Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London

On the Relation of Boredom and Aggression

“…In practice, her boredom would result in the prototypical symptoms of dysphoric affect, concentration difficulties, changes in arousal, and the sense of altered time (Chin et al, 2017;Eastwood et al, 2012;Troutwine & O'Neal, 1981;van Tilburg & Igou, 2012, 2017Westgate & Wilson, 2018).…”

“…We might argue that the growing availability and realism of aggression in modern media has perhaps desensitized us; that this acceptance of aggressive content as entertainment is a newer phenomenon, and yet, we only need to look at what pleased the masses hundreds or even thousands of years ago to know that is not true. The Victorians delighted in the extreme violence of public executions with families traversing to the city square to watch criminals hang (Crone, 2017), and the ancient Romans filled the Colosseum with eager gladiator fans cheering for blood to spill (Fagan, 2011). It is not hard to imagine how these spectacles would have provided a great sense of excitement, essentially the perfect escape from the monotony of everyday life before TV, phones, and game consoles made entertainment easily available.…”

Rethinking the history of British popular culture, 1850–1914

“…Increasingly, historians have begun to critically look at the whole idea of the civilising process repressing rough popular culture; for example, the role of respectability as a transformative force which repressed rough behaviour. Rosalind Crone shows how a lot of popular culture was marked by an attachment to violent entertainment ranging from Punch and Judy to arguably the most popular figure in Victorian melodrama: Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, who slit the throats of his customers and gave the bodies to Mrs. Lovett next door to be made into meat pies (Crone, 2012). In an important intervention, Peter Bailey argues that respectability might simply be a form of performance, appropriate in some circumstances but one that could be abandoned at other times (Bailey, 1998, pp.…”