Abstract
First, this chapter considers the efforts made by sections of the press to ‘clean up’ popular culture aimed at children by drawing upon the threat of moral decay. Such efforts failed to alter patterns of middle-class cultural consumption. Second, the chapter examines the Scouting Movement’s popularity, rooting this in a desire for the development of ‘good’ citizens rather than fears of military or patriotic inadequacy. Finally, the chapter assesses attitudes towards working-class ‘hooligans’, arguing that some historians have overstated fears about the threat they posed to Edwardian England. The hooligan threat receded in the early years of the twentieth century, partly due to the need of some commentators to construct an alternative narrative of street life in order to underpin anti-immigrant campaigns.
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Notes
John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp.74–6
Penelope Summerfield, ‘The Effingham arms and the empire: deliberate selection in the evolution of music hall in London’, in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (eds) (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp.219–20
Compare, for instance, Jay Hickory Wood and Arthur Collins, Humpty Dumpty: A Children’s Pantomime (London: J. Miles, 1903), passim, especially pp.40–1, 44,
to Wood and Collins, The White Cat (London: J. Miles, 1904), passim.
Regarding topicality, see T. F. Doyle, Cinderella and the Fairy Glass Slipper (programme for Theatre Royal, Sheffield performance, 1898–9), uncatalogued script, in Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds Special Collections
J. S. Bratton, ‘Beating the bounds: gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall’, in The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.97
Wood, The Babes in the Wood (Edinburgh, 1905), no pagination, Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives, London (hereafter VA) Plays.Bab. Pamphlet;
Wood, Babes in the Wood (Liverpool, 1905), no pagination, VA Plays.Bab.O.S.Pamphlet
F. C. Burnand, Wood, and Collins, Cinderella (London, 1905), pp.60–5, VA PR4279.B5; Wood and Collins, Humpty Dumpty, p.90
Wood and Collins, Sindbad: Children’s Pantomime (London, 1906), pp.22–30, VA PR5483.W17
Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (London: Horace Cox, 1908), p.45
Allen Warren, ‘Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Great Britain, 1900–1920’, English Historical Review 101:399 (1986), pp.390–1
Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (London: Crook Helm, 1977), p.64
Springhall, ‘Debate: Baden-Powell and the Scout Movement before 1920: Citizen Training or Soldiers of the Future?’ English Historical Review 102:405 (1987), pp.935, 941
Using different source material, what follows ends up supporting some of the points made in Martin Dedman, ‘Baden-Powell, militarism, and the “invisible contributors” to the Boy Scout Scheme, 1904–1920’, Twentieth Century British History 4:3 (1993), pp.201–23
On this move, see Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell (London: Pimlico, 1989), p.407
‘1st Petersfield Scout Group’, undated memorandum, HRO 10M99/B1/36/1; Dedman, Highfield Scout Group (Southampton: 14th Southampton (Highfield) Scout Group, 1979), p.2, in 10M99/B1/47/1; Springhall, ‘Baden-Powell’, p.940
Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Coetzee, ‘Rethinking the radical right in Germany and Britain before 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History 21:4 (1986), p.522
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1909), p.288;
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1911), p.290
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1909), pp.288–90;
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1911), pp.290–2
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908), pp.262, 264–5
Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1911), p.292
Baden-Powell, ‘Pessimism – looking on the dark side, etc.’ [1911], SAA TC/21
Admirably summarized in William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.142–5
See also Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), pp.55–71
On Burdett, see Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp.127–8; Henry Burdett to Joseph Chamberlain, 30 May 1903, Bodleian Library Special Collections, University of Oxford, Oxford, (henceforth BLSC), Mss.Eng.c.5905/19–22
Prochaska, Philanthropy and the Hospitals of London: The King’s Fund, 1897–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp.15–7, 22–77
Prochaska, ‘Burdett, Sir Henry Charles (1847–1920)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol.8, p.742
On the failure of the Navy League, see the excellent Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch.1
John Stewart, ‘Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party, and child welfare, 1900–1914’, Twentieth Century British History 4:2 (1993), p.123
H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911; London: Garland, 1984), p.331;
Frances Greville, A Nation’s Youth: Physical Deterioration: Its Causes and Some Remedies (London: Cassell & Co, 1906);
see also J. H. Vines, ‘The physique of Scottish children’, in Westminster Review (September 1903), pp.319–22;
David Young, ‘People, place and party: the Social Democratic Federation 1884–1911’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2003), ch.7
Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth1889–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p.174
Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp.60–73
David Glover, Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siecle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
‘Mr. Chamberlain at Limehouse’, St. James’s Gazette, 16 December 1904, p.3; see also Bernard Harris, ‘Pro-alienism, anti-alienism and the medical profession in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, Waltraud Ernst and Harris (eds) (London: Routledge, 1999), p.193
For the context to this, see Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of the ‘Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Radical Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Deborah Gorham, ‘The “Maiden tribute of modern Babylon” re-examined: child prostitution and childhood in late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 21 (1978), pp.353–79
James Walvin, Leisure and Society1830–1950 (London: Longman, 1978), p.119
Colin Holmes, John Bulls’ Island: Immigration and British Society 1871–1971 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), pp.65, 67
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© 2013 Christopher Prior
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Prior, C. (2013). Moral Reform, Youth Movements, and Hooliganism. In: Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline: An Empire’s Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373410_4
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