Moral Panic and Reading: Early Elite Anxieties About the Media Effect

Introduction

Although Émile Durkheim referred to the new discipline of sociology as ‘la science de la morale’, in recent decades the social sciences have become estranged from the domain of the moral. Arguments and claims that are communicated through a self-consciously moral language are rarely taken seriously in their own terms. Typically, morally framed arguments are either dismissed as a marker for naivety or treated as rhetoric to be deconstructed and exposed. Dromi and Illouz point to a tendency for the ‘widespread conflation of morality with coercive ideological structures’. They add that ‘throughout the twentieth century, both sociology and psychoanalysis have viewed morality as a form of false consciousness, repressing the working class or disciplining the ego’ (Dromi and Illouz, 2010: 351). This point is also echoed by David Rowe who contends that frequently the term moral is deployed to signify that a particular phenomenon should not be taken seriously. He wrote that the coupling of the adjective ‘moral’ with the noun ‘panic’ offers ‘a pejorative connotative dimension’ (Rowe, 2009: 23). So instead of taking the moral side of panics seriously, the moral is represented as a marker of the irrational quality of the reaction. The moral dimension of panic is often unexplored in contributions that represent it as an ‘elite-engineered’ drama. ¹

Frequently the alarmist feature of a moral panic is presented as an over-reaction, as a disproportionate response to a particular condition. Yet as McRobbie and Thornton note, the contestation of moral values is directly implicated in the constitution of moral panics (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). Historical experience indicates that what endows a panic with the character of the moral is its genesis in the perception that the moral order is under threat. A moral order refers to the deep structures of moral life through which people and their community make sense of their circumstances. It signifies ‘the latent and typically unspoken frameworks of authority, teleology, anthropology and narrativity that tend to define meaningful order and continuity in a culture’ (Dill and Hunter, 2010: 288).

The tendency to approach the domain of morality as a site for exposing the ‘real’ motives driving moral claims is evident in numerous contributions to moral panic theory. Paradoxically, despite the coupling of the terms moral and panic, the literature on this subject tends to regard the former as an unimportant subject for scrutiny. This point was recognised by Stanley Cohen in his introduction to the 2002 edition of his seminal study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. He noted that ‘the concept of moral panic evokes some unease, especially about its own morality’ (Cohen, 2002: xxi). He has also drawn attention to the reluctance of many advocates of moral panic theory to acknowledge their own normative assumptions (Cohen, 2011: 327). David Garland has observed that ‘when someone describes an episode as a moral panic, it is always possible to suppose that he or she is simply refusing to take seriously the moral viewpoint of those who are alarmed’ (Garland, 2008: 22). Yet, what makes a panic moral is that it disrupts and serves to unravel the web of meaning through which individuals and communities give meaning to their experience.

People’s moral viewpoint is deeply implicated in the disposition to panic. Such moral anxieties were found to be widespread in my study of the disquiet directed at writing and reading. The historical experience of anxiety and panic regarding the medium of writing indicates that it was intimately connected with disquiet about the prevailing moral order. It was Plato, writing through the mouth of Socrates, who first issued a health warning about the threat posed by writing to the moral outlook of the reader. Socrates asserted that writing is indiscriminate in that it does not choose its audience, but ‘roams about everywhere’ (Furedi, 2016: 15–16). Since writing could elude the control of the cultural elites, it could constitute a threat to the Athenian moral order. He warned that writing reaches those with ‘understanding no less than those who have no business with it’ (Plato, 1997: 551). In line with the paternalistic worldview of his era, Socrates assumed that in the wrong hands, a little knowledge was a threat to moral order.

The focus of concern was not so much on the content of the written text but on the potential of the new medium of communication to disrupt the moral order. Perceptions of the media as intrinsically a potential threat to the moral order have played a significant role in the long history of moral panics. Unlike media promoted panics, which are often emphasised in the literature, the focus of this article is panics about the media: not the reaction to the content of media communication but to its potential to disrupt the prevailing moral order.

