Book Review

Comparative/World

It hardly needs saying that the behavior and leisure pursuits of young people have always been a source of concern to adult society. In this relatively short but clearly written and informative book, John Springhall charts the history of some of these anxieties in Britain and America. After a useful introduction, in which "Moral Panic" is defined as occuring when "official or press reaction to a deviant social or cultural phenomenon is 'out of all proportion' to the actual threat offered" (pp. 4–5). Springhall recounts, chapter by chapter, the panics in Britain over nineteenth-century penny theaters and penny dreadfuls (in America arising from gangster films in the 1930s and horror comics in the 1940s and 1950s) and the mass media panics during the 1980s and 1990s. Given such a full and wide-ranging menu, it is hardly surprising that some courses are better served than others.	1
The bulk of the book is devoted to the penny theater or "gaff" and the penny dreadful, about both of which Springhall has written fairly extensively in essays and articles. "Gaffs" were unlicensed theaters, usually set up in a vacated shop or warehouse and offering "innocuous forms of dancing, singing, pantomime and melodrama" (p. 12) to children and adolescents. Although subject to police raids, the "gaffs," far from undermining the established order, through their melodramas reinforced concepts of patriotism, domesticity, duty, and inequality. Only in the sense that they represented an autonomous, working-class youth subculture could they be said to have been a threat to that orthodoxy. Likewise with penny dreadfuls (a generic term for a range of publications, "melodramatic and exciting, but otherwise harmless serial fiction"). After a detailed study of the publishers, their content, and how they were made into scapegoats for late Victorian juvenile crime, Springhall concludes that the dreadfuls were anything but subversive, offering for the most part dramas that extolled the consensual values of bourgeois Victorian morality. They did not, he says, "reflect or create a dissentient working-class culture . . . at most they were read in unwitting rebellion against middle-class moralizing and polite standards of taste" (p. 69). One may balk a little at the passivity implied in the word "unwitting," but the thrust of the judgment is surely correct.	2
The chapter on gangster films and censorship in Hollywood in the 1930s is briskly written and should serve as a good descriptive summary of the issue, but it is not much more than that. Although the impact of movies was overwhelming, in Springhall's view, "little credence can be attached to the 'behavioral effects' argument" of contemporary film censors and moralists (p. 119). He seems to have nothing else to add beyond quoting a film historian's suggestion that crime films should be studied as "neither a producer nor a controller of crime, but rather as the expression of America's changing attitudes towards crime" (p. 120). It is hard to see where the relationship between youth, popular culture, and moral panic has been elucidated. Similarly, the account of the horror comic panic concentrates on describing the mainly American campaign against them and, although rich in detail, has little to say about youth as such. However, it is useful to be reminded that labels like "horror comic" signify the struggle among middle-class moralism, mass culture, and youthful demand. Unfortunately, this insight is not followed up.	. . .