Publisher's Synopsis
This provocative study examines the outbreaks of street violence ("garotting") in large British cities between the 1850s and the 1880s. It draws a telling picture of the effect of the mass media in stirring up a moral panic creating folk devils and heavily influencing the behaviour of police, politicians and judges. It compares the media panic with the reality as derived from criminal statistics and, by comparing cities with different press attitudes to the same problem, demonstrated the enormous influence of newspapers upon official attitudes. Interestingly, the author is able to show that the arbitrary nature of such moral panics was widely understood by the public, and that street violence was not viewed as a major problem by the Victorian middle classes.
