Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 by Laura Harrison (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 by Laura Harrison Siân Pooley Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939. By Laura Harrison. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. xiv + 256 pp. Cloth $120.00. Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 offers an engaging and valuable addition to thriving scholarship on modern youth cultures. Laura Harrison has a dual focus: "the way the young working class were represented and their behaviour in the streets and public spaces defined, along with young people's own experiences [End Page 503] and interactions with space" (218). Across five chapters, Dangerous Amusements explores different "sites of social interaction, along with the young people who populated them" (6). Part I introduces youthful leisure by describing the formative experiences that young people shared—starting work, social activities, and courtship—in Chapter 1, before, in Chapter 2, focusing on the provision of rational recreation as a response to the perceived problem of youth. The three chapters in the second part spotlight different spaces by looking, in Chapter 3, at the neighborhood, followed by the streets and civic spaces, and closing with a case study of monkey parades, through which young people occupied the city center. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from geography, the book sets out to chart "how the young working class experienced and negotiated their own lives in the city, and sees the city not just as material and lived but also a space of the imagination and representation" (8). Harrison summarizes other scholars' work with admirable clarity, so that the book provides an accessible introduction to spatial approaches as well as to the history of youth in modern Britain. A wide range of sources are read "together and against each other" to examine the relationship between commentators' anxieties about urban youth and young people's experiences (17). Insights into the lives of young people are gained primarily through over one hundred oral history interviews with older adults born between 1881 and 1927, together with self-narratives in thirteen published autobiographies. Additional insights into "young working-class social life" are gained through institutional records, newspaper reports, and social surveys (17). Harrison often succeeds in combining cultural and social history approaches. Oral history testimonies are used to, for instance, show how local commentators' condemnation of poor neighborhoods had an impact on their young inhabitants. Although careful to point out gendered inequalities in young people's experiences and the stigma of poverty, "reformers and middle-class commentators" are, interestingly, presented as offering a shared perspective on urban youth, irrespective of their own religion, politics, wealth or generation (56). Dangerous Amusements makes three principal contributions to histories of childhood and youth. The book adds evidence to longstanding scholarly debates about when a "distinct youth culture" developed. By concluding that this youth culture "can be traced to the late nineteenth century," Harrison makes an important argument for continuity in youth culture across the period between 1870 and 1939 (216). Rather than viewing youth culture principally as a product of expert categorization, organized associational life, or consumption, Dangerous Amusements reveals that "the street and neighborhood" was the "forum" in which this shared and distinct youth culture emerged (216). As Harrison observes in the conclusion, this argument has important implications for future research on both rural Britain and postwar youth. [End Page 504] Second, the geographical focus on the city of York is a strength because it contrasts with most studies of youth culture that have researched London or large industrial cities. This spotlight does not, however, seem to reveal many new insights. The York case study is situated alongside evidence from a range of towns and cities, suggesting—more implicitly than explicitly—that there was a shared British experience of working-class youth irrespective of the size, economy, or culture of the urban area in which young people grew up. The study concludes that York was "neither representative or unrepresentative of the wider national picture," so the implications of this commonality across urban Britain are not drawn out (216). Finally, Dangerous Amusements emphasizes the agency...