In this piece, written for the Fear and Fun module, taught by Dr Rob James and Dr Karl Bell, second year UoP student Amber Braddick discusses journalist James Greenwood’s exaggerated denouncement of the Victorian ‘penny dreadful’. Despite such middle-class anxietes over the corrupting influence of cheap print on working class youth, many of their stories strike a highly moralistic tone. James Greenwood’s, A Short Way to Newgate (1874) demonstrates the anxieties felt by the middle classes towards the extremely popular penny dreadfuls during the late 19th Century. The author, Greenwood, is not only writing in an attempt to show other middle and upper class members of society how dangerous this […]