The Uncertainty of Meaning

In its original formulation moral panics referred to a phenomenon where a ‘condition, episode, person or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values’ (Cohen, 2002: 1). Threats to societal values disorient communities because they challenge their prevailing system of meaning. Consequently such moral threats possess the distinct quality of calling into question a community’s capacity to deal with the problems it faces in a taken-for-granted manner. C. Wright Mills has argued that people’s consciousness of being threatened is mediated through their system of values. He claimed that whether or not people feel well or insecure is influenced by their relationship with the prevailing sense of meaning. So ‘when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them, they experience well-being’. In contrast ‘when they cherish values but do feel them to be threatened, they experience a crisis’. ‘And if all their values seem involved they feel the total threat of panic’, adds Mills (1959: 11, original emphases). In circumstances where values are called to account and faced with doubt, the moral order is placed in jeopardy.

Originally, in everyday language the term moral panic tended to be attached to anxieties that were related to uncertainties about values, specifically religious ones. The first use of the term in an English language publication found through searching Google Ngram Viewer is in The Quarterly Christian Spectator in 1830 (Anonymous, 1830). ² It was used to highlight the religious confusion and disorientation of the individual. The meaning conveyed by moral panic was analogous to that of a moral paralysis. A year later The Biblical Repertory And Theological Review used the term in a similar manner in relation to a religious experience that paralyses ‘the soul’ to ‘strike it through with a moral panic’. ³ In these publications, as well as others, the term is utilised to highlight the moral uncertainties regarding a person’s relation to God and religion, and the attendant upheavals that serve as a catalyst for a panic-like reaction.

In 1906, the Church of England Bishop Mandell Creighton characterised the despair and doubt of a Biblical figure as a moral panic. ‘Then he realized that the prevailing scepticism was really a moral panic, and had to be regarded as such’, he stated. He wrote that ‘there was, in fact, a moral and religious panic, which swept away many well-intentioned persons by the gathering force of the counsels of despair’. Creighton discussed in some detail the working of this panic and its disruptive impact on an individual’s system of meaning, which he claimed are the ‘results of a sudden alarm in the outward surroundings of life’. He argued that inwardly such reactions are particularly destructive to those who have ‘no wiser impulses to fall back upon’. In contrast ‘those who have moral or intellectual impulses to fall back upon’ succeed in restoring their mental equilibrium and realise that ‘the danger no longer seems so imminent as it did at first’ (Creighton, 1905: 149–151). For Creighton, the ability to minimise the destructive consequences of being overwhelmed by panic-like impulses was the possession of wisdom and character.

Creighton believed ‘that moral panics are not rare’ because ‘religious difficulties have never ceased to weigh upon the hearts of men’ (Creighton, 1905: 154). For Creighton, panics that are moral are inextricably linked to the anxieties and fears provoked by the crisis of belief that haunted Christianity in the modern era. Others used the term in ways that focused on reactions and movements motivated by powerful moral sentiments. Evidence laid before the Royal Commission On The Liquor Traffic in Canada in 1895 by a witness, observed that ‘prohibition had been carried by a kind of wave of moral panic’. In response to this Evidence a member of the Commission asked, ‘do you understand, then, that prohibition does represent something of a moral sentiment?’. The answer offered by the witness was an unequivocal ‘undoubtedly’ (Royal Commission, 1895: paragraphs, 1734 5a, 1741 5a, 1741 6a). It was during this exchange on the relationship between moral sentiment and moral panic in relation to the Temperance Movement that we have probably the first attempt to grapple with a phenomenon that would be discussed almost 80 years later in a sociologically informed manner by Cohen.

The attempt to capture the relationship between moral turmoil and a ‘wave of moral panic’ is important because it allows this experience to be understood as an expression of a threat to values and meaning rather than as a direct response to a specific perceived problem. Historical studies (Parkin, 1986) of the relationship between social anxiety and the perception of threats suggests that the intensity of reactions is inversely proportional to the authority of the prevailing system of meaning (Furedi, 2013). Fear and anxiety become easier to manage in conditions where values and rules can be taken for granted by members of a community (Riezler, 1944: 495).

