeade is established in 1877, Fred takes the opportunity to fly the nest and set up his own small residence in the fast-growing slums of Hogsmeade. It feels refreshing to him to be out of the oppressively thick population of London, and it makes shacking up with women much easier.

He meets Sarah in 1879 while she is working at a shop and has a surprising amount of difficulty talking his way under her skirts, given what he knows of her family history. He is nothing if not determined, however, and over the course of their flirtation he manages to convince her (and, somehow, himself along the way) to go the marriage route instead.

At first, marriage entirely agrees with Frederick. Sarah does things around the house that have gone largely undone since he moved away from his siblings, she cooks better than he does, and he gets to take her to bed whenever he wants — and he hardly ever has to deal with her crazy family, which is a plus. As the years go on, though, they continue to not have children, which bothered Sarah much more than it bothers him. Frederick isn’t opposed to the idea of children, but having both come from large families he thinks it’s sort of a blessing that they aren’t already knee-deep in mouths that need to be fed. Still, it’s hard on Sarah, which makes her significantly less fun to be around and leads to him spending more of his free time away from home. He takes for granted now all the little things that had at first delighted him about their marriage, and his time away from home leads, inevitably, to an uptick in his drinking habit and eventually a resurgence of his womanizing habits, which had been dormant since meeting Sarah. For the time being, this is restricted to casual flirting with women in his workplace or at pubs.

At first he tries to be subtle about it, but when Sarah starts being increasingly more needy (since “emotionally needy” is how Frederick sees her at the height of the 1883/1884 Trelawney drama, though he wouldn’t say that) he starts to be a little more brazen when he flirts with other women and a little less concerned about whether rumors of his escapades will make their way back to Sarah.

Although his family makes it through the Laughing Plague unscathed, his mother and oldest remaining sister are caught up in the Hogsmeade fire later that summer when their place of employment on High Street burns down. This dramatic reduction of the Townsend family erodes what little remained of Frederick’s will to keep up a pretense of being happy, and he begins a long but steady march into cynicism over the following years. He has a handful of affairs, both of the ‘short and meaningless’ variety and one or two lengthier relationships, which he feels surprisingly little guilt about continuing while still married to and living with Sarah.

Life with Sarah, on the other hand, seems to be circling back more and more frequently to the question of children, which they still don’t have. At this point it’s obvious that something is wrong with one of them, and though Frederick is almost entirely certain it’s him, he won’t admit it and even tries to subtly imply that something must be wrong with Sarah when the topic comes up.