HP theory (not quite meta)
What follows is my personal theory, at least for the time being, on Severus Snape's personal history, along with some of his motivations.
Those who don't care about Harry Potter theory probably want to skip this post. Those who haven't read book 6, yet, may also want to skip, as it contains some spoilers for HBP.
There are two parts. The first is simply a divided list of relevant assumptions and facts. The second part is my personal theory, in (more or less) narrative form. I ran out of steam and petered out near the end.
Naturally, I reserve the right to add to and/or revise any of this, later. :)
Primary Assumptions:
• Rough location of the town containing Spinners End based on research by junediamanti, found here. Other theories, such as self elocution training, stolen from comments to that same post.
• The house at Spinners End is the same House that Severus grew up in.
• I am quite familiar with the common attitudes of "company" families in the Midwest United States (e.g., Ford Motor Company, GM, Amway). I assume that the same or similar attitudes prevail within that sector of labour-class in the U.K., as well.
• Also potentially of note is the fact that I have only reread the chapter "Spinners End" in HBP for pieces of cannon concerning Severus Snape. Any other bits I have included in the telling are either pulled up from a potentially faulty memory, or gleaned from comments to junediamanti's post.
Historical fact:
• My primary source for historical facts is this article
• Snape town in Yorkshire has a castle owned by the Nevilles
• Roughly 90 square metres of space on each floor of a row house
• First floor is all-purpose living-room with a door directly to the street; small kitchen at the back
• Two bedrooms upstairs
• Outside privy, probably at the end of a row of three or four houses, shared between them
• Baths in a tin in front of the fire with water heated either in the kitchen or over the fire
• Woolen dyers were predominately male labor
• In cotton and woolens, spinning was elite and male dominated. In worsted, the spinners were primarily female
• The Yorkshire woolens and worsted industries were prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's before dying out
Book cannon:
• Dirty river; overgrown, rubbish-strewn banks
• Chimney; relic of a disused mill
• Deserted town
• Rusty railing separating river from narrow, cobbled street
• Rows and rows of dilapidated brick houses, windows dull and blind in the darkness
• "Dunghill"
• Broken street-lamps
• Boarded up and broken windows
• Last house on the street
• Curtains in the window
• Door from the street leading to a tiny sitting-room
• Walls covered in books
• Threadbare sofa
• Old armchair
• Rickety table
• Candle-filled lamp
• Wall of books hides narrow staircase to upstairs
• Door to kitchen hidden by another bookcase
• Spinners End located several turns and twists into the town
• Eileen Prince is likely pure-blood
• Announcements of Eileen Prince's marriage and Severus' birth in the Prophet
Conjecture by others:
• Yorkshire, England
• West Yorkshire, such as Halifax
• Woolens or worsted mill at the end of the street
• Severus may have spent his first year or so at Hogwarts ironing out his accent, leading to the current clipped, precise sound
• "Two up two down" company house
• Robes for school made by his mam
Conjecture by self:
• Half Blood Prince: maybe not pureblood, but at least part Prince. A desire to be part of the family his mother is estranged from, instead of his father's family that wants to deny him who he is
• Tobias would not want his family/community to know about his son's magic
• Did Severus interact with neighbourhood kids or wizarding children?
• Did Eileen have a 'softer' accent and/or manners that he tried to imitate?
• Was his childhood schooling muggle or wizarding?
• Rough ages for timeline purposes: Severus was at school with James and Lily and we are given the impression that they are in the same class or thereabouts. Assuming that Harry was born only a few years after his parents got out of school, that would make Severus roughly 20 in 1981, putting his birthday at or about 1960. Assuming that Eileen and Tobias were also relatively young when Severus was born (primarily because it fits my speculated back-story better), his parents would have been born at or about 1940, shortly before WWII.
Let me start with Eileen Prince, as her story is far more imagination and conjecture, with less to be gleaned about her family from a perusal of factual history.