The Media as a Threat to the Moral Order

Numerous studies have noted the significant role played by the media in the unfolding of moral panics. However, often the media are perceived one dimensionally as alarmist instruments of message amplification rather than as themselves a focus of permanent moral concern. ⁴ This is the main emphasis of a collection of essays published as Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, which represents the relationship between media and moral panics, principally thorough media’s role in the construction and amplification of panics (Lemmings and Walker, 2009). An example of this approach is provided by a study of the role of The London Journal, which it is claimed ‘exemplified the modern role of the newspaper press in engendering irrational fears and moral judgments for commercial and political ends’ in the 18th century (Lemmings, 2009: 140). It is our contention that the promotion of ‘irrational fears’ is only a part of the media dynamic and its effect. Often, it is not the content of a story but the media themselves and their supposed morally toxic effect on people and society that is identified as a threat to the prevailing system of values.

That innovation in the technology of communication can have serious implications for the reproduction of the moral order has been recognised since ancient times. Since the invention of writing every new medium has been an object of suspicion. As Littau (2006) contends, concern about the impact of a new medium has led to anxiety about its effect on the moral behaviour of its audience, as every new medium constitutes a vehicle for the communication of alternative moral knowledge with unpredictable effects.

Since the discovery of writing, the potential of a medium to disrupt the prevailing moral order has served as a regular focus for concern. Marshall McLuhan was the first to associate the term moral panic with the development of new media. He drew attention to the circulation of fears regarding the disruption that electronic media could cause to the print-based moral order. McLuhan highlighted the close correspondence of media related issues and public anxieties. In his discussion of the emergence of new electronic technology, he pointed to ‘the current anxieties of civilized man concerning the written word’, which he believed were for ‘some Westerners’ a ‘very touchy subject’ (McLuhan, 1994: 82).

Drawing on his study of the history of the media, McLuhan noted that technological innovation has a direct impact on the relationship between the system of values that underpin the moral order and wider society. One reason, McLuhan claimed, that the printed word had become a ‘very touchy subject’ was because this ‘ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet’ appeared to be threatened by the electronic media. The evolution of the media is frequently paralleled by the contestation of values. McLuhan stated that:

Our Western values, built on the written word have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and TV. Perhaps that is the reason why many highly literate people in our time find it difficult to examine this question without getting into a moral panic. (McLuhan, 1994: 82)

The meshing of values and new media technology has important implications for the working of the moral order. The potential influence of new media technology on the moral outlook of its audience constantly provokes reactions, which sometimes assume the form of a panic (Critcher, 2003).

Since the invention of writing, reading has become the principal source of moral knowledge. The Book itself possessed a sacred quality. Historically, the Book served as a focus of moral and religious anxieties, because so much cultural meaning was invested in it. Often the Book was represented as a medium through which moral orthodoxy could be subverted. During the Middle Ages, the Church was unequivocally opposed to allowing ordinary people to study the Bible in private. In 1229 the Synod of Toulouse proscribed the publication of the vernacular version of the complete Bible on the grounds that in ‘untutored hands and heads it would promote heterodoxy and heresy’ (Levine, 1986: 64). The Catholic Church clearly regarded reading as a very dangerous accomplishment. In 1750, Inquisitor-General Perez del Prado denounced those ‘men [who had] ‘pushed their audacity to the Execrable Extremity of asking permission to read the Bible’ (Capel, 1856: 4). The Catholic Church’s reaction, which at times took extreme forms, represented a continuation of the Socratic tradition’s suspicion towards writing and mistrust of the reader. The belief that access to books encouraged heretical thoughts can be interpreted as an early expression of a reaction which is today described as the ‘media effect’. ⁵

