ABSTRACT
The history of social violence and its associated discontents can be traced back not only to beginning of the Victorian era, but also beyond the great urban and industrial transformations of the nineteenth century to what is often imagined to have been the sleepy tranquillity of ‘Merrie England’. The long, entrenched history of street violence and disorder shows perhaps how much more difficult it will be to dislodge or ameliorate the problem, than if it were true that it had sprung from nowhere ‘in the past thirty years’ or ‘since the war’. Whereas under the impact of ‘the more mobile and open experience of recent years’, Seabrook sees a high price exacted in ‘the sense of disturbance in many children, the violence and absence of direction’. The 1870s witnessed a resurgence of mob violence at elections, which carried on for some years.
