Gang Crime and the Media in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article will offer a fresh perspective on media attitudes towards working-class youth in late Victorian London by looking in detail at a case study of violent youth crime. It offers an analysis of gang crime in the late nineteenth-century capital and explores the use of class and stereotyping in the reporting of working-class youth. It considers the extent to which the problems of violent youth gangs were manipulated by the press to portray the capital as a ‘city out of control’. Finally, it will argue that these contemporary representations of youth helped create a fear that exaggerated the threat posed by gangs.