Although academic interest in the effects of the media on human behaviour only emerged in the 19th century, it has always been a matter of concern to cultural, religious and political elites. In his study The Fear of Books, Holbrook Jackson argues that what he portrays as bibliophobia is ‘not confined to books per se, it is even more apparent in a fear of what books may do’, that is, their effects on people (Jackson, 1932: 2). Such apprehensions gained intensity with the emergence of commercial publishing in the 18th century and the constitution of an ever-widening audience of readers. The question of how a mass readership would react to the publications they consumed was a perennial subject of debate. In his seminal study of the development of public opinion, Habermas noted that the emerging middle class cultivated its identity through its literary practices. With so much at stake the widening of literacy became a source of anxiety expressed through terms like reading ‘addiction’ and ‘mania’ (Habermas, 1992: 72). The fear that ‘you become what you read’ was constantly voiced by cultural and political elites (Brantlinger, 1998: 12).

Kirsten Drotner has used the term media panic – that is, a panic about the media – to highlight the recurrent tendency for change and innovation in the media to incite anxiety and fear (Drotner, 1999: 595–619). Such reactions were a response to the expansion of both publishing and the reading public in the 18th century. As Lowenthal and Fiske noted ‘if one takes the term “mass” media to mean marketable cultural goods produced for a substantially buying public, eighteenth-century England is the first period in history where it can meaningfully be applied’ (Lowenthal and Fiske, 1956: 442). The expansion of the media and its commercialisation created an environment where competing views and opinions helped foster a climate where moral authority could face contestation. A new medium – particularly when it assumes a mass form – represents an implicit challenge to moral authority. Through providing a medium for communication, it offers new opportunities for unsupervised discussion, which in turn may raise questions about the legitimacy of the moral order. Elite uncertainties towards a new medium are based on the perception that it has a potential for opening up the domain of the moral to contestation.

Elite Anxieties Towards Reading in 18th-Century England

Throughout most of the 18th century, a relatively homogeneous media ecology allowed the ascendant middle class elites to regard the press as an institution that could provide moral guidance and enlightenment. Articles often dwelled on the need to challenge or improve public prejudice and ignorance. ‘Moral righteousness, religious conviction and the quest for improvement combined to ensure that the people were defined as a problem and treated as an undifferentiated mass that clung to past habits through superstition, ignorance, irreligion, indolence and folly’, writes Black (1991: 247). This was a conservative phase of the press, when its relationship to the wider public was not yet a major issue. Black claims that ‘however corrosive print might be potentially as a medium for the transmission of social and political ideas, newspapers tended to be hierarchical and conservative in their assumptions’ (Black, 1991: 247).

Until the late 18th century, most of the press promoted sentiments based on a shared normative foundation. It was only when publications became more heterogeneous and society more polarised, that concerns about its moral effects became crystallised. The commercialisation of publishing, leading to greater competition, alongside the growth of the reading public, raised queries about the likely impact of the media. For sections of the cultural and political elites, the problem was the very existence of the mass media themselves. After issuing a warning about the ‘alarming spread of infidelity and even of Atheism’, The Weekly Register declared in its first issue in May 1798 that ‘The Press is certainly the most powerful engine which can be applied to the public mind’ (cited in Black, 1991: 212). Raymond Williams claimed that such alarmist reactions were provoked by the conviction that if ‘the common man reads, both quality and order’ will be ‘threatened’ (Williams, 1971: 179).

Inevitably religious campaigners were most sensitive to the risks posed by a more diverse and commercially driven media to the moral order. By the end of the 18th century religious groups began both to fear but also to look to the press as a potential instrument for containing immorality. Religious activists, particularly those of an evangelical disposition, were in the forefront of challenging what they interpreted as the morally corrupting influence of cheap mass-produced popular publications. Hannah More’s well-known campaign to produce Cheap Repository Tracts sought to combat ‘vulgar and licentious publications’ – that is, Chapbooks, cheap publications produced for the mass market. ⁶ More and her colleagues perceived Chapbooks as a direct threat to the Christian middle class moral order. One study draws the following contrast between the rival publications: ‘chapbooks presented a fictional world where the sexual and social order was fluid and changeable; the evangelicals countered by calling for strict domestic hierarchies and the grateful acceptance of one’s social place’ (Pendersen, 1986: 106).

