"Background" could sometimes be understood as being the same kind of people.
Take Émilie Taylor's clique, for example. Not everyone joined because they wanted to be her friend. Many joined so they would not be mocked by them, and even if they had not wanted to, once they joined, they had no choice but to mock Esmeralda Muck along with them.
Esmeralda Muck could never join Émilie Taylor's clique, because she was a Slytherin. How could she join a Gryffindor girls' clique?
At that point, to protect herself, she would join a Slytherin girls' clique, just like her sister had. Only the leader had changed. It was no longer Bellatrix, but a half-blood witch named Isabella Sidney.
The Sidney family could be traced back to Philip Sidney, Elizabeth I's cupbearer in the sixteenth century. Another famous figure was Rogers Sidney, who took part in the parliamentary reform of 1867, which differed from the reform of 1832.
On the surface, both reforms seemed to abolish rotten boroughs, lower voter qualifications, and increase the number of representatives for densely populated emerging industrial cities. That was inevitable. As industrialization developed, some once-prosperous areas became deserted, while others grew as dense as beehives or anthills. Yet these rotten boroughs could sell their votes to unrepresented constituencies such as Birmingham.
If having money but no power had been the greatest worry of British merchants and factory owners in the early nineteenth century, then having power but no money had been the plight of landed aristocrats. Urban development severed the "historical relationship" between voters and representatives, drawing them closer together instead as a community of shared interests.
There were no eternal enemies, only eternal interests. Though an annual income of ten pounds was insignificant in the eyes of the truly wealthy, it seemed "reasonable enough." More