‘Penny Dreadful’ Panic (II): Their Scapegoating for Late-Victorian Juvenile Crime

Some attention has been given by social historians to both crime and popular culture as independent variables in the past, but few attempts have been made to look at the interchanges between the two. Victorian middle-class moralists were less scrupulous and hence their attempts to link delinquency with the reading of cheap fiction. The most vociferous critics of new forms of entertainment for the young were recruited from the ranks of the expanding professional middle class and the intellectual clerisy rather than from the manufacturing or business middle class. ‘Boys and girls reared in the cellars and garrets of large cities’ were accused in 1865 by Harriet Martineau, political economist and champion of middle-class values, of reading a literature of ‘animal passion and defiant lawlessness’. She went on, echoing a familiar complaint, ‘lives of bad people, everything about banditii anywhere, love stories from any language, scenes of theatrical life, trials of celebrated malefactors, love, crime, madness, suicide, wherever to be got in print, are powerful in preparing the young for convict life.’ If compulsory elementary education from the 1870s onwards did not lead working-class school-children towards the high ideal of self-improvement, comments Joseph Bristow, ‘then it would appear to have abandoned them to the supposedly corrupting influence of penny fiction’.1