It is worth noting that the anxieties surrounding the media effect were not confined to the content of its communication. The most threatening media effect was the creation of a new mass audience who might decide to reject the habits and conventions of the prevailing moral order. Although elite concerns were often directed at the emergence of a radical press, their apprehension was also directed at the capacity of this new medium to influence the common people. Their moral ‘condemnation of light periodicals’ anticipated the subsequent denunciation of the media of popular culture (Williams, 1971: 179). In the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, the concept of the ‘reading public’ was sometimes classified as a variant of such dangerous collective categories as ‘people, mob, crowds’ (Brantlinger, 1998: 26). In Britain the concept of the ‘reading crowd’ expressed the insecurity of a middle-class elite that felt isolated and estranged from popular culture. Such insecurities intensified in the decades to come, until the concept of the reading crowd ‘took on more sinister meanings’ (Sumpter, 2006: 234).

From the late 18th century onwards, political and cultural commentators often displayed their insecurity through their inflated assessment of the power and size of the reading public. The literary historian Ina Ferris noted:

The period is filled with signs of an urgent, widespread sense that large numbers of new and diverse readers had appeared on the scene. Whatever the empirical data on literacy (and these are notoriously problematic) the perception in the reviews was of a huge, recent increase in readers. (cited in Brantlinger, 1998: 26, original emphasis)

Inflated assessments of the size of the reading crowd were paralleled by a tendency to endow the media with fantastical powers. It was claimed that novels and newspapers possessed a power of suggestion that literally seduced and morally disarmed readers.

Studies of the popular culture of the late 18th century frequently depict the reactions of the elites to it as a form of moral panic. Pointing to the campaigns associated with the moral reformer Hannah More, one study argues that ‘moral panics over popular culture’ can ‘be discerned in Britain’ even before the ascendancy of ‘commercial mass production and technological innovation’ (Springhall, 1998: 5–6). In her study of the widespread cultural attacks mounted against the new genre of the novel, Terry Lovell stated that ‘it was denounced not only for its lack of literary merit, but also for its alleged effects on morals’. She added that:

The moral panic it occasioned in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was merely the first of a series which occurred whenever a new cultural commodity made its debut. It was repeated in very similar terms in the twentieth century over cinema and then television, both of which were attacked as culturally debased and tending to corrupt. (Lovell, 1987: 8)

The positioning of the anti-novel crusade as one that shares the characteristics of subsequent reactions against new media, is apposite for highlighting the recurrent concern with the media effect.

The moral condemnation of the novel was not simply a reaction to the content of this genre of literature, but also shows the growing tendency to mistrust the capacity of a mass readership to avoid being misled and corrupted by it. Brantlinger depicts this elite reaction to the newly produced cultural commodities as one that is best expressed through the concept of a moral panic. He characterised this reaction as a ‘diffuse moral panic extending over two centuries’ (Brantlinger, 1998: 142). This usage of the concept of a moral panic to capture this trend weakens the coherence of the concept.

Panics do not last for centuries but elite distrust of the media was and continues to be a recurrent feature of modernity. Moral panics regarding reading and the mass media did erupt in the 18th century. The hysterical reaction to Goethe’s romantic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was probably the first mass-media-led moral panic of the modern era (Furedi, 2016). However, the wider alarmist reaction to the growth of mass literacy is best described as moral disquiet and a disposition to fear and mistrust the common reader. Insofar as the term panic has any relevance, it applies to a narrow stratum of the cultural elites who feared the consequences of ‘undesirable reading’ (Williams, 1971: 179).

Threat to Moral Authority

An examination of the highly charged climate surrounding the emergence of mass literacy and popular culture suggests that what was at issue was the capacity of the moral order to retain authority over public attitudes and behaviour. The new media created a mass audience and it was feared that it could expose readers to morally subversive influences. This defensive reaction to the radical press and the so-called sensationalist novels was ‘related directly to the strength of its appeal to the masses’. Such concerns were intensified by the size of this constituency of mass readership: ‘The greater the audience, the greater the presumed threat to individual health and to social order’, concludes a study of the ‘Fear of Fiction’ (Straker, 1990: 44).

