Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to by John Springhall

By John Springhall

This publication units out to teach that modern day fears concerning the meant ethical probability posed to the younger via violent videos or interactive machine video games have their roots in nineteenth-century anxieties concerning the unwell results of renowned kinds of enjoyment at the "children of the decrease classes." those matters stretch in a nearly unbroken line via successive "moral panics" in either Britain and the US, as all through heritage there were makes an attempt to shift the blame for social breakdown onto the leisure kinds of the age: penny theatres, "penny dreadfuls," dime novels, gangster motion pictures, horror comics. a majority of these are mentioned, evaluated, and positioned in context. A postscript refers to "video nasties," violence on tv, "gangsta rap," and laptop video games, each one in flip enjoying the function of "folk devils" which has to be inflicting delinquency. The booklet argues that on account that "moral panics" over pop culture are perennial, this tells us greatly extra approximately grownup anxieties--fear of the long run, technological switch, and the erosion of ethical absolutes--than concerning the nature of adlescent misbehavior.

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Extra resources for Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996

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The popularity of galvanism and 'chemical experiments' suggests that gaff proprietors were eager to exploit new scientific developments for commercial profit. Some of the old staples remain but young audiences seem to have become more tolerant of amateur performers, more prepared to go up on stage themselves, and less inclined to watch lengthy dramatic pieces performed in dumb show. The strong communal aspect of theatre-going in working-class areas converted the offerings on stage into part of a wider age-group experience, indicating how urban popular culture had not yet become dominated by professional entertainers performing to largely passive consumers.

A similar commercialized urban culture had developed in Britain decades before, when workers flocked from rural areas to London and the new industrial cities. In the heyday of German serialized novels, each chapter sold separately to the worker or artisan for ten pfennigs, recalling both the English 'penny bloods' of the l830s onwards and their 'penny dreadful' successors, yet there is no evidence that kolportageroman were at all consciously based 'Penny Dreadful' Panic (I) 41 on English models.

The French roman feuilleton also had a great influence on George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814-79), best -selling English author of long-running serialized novels (see below). Poorly paid hack writers of 'bloods' and 'dreadfuls' in London followed the feuilleton style to make up the requisite pages, breaking up their prose into short independent paragraphs, their conversations into mere phrases and melodramatic exclamations. This gave a patchy look to the page and a certain jerkiness to the narrative which was not assisted by each weekly part running on directly, sometimes in mid-paragraph, from where it had left off in the previous issue.

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