I see Eileen Prince as coming from a solidly upper-middle class pure-blood family. Her family owned a dry-goods store just off Diagon Alley and lived in a flat above. The store sold a variety of common house-hold items, from salt and sugar, to pots and pans, to self-wringing mops, to hand-crafted children's toys. Her parents worked together to run the store, often leaving Eileen and her brother to amuse themselves.
The Princes perceived themselves as being upwardly mobile, and choose who they associated themselves with based largely on blood line and social standing. This often left Eileen at the bottom of the social totem pole among the children of family friends.
Eileen was not, by birth, ugly. Neither was she particularly attractive. She was skinny, mouse-like, and quite plain. This did not win her any favor among her family's chosen peers. Over time, the attitudes of other's toward Eileen led her to be sullen and withdrawn, her face etched with disdain and a scowl. The expression did her no favors, and turned plain to unpleasant.
At Hogwarts, she did passingly well in her studies, but did not look beyond the expectations of her family in her aspirations; she would marry a pure-blood wizard of respectable social standing, and assist him in his chosen career path.
After graduating from Hogwarts, she took a holiday, with the expectation of seeing a bit of the world before settling down. It was during this holiday that she met Tobias Snape.
Tobias Snape came from a labour-class family. He was the younger of two children, with an older sister. His grandfather had worked at the worsted mill, and the children followed in his footsteps. Shortly after Tobias was born, war was declared, and Tobias' father went off to fight. His mother took a job at the mill to support herself and her two young children. They lived in housing provided by the Company on Spinners End. Tobias and his sister spent much of their early childhood with other Company children, being watched over by the wives of labourers who, for one reason or another, were not a part of the active military and continued on at the Mill. Tobias' father died in the war.
Given choice and opportunity, Tobias would likely have become an engineer, freely reveling in mechanical scholarship and creativity. However, his upbringing was centered around the realities of the Company and the Union, with both schooling and social pressure focusing on the expectation that he would live and die a Company man. As such, when Tobias was old enough, he also went to work at the Mill, and took over financial support of the family. Shortly after, his sister married outside the Company and moved away.
With the family history of work for the Company, Tobias expected to be given an elite position within the Mill. Given the rise of the textile industry at the time, and his lack of enthusiasm for the work, however, he found himself a common labourer, barely making a living wage.
Tobias was on holiday, having taken Mother Snape to visit his sister and her husband when he met Eileen.
Like Eileen, Tobias was not conventionally ugly. Instead, his genes were such that he was unconventionally attractive in youth and early adulthood, but he did not age well.
When Eileen and Tobias met, it there was not a grand love affair. Instead, there was a common bond of chafing familial expectations and a desire for some ephemeral "other." They both saw the world as being uniquely unfair to them and deserving far more than life allotted them. The spent countless hours talking over the perceived wrongs they had suffered, but both lacked any real ambition to change their lots in life. Both were naturally keen to exaggerate their own standing and worth in their respective worlds.
In Eileen, Tobias saw someone "exotic" that could potentially earn him respect and standing among his peers. Filtered through the lens of his own experience and aided by the fact that Eileen feared revealing much more than simple charms to a muggle, Tobias saw magic as little more than a series of parlor tricks, and he viewed the Wizarding World less as a fully-formed society living parallel to his own, and more as a band of gypsies to be humoured and tolerated.
Eileen, for her part, perceived the Snape family tradition within the Company as being a muggle equivalent of pure-blood tradition and social standing. Tobias was a way to slip the constraints while remaining inside a familiar social mindset, substituting "Company man" or "Union man" for "pure-blood". Added to this was the appeal of living within a framework where the perception that the 'the Union cares for its own' ruled, and she would neither have to work too hard, nor be alone.
Fueled by the perception of like finding like in mind and spirit, they were married mere days before the end of Tobias' holiday. With Eileen as the new lady of the house, Tobias' mother chose instead to remain with her daughter and son-in-law.
As so often happens, reality failed to meet expectations. Rather than simply accepting her marriage and letting her live in peace, allowing Eileen a "best of both worlds" perception, Eileen's family renounced her as a blood traitor. While still able to maintain ties with the Wizarding World, the social circles of her youth turned their backs on her. Tobias, for his part, found himself with an increasingly sullen wife with few practical skills and no practical experience with navigating the muggle world.
The marriage was not without love, at the outset, but both solidly clung to misperceptions of who the other should be, rather than facing a less than ideal reality.
When, slightly more than a year after their marriage, Eileen gave birth to a boy, she named him Severus, after her father, in a desperate and futile hope that having a grandchild with such a link to the family would soften her parents' hearts.
At home, Eileen used a number of standard house-hold charms, but did not use more complex or extensive magic to improve their lives. In part, this was because Tobias refused to see magic as anything more than parlor tricks, and would become upset and angry at more "unnatural" displays of power.
Another factor was social pressure. As time went by, Tobias settled further and further into the stoic and resigned mindset of the Union man. While Eileen's more refined manners and speech, part of her pure-blood Wizarding heritage, bought Tobias a measure of prestige and envy among his peers, there was also the fear that her magic would brand her a freak, and him by association, leading him to insist that no one in town could ever know about that side of her. At the same time, her manner - along with her sullen demeanor - left Eileen a social outcast, being seen as an 'outsider,' 'elitist,' and 'a bit odd' by the other Company wives.
Finally, Tobias was adamantly insistent that he was the head of the household, and refused any implication that he couldn't provide adequately for his family; an easier way to wash the dishes or heat the bath water was all well and good, but a plate or chair that had to be conjured or transfigured was a plate or chair they did not need.
When Severus reached schooling age, Tobias ignored his wife's protests, and insisted that Severus would be educated at the school in town, preparing him to work at the Mill when he came of age. Eileen complied reluctantly after securing a promise that Severus would be allowed to go to a Wizarding secondary school.
In primary school, Severus was an outcast. Owing to a need to keep any hint of magic a secret, he was quiet and withdrawn. Having inherited the worse physical traits of both parents, he was ridiculed mercilessly.
Severus found his solace in his mother's stories of the her childhood in the Wizarding World, along with infrequent trips to Diagon Alley when Eileen was feeling particularly nostalgic and they could escape for a short time without attracting Tobias' notice.
As he grew older, Severus found he possessed a hunger for knowledge and a love of books beyond what was proper for a Mill labourer's son. The more Tobias tried to force him into conformity, the more determined Severus became to escape the Mill and make a place for himself in his mother's world. He paid close attention to his mother, and to other wizards and witches when he could, and carefully patterned his speech and behavior so that he would better fit in there.
All of this made for palpable tension in the Snape household. Tobias and Eileen fought often, with arguments steadily growing more frequent and more heated. Tobias began spending less and less time at home, often coming home from the pub in the early hours of the morning, drunk and angry.
When Severus received his Hogwarts letter, Eileen hid it from her husband, sure that Tobias would go back on his promise to allow Severus his time in the Wizarding World. She carefully put together the supplies her son would need, digging out many of her old, cherished school things, making his robes herself, and carefully hiding them away. Anything that had to actually be purchased was put off until the last possible minute, with Eileen waiting until Tobias went to work before spiriting off with Severus to the Leaky Cauldron to finish shopping and catch the Hogwarts Express the next day. She would use a Gringotts account, started in her own years at Hogwarts and carefully managed and grown through her years of motherhood, to pay for Severus' schooling.
Once away from Spinners End, Severus' ambitions to leave Mill life behind redoubled. He accentuated his mother's pure-blood heritage while avoiding mention of his muggle upbringing.
As at home, he was never popular, but at least at Hogwarts, Severus found a place where he could use his knowledge and ability to earn the respect of his peers and teachers. In Slytherin, Severus quickly formed profitable alliances - far more important to him than friendships. He built for himself a position of 'first among equals' within his house, even as he bore the scorn of those less far-sighted than himself.
Back at Spinners End, the Mill was failing. Letters from his mother showed her becoming more withdrawn and unhappy as finances tightened and Tobias' temper grew. Severus avoided returning to his parents house when possible, preferring to stay at Hogwarts over shorter holidays, and procuring invitations to the homes of fellow Slytherins whenever he could for the summer.
Not all of his alliances were with other Slytherins, however. When both showed signs of excellence in potions, Severus was often paired with Lily Evans. The two students developed a companionable understanding. There was an added comfort in the fact that she seemed to accept him for who he was, rather than who she expected him to be or to become; a fact that would potentially save him, later in life.
After graduating from Hogwarts, Severus was faced with the choice of what to do next. Lily Evans now surrounds herself with the Marauders, who mercilessly dogged Severus throughout school. Many of Severus' closest housemates are joining Voldemort. His uncle, Eileen's brother, is already a Death Eater. Given his childhood, Severus has no love of Muggles. Finally, the Death Eaters actually ask him to join them. Having fought throughout his adolescence to create a place for himself in the Wizarding World, that sense of belonging offers a completion.
[This is where I start to gloss over a lot of things, having put less thought into this portion of Severus' life, and losing steam at the end of the day.]
On the family front, the Princes all joined Voldemort, and lost the store in the process. Eileen's parents died early on. Her brother was caught up in Voldemort's first defeat and died in Azkaban. Without her son to distract her, and unable to bear the loss of her former standing in the Wizarding world any longer, Eileen committed suicide in Severus' sixth year at school. The Mill took its toll on Tobias and his health declined quickly. When the Mill failed and he no longer had the Union supporting him, Tobias died a little under two years after Severus graduated Hogwarts.
After the prophecy, resulting in Lily's death and Voldemort's demise, Severus returned to his childhood home. He views this both as a means of escape - a place from which to evaluate his position in the Wizarding World - and as a penance - returning to the life that he hated as payment for the lives that he threw away.
Those who don't care about Harry Potter theory probably want to skip this post. Those who haven't read book 6, yet, may also want to skip, as it contains some spoilers for HBP.
There are two parts. The first is simply a divided list of relevant assumptions and facts. The second part is my personal theory, in (more or less) narrative form. I ran out of steam and petered out near the end.
Naturally, I reserve the right to add to and/or revise any of this, later. :)
Primary Assumptions:
• Rough location of the town containing Spinners End based on research by junediamanti, found here. Other theories, such as self elocution training, stolen from comments to that same post.
• The house at Spinners End is the same House that Severus grew up in.
• I am quite familiar with the common attitudes of "company" families in the Midwest United States (e.g., Ford Motor Company, GM, Amway). I assume that the same or similar attitudes prevail within that sector of labour-class in the U.K., as well.
• Also potentially of note is the fact that I have only reread the chapter "Spinners End" in HBP for pieces of cannon concerning Severus Snape. Any other bits I have included in the telling are either pulled up from a potentially faulty memory, or gleaned from comments to junediamanti's post.
Historical fact:
• My primary source for historical facts is this article
• Snape town in Yorkshire has a castle owned by the Nevilles
• Roughly 90 square metres of space on each floor of a row house
• First floor is all-purpose living-room with a door directly to the street; small kitchen at the back
• Two bedrooms upstairs
• Outside privy, probably at the end of a row of three or four houses, shared between them
• Baths in a tin in front of the fire with water heated either in the kitchen or over the fire
• Woolen dyers were predominately male labor
• In cotton and woolens, spinning was elite and male dominated. In worsted, the spinners were primarily female
• The Yorkshire woolens and worsted industries were prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's before dying out
Book cannon:
• Dirty river; overgrown, rubbish-strewn banks
• Chimney; relic of a disused mill
• Deserted town
• Rusty railing separating river from narrow, cobbled street
• Rows and rows of dilapidated brick houses, windows dull and blind in the darkness
• "Dunghill"
• Broken street-lamps
• Boarded up and broken windows
• Last house on the street
• Curtains in the window
• Door from the street leading to a tiny sitting-room
• Walls covered in books
• Threadbare sofa
• Old armchair
• Rickety table
• Candle-filled lamp
• Wall of books hides narrow staircase to upstairs
• Door to kitchen hidden by another bookcase
• Spinners End located several turns and twists into the town
• Eileen Prince is likely pure-blood
• Announcements of Eileen Prince's marriage and Severus' birth in the Prophet
Conjecture by others:
• Yorkshire, England
• West Yorkshire, such as Halifax
• Woolens or worsted mill at the end of the street
• Severus may have spent his first year or so at Hogwarts ironing out his accent, leading to the current clipped, precise sound
• "Two up two down" company house
• Robes for school made by his mam
Conjecture by self:
• Half Blood Prince: maybe not pureblood, but at least part Prince. A desire to be part of the family his mother is estranged from, instead of his father's family that wants to deny him who he is
• Tobias would not want his family/community to know about his son's magic
• Did Severus interact with neighbourhood kids or wizarding children?
• Did Eileen have a 'softer' accent and/or manners that he tried to imitate?
• Was his childhood schooling muggle or wizarding?
• Rough ages for timeline purposes: Severus was at school with James and Lily and we are given the impression that they are in the same class or thereabouts. Assuming that Harry was born only a few years after his parents got out of school, that would make Severus roughly 20 in 1981, putting his birthday at or about 1960. Assuming that Eileen and Tobias were also relatively young when Severus was born (primarily because it fits my speculated back-story better), his parents would have been born at or about 1940, shortly before WWII.
Let me start with Eileen Prince, as her story is far more imagination and conjecture, with less to be gleaned about her family from a perusal of factual history.
I see Eileen Prince as coming from a solidly upper-middle class pure-blood family. Her family owned a dry-goods store just off Diagon Alley and lived in a flat above. The store sold a variety of common house-hold items, from salt and sugar, to pots and pans, to self-wringing mops, to hand-crafted children's toys. Her parents worked together to run the store, often leaving Eileen and her brother to amuse themselves.
The Princes perceived themselves as being upwardly mobile, and choose who they associated themselves with based largely on blood line and social standing. This often left Eileen at the bottom of the social totem pole among the children of family friends.
Eileen was not, by birth, ugly. Neither was she particularly attractive. She was skinny, mouse-like, and quite plain. This did not win her any favor among her family's chosen peers. Over time, the attitudes of other's toward Eileen led her to be sullen and withdrawn, her face etched with disdain and a scowl. The expression did her no favors, and turned plain to unpleasant.
At Hogwarts, she did passingly well in her studies, but did not look beyond the expectations of her family in her aspirations; she would marry a pure-blood wizard of respectable social standing, and assist him in his chosen career path.
After graduating from Hogwarts, she took a holiday, with the expectation of seeing a bit of the world before settling down. It was during this holiday that she met Tobias Snape.
Tobias Snape came from a labour-class family. He was the younger of two children, with an older sister. His grandfather had worked at the worsted mill, and the children followed in his footsteps. Shortly after Tobias was born, war was declared, and Tobias' father went off to fight. His mother took a job at the mill to support herself and her two young children. They lived in housing provided by the Company on Spinners End. Tobias and his sister spent much of their early childhood with other Company children, being watched over by the wives of labourers who, for one reason or another, were not a part of the active military and continued on at the Mill. Tobias' father died in the war.
Given choice and opportunity, Tobias would likely have become an engineer, freely reveling in mechanical scholarship and creativity. However, his upbringing was centered around the realities of the Company and the Union, with both schooling and social pressure focusing on the expectation that he would live and die a Company man. As such, when Tobias was old enough, he also went to work at the Mill, and took over financial support of the family. Shortly after, his sister married outside the Company and moved away.
With the family history of work for the Company, Tobias expected to be given an elite position within the Mill. Given the rise of the textile industry at the time, and his lack of enthusiasm for the work, however, he found himself a common labourer, barely making a living wage.
Tobias was on holiday, having taken Mother Snape to visit his sister and her husband when he met Eileen.
Like Eileen, Tobias was not conventionally ugly. Instead, his genes were such that he was unconventionally attractive in youth and early adulthood, but he did not age well.
When Eileen and Tobias met, it there was not a grand love affair. Instead, there was a common bond of chafing familial expectations and a desire for some ephemeral "other." They both saw the world as being uniquely unfair to them and deserving far more than life allotted them. The spent countless hours talking over the perceived wrongs they had suffered, but both lacked any real ambition to change their lots in life. Both were naturally keen to exaggerate their own standing and worth in their respective worlds.
In Eileen, Tobias saw someone "exotic" that could potentially earn him respect and standing among his peers. Filtered through the lens of his own experience and aided by the fact that Eileen feared revealing much more than simple charms to a muggle, Tobias saw magic as little more than a series of parlor tricks, and he viewed the Wizarding World less as a fully-formed society living parallel to his own, and more as a band of gypsies to be humoured and tolerated.
Eileen, for her part, perceived the Snape family tradition within the Company as being a muggle equivalent of pure-blood tradition and social standing. Tobias was a way to slip the constraints while remaining inside a familiar social mindset, substituting "Company man" or "Union man" for "pure-blood". Added to this was the appeal of living within a framework where the perception that the 'the Union cares for its own' ruled, and she would neither have to work too hard, nor be alone.
Fueled by the perception of like finding like in mind and spirit, they were married mere days before the end of Tobias' holiday. With Eileen as the new lady of the house, Tobias' mother chose instead to remain with her daughter and son-in-law.
As so often happens, reality failed to meet expectations. Rather than simply accepting her marriage and letting her live in peace, allowing Eileen a "best of both worlds" perception, Eileen's family renounced her as a blood traitor. While still able to maintain ties with the Wizarding World, the social circles of her youth turned their backs on her. Tobias, for his part, found himself with an increasingly sullen wife with few practical skills and no practical experience with navigating the muggle world.
The marriage was not without love, at the outset, but both solidly clung to misperceptions of who the other should be, rather than facing a less than ideal reality.
When, slightly more than a year after their marriage, Eileen gave birth to a boy, she named him Severus, after her father, in a desperate and futile hope that having a grandchild with such a link to the family would soften her parents' hearts.
At home, Eileen used a number of standard house-hold charms, but did not use more complex or extensive magic to improve their lives. In part, this was because Tobias refused to see magic as anything more than parlor tricks, and would become upset and angry at more "unnatural" displays of power.
Another factor was social pressure. As time went by, Tobias settled further and further into the stoic and resigned mindset of the Union man. While Eileen's more refined manners and speech, part of her pure-blood Wizarding heritage, bought Tobias a measure of prestige and envy among his peers, there was also the fear that her magic would brand her a freak, and him by association, leading him to insist that no one in town could ever know about that side of her. At the same time, her manner - along with her sullen demeanor - left Eileen a social outcast, being seen as an 'outsider,' 'elitist,' and 'a bit odd' by the other Company wives.
Finally, Tobias was adamantly insistent that he was the head of the household, and refused any implication that he couldn't provide adequately for his family; an easier way to wash the dishes or heat the bath water was all well and good, but a plate or chair that had to be conjured or transfigured was a plate or chair they did not need.
When Severus reached schooling age, Tobias ignored his wife's protests, and insisted that Severus would be educated at the school in town, preparing him to work at the Mill when he came of age. Eileen complied reluctantly after securing a promise that Severus would be allowed to go to a Wizarding secondary school.
In primary school, Severus was an outcast. Owing to a need to keep any hint of magic a secret, he was quiet and withdrawn. Having inherited the worse physical traits of both parents, he was ridiculed mercilessly.
Severus found his solace in his mother's stories of the her childhood in the Wizarding World, along with infrequent trips to Diagon Alley when Eileen was feeling particularly nostalgic and they could escape for a short time without attracting Tobias' notice.
As he grew older, Severus found he possessed a hunger for knowledge and a love of books beyond what was proper for a Mill labourer's son. The more Tobias tried to force him into conformity, the more determined Severus became to escape the Mill and make a place for himself in his mother's world. He paid close attention to his mother, and to other wizards and witches when he could, and carefully patterned his speech and behavior so that he would better fit in there.
All of this made for palpable tension in the Snape household. Tobias and Eileen fought often, with arguments steadily growing more frequent and more heated. Tobias began spending less and less time at home, often coming home from the pub in the early hours of the morning, drunk and angry.
When Severus received his Hogwarts letter, Eileen hid it from her husband, sure that Tobias would go back on his promise to allow Severus his time in the Wizarding World. She carefully put together the supplies her son would need, digging out many of her old, cherished school things, making his robes herself, and carefully hiding them away. Anything that had to actually be purchased was put off until the last possible minute, with Eileen waiting until Tobias went to work before spiriting off with Severus to the Leaky Cauldron to finish shopping and catch the Hogwarts Express the next day. She would use a Gringotts account, started in her own years at Hogwarts and carefully managed and grown through her years of motherhood, to pay for Severus' schooling.
Once away from Spinners End, Severus' ambitions to leave Mill life behind redoubled. He accentuated his mother's pure-blood heritage while avoiding mention of his muggle upbringing.
As at home, he was never popular, but at least at Hogwarts, Severus found a place where he could use his knowledge and ability to earn the respect of his peers and teachers. In Slytherin, Severus quickly formed profitable alliances - far more important to him than friendships. He built for himself a position of 'first among equals' within his house, even as he bore the scorn of those less far-sighted than himself.
Back at Spinners End, the Mill was failing. Letters from his mother showed her becoming more withdrawn and unhappy as finances tightened and Tobias' temper grew. Severus avoided returning to his parents house when possible, preferring to stay at Hogwarts over shorter holidays, and procuring invitations to the homes of fellow Slytherins whenever he could for the summer.
Not all of his alliances were with other Slytherins, however. When both showed signs of excellence in potions, Severus was often paired with Lily Evans. The two students developed a companionable understanding. There was an added comfort in the fact that she seemed to accept him for who he was, rather than who she expected him to be or to become; a fact that would potentially save him, later in life.
After graduating from Hogwarts, Severus was faced with the choice of what to do next. Lily Evans now surrounds herself with the Marauders, who mercilessly dogged Severus throughout school. Many of Severus' closest housemates are joining Voldemort. His uncle, Eileen's brother, is already a Death Eater. Given his childhood, Severus has no love of Muggles. Finally, the Death Eaters actually ask him to join them. Having fought throughout his adolescence to create a place for himself in the Wizarding World, that sense of belonging offers a completion.
[This is where I start to gloss over a lot of things, having put less thought into this portion of Severus' life, and losing steam at the end of the day.]
On the family front, the Princes all joined Voldemort, and lost the store in the process. Eileen's parents died early on. Her brother was caught up in Voldemort's first defeat and died in Azkaban. Without her son to distract her, and unable to bear the loss of her former standing in the Wizarding world any longer, Eileen committed suicide in Severus' sixth year at school. The Mill took its toll on Tobias and his health declined quickly. When the Mill failed and he no longer had the Union supporting him, Tobias died a little under two years after Severus graduated Hogwarts.
After the prophecy, resulting in Lily's death and Voldemort's demise, Severus returned to his childhood home. He views this both as a means of escape - a place from which to evaluate his position in the Wizarding World - and as a penance - returning to the life that he hated as payment for the lives that he threw away.