The ‘fear of fiction’ reflected the conviction that popular literature could encourage readers to acquiesce to their ‘degrading’ passions and thereby contribute to the degradation of the traditional emotional and moral conventions of everyday life. This reaction to novel reading was underwritten by the belief that fiction offered the gullible masses a dubious but potent guide to life and behaviour. Unease about the media effects of popular literature was often focused on its intoxicating impact and potential for destabilising the workings of everyday morality.

The 18th century essayist and moralist Samuel Johnson believed that precisely because the fiction of his time resembled real life it had a unique power to influence human behaviour. Anticipating a theme that regularly features in discussions on the media effect, Johnson was acutely worried about its impact on youth. He asserted that the realism of fiction, in particular its tendency to deal with the issues of everyday life, had particularly insidious consequences. From his perspective, a literature that was close to the lived experience of the reader was likely to be more dangerous than the heroic romantic writings of a bygone era. According to Johnson, the ‘accurate observation of the familiar world’ is more dangerous than the previous ‘heroic romances’. Why? Since it directly engages with the experience of readers, it has the power to influence them (Johnson, 1750).

Johnson’s apprehension was directed at the ability of the media to provide an alternative guide to behaviour rather than to the threat it posed to a specific value. The very possibility that a section of a community could fall under the influence of an alternative set of values exacerbates insecurity about the prevailing moral order. That is why historically the influence of the media is frequently represented as a challenge to authority and discussed through an alarmist discourse. ⁷ By the 19th century the negative sentiments expressed by Johnson about the power of the novel had become widespread amongst middle-class cultural elites. From this point onwards popular literature – in its different forms – would often be treated in a manner not dissimilar to moral devaluation of the tabloid press in the late 20th century.

The 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope represented the novel as a compelling source of alternative moral knowledge that overshadowed the influence of the family and community. He wrote that the ‘bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teachings chiefly from the novels they read’. According to Trollope’s diagnosis the traditional institutions of moral education and socialisation were no match for the omnipotent novel:

the novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do into her task-work; and there she is taught—how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion of such tutorship (Trollope, 1879: 202–203).

Trollope had no doubt that a traditional instrument for moral communication, such as the sermon, could not compete with the appeal of the novel. In his view, the novel was a medium that had the intoxicating effect of inciting the reader to throw ‘herself head and heart into the narration’. It could almost effortlessly shape and influence behaviour.

In his 1879 overview of cultural and political developments in Britain, the historian Spencer Walpole drew attention to a new almighty power:

It might be said of the present age that the power of controlling thought is passing … to the novel-writer. Political speeches are studied by some; sermons are avoided by many; history has only a few students; but every one reads novels. The novel influences for good or for evil the thoughts of its readers: the thoughts of its readers may ultimately determine the government of the world. (Walpole, 1913: 252)

Walpole’s extravagant claim about the novel writer’s ‘power of controlling thought’ was paralleled by the recognition that the influence of religion had waned – ‘sermons are avoided’ – and the vitality of traditional moral influences had become exhausted. Uncertainties about religion and values and the durability of the Victorian social order heightened elite sensitivities towards potential competitors to its moral authority.

By the late 19th century the anxieties associated with the novel had shifted to the mass-produced newspaper (Jones, 1996: 79). In Britain the so-called New Journalism, which catered to a mass readership, became a target of those worried about the corrupting effect of popular culture. After the Third Reform Act of 1884 and the extension of the franchise, there was an escalation of disquiet regarding the influence of the New Journalism. According to one account, a ‘new moral panic was triggered by the possibility that a “mass” press could shape a “mass culture” that could now wield actual power through the ballot box’ (Jones, 1996: 132).

From the standpoint of the current discussion of moral panics, what makes the debates around 18th and 19th-century popular culture interesting is the self-conscious moral vocabulary through which arguments were conveyed. For example, the discussions of ‘sensation fiction’ were communicated through ‘metaphors of moral corruption, disease and poison’ (Brantlinger, 1998: 143) in the first instance, and the new media were seen as an instrument that exposed the domain of moral authority to criticism.

Lack of confidence in the ability of the reading public to resist the influence of the media was by no means confined to conservative traditionalist moralists. The anti-imperialist liberal writer John Hobson indicted mass journalism for misleading the public by encouraging them to adopt a Jingoist orientation towards the Boer War. The liberal historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed during the aftermath of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion that the ‘Yellow Peril’ was not as dangerous as the white peril made up of ‘uniform modern man’, manipulated by the press (Brantlinger, 1998: 23). During the decades to follow it became evident that support for the moral regulation of people’s reading habits transcended the usual ideological divide. The influence of fiction on the young was no less a matter of concern to George Orwell than it was to Samuel Johnson. Writing in 1940, Orwell offered a moralistic critique of the quality of fiction available to the young (cited in McAleer, 1992: 4). But by this time Orwell’s concerns about the influence of fiction were relatively marginal to the preoccupations of his era. Anxiety about the power of the press and the cinema tended to displace fiction as the main driver of interest in the media effect.

What the experience of the 18th and 19th centuries suggests is that apprehensions provoked by the mass media and the new reading crowd were logically prior to any specific effect attributed to it. That mass literacy increased the numbers of people open to new ideas and influences meant that moral authority would have to account for the norms and values it upheld. Unlike in our era, public language was still unapologetically moral. Questions of right and wrong readily mutated into that of good and evil. Those who contested the preponderant conventions were not only criticised for their mistaken views, they were also condemned as immoral. Since the consumption of media was likely to lead readers in undesirable directions, it was held responsible for moral decline.

Since the 20th century there has been a notable tendency for the meshing of the moral with the medical. Consequently, alarmist reactions to the effects of the media point to their alleged effects on the reader’s physical and mental health. Of course the medicalisation of the reading of novels was already well advanced in the late 18th century (Vogrinčič, 2008). But with the relative decline of a self-conscious moralistic narrative, condemnation of the media has been increasingly expressed through the discourse of medicalisation. In the current era, a variety of conditions – addiction, trauma – have been associated with reading. The call for trigger-warnings to protect readers from trauma constitutes the 21st-century approach to the age old policing of reading (Furedi, 2016: 214).

Discussion

Our review of the moralised discourse through which reactions to popular fiction and the press were communicated indicates that they were mainly driven by the impulse to strengthen a claim to moral authority. Whatever the power and influence of the mass commercial media, its very existence raised questions about the ability of Britain’s middle class elite to guide and influence the new reading public. At times confident assertions of elite authority trumped the obsessive fears regarding the moral corruption of the masses. But from the late 18th century onwards, expressions of fear about the state of the moral order became a recurrent – if not always dominant – feature of elite imagination.

One question posed by the emergence of the media was how would its audience be affected by it. Religious activists immediately perceived the media as a threat because it feared that at the very least the entertainment it provided distracted people from their moral duties. It was also suspected that it encouraged morally dissolute behaviour. The ascendant middle class liberal elites were suspicious of popular culture because they feared that its aesthetic effect would diminish people’s capacity to reason and resist its invitation to evil behaviour. This sentiment informed their reaction to the sensation novel. According to Ann Cvetkovich, the ‘construction of mass culture as primarily appealing to feeling rather than reason underwrote the dismissal of it as aesthetically inferior’. She adds that ‘affect also figures prominently in the moral panic that pervades such aesthetic pronouncements’ (Cvetkovich, 1992: 22). The intoxicating emotional, non-rational and even irrational passions that could be incited through the consumption of the media were perceived as a threat to rational order.

Springhall (1998) writes of a social dynamic that ‘allowed cultural authorities to amplify social anxieties’ about the threat to ‘good taste’. Pointing to the stigmatising labels attached to the different genres of popular culture – ‘penny dreadful’ or ‘horror comic’ – he interprets the underlying impulse as a ‘struggle between middle class moralism and popular demand’ (Springhall, 1998: 9). No doubt conflict over taste served as a symbolic weapon in the conflict between elites and masses. As Pierre Bourdieu in his magisterial sociological essay Distinction noted, ‘aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent’. He explained that ‘struggles over the “art of living” serve to draw lines between behaviour and attitudes considered legitimate and those deserving moral condemnation’ (Bourdieu, 2010: 49). From this perspective, the demonisation of the popular press and the media also constituted a claim to moral and cultural authority. The critique of popular taste was integral to the project of reasserting cultural hierarchy (LeMahieu, 1988: 105).

But is the struggle for moral authority best captured by the concept of a moral panic? During the period under consideration, the anxieties expressed regarding the power and influence of media were principally an expression of elite attitudes. It is far from clear whether elite anxieties about mass culture had any significant influence on the day-to-day behaviour of the reading public and wider society. Despite the many warnings about their consumption, the demand for cheap and sensational literature and for tabloid journalism continued to expand until the time of the rise of the electronic media and other forms of entertainment. If the term panic is to be applied, it is probably best applied to refer to intra-elite reactions to popular culture. There were of course instances of society-wide panics such as the reaction to the ‘white slave trade’, but it is likely that concerns about the power of the media were sublimated elite anxieties about the media’s influence on their consumers. Discussions of the press during the second half of the 19th century did not simply exaggerate its power but also the size of its mass readership (Hwampton, 2001: 214). That the size and the power of the reading crowd mattered so much signalled an attitude of disquiet toward it. The corollary of the inflation of media power was the deflation of the moral status of its audience.

The contempt for popular culture and mass literacy interweaved with a view of common people that was obsessed with their moral and psychological deficits. The metaphors of intoxication and addiction were used not just to describe but also morally to condemn. In the 19th century even intellectuals and social scientists were drawn towards such moralised conceptions of mass behaviour. A paper given by W. Cooke Taylor to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in December 1867 noted with alarm ‘the very high level of anxiety which the “intoxicating” consequences of fiction had engendered during that year of parliamentary reform’ (cited in Jones, 1996: 110).

For the social and moral reformers, the persistence of mass interest in potentially misleading or intoxicating literature was a disappointment. Their alarm was motivated by the belief that the reading crowd was likely to react emotionally and irrationally to the literature they consumed. Their alarmist reaction constituted a statement of mistrust towards how a crowd of readers, afflicted with a moral deficit, would behave. Their response shares some of the current attitudes of studies of moral panics that emphasize the irrational and emotional elements of public opinion’ (see Lemmings, 2009: 247). It is this lack of trust in the moral and intellectual resources of the public that continues to encourage the promiscuous attribution of a variety of medical, psychological and moral deficits – Internet addiction, video games causing violent behaviour, etc. – to the consumers of the media today.

Our study suggests that reactions to the media effect were underpinned by a sense of disquiet about the moral status and behaviour of the public. Since the 18th and 19th centuries the Socratic diagnosis of the public as gullible and easily manipulated has acquired the status of an incontrovertible truth in discussions surrounding the media and advertising. In 1927 The Times argued that ‘it is more important than ever before to prevent’ the public ‘being led astray by ill-chosen ideas of entertainment and interests which only bore and offend those who know more about life’ (cited in LeMahieu, 1988: 109). Contemporary debates on the power of the media, and particularly tabloid journalism, serve as testimony to the resilience of this narrative. Misgivings about the public’s consumption of the media frequently mutate into an alarmist discourse about its likely behaviour (Calcutt and Hammond, 2011: 149–153).

In her account of panic discourses, Drotner acknowledges that there have been ‘important moral panics whose focus has not been on the media’. ‘But’, she adds, as mass media have come to the fore ‘with an ever-increasing rapidity, more and more moral panics have been media panics or have quickly been implicated with concern over the media’ (Drotner, 1999: 609). By its very existence the mass media have served as a vehicle through which moral anxieties are sublimated. The media are also experienced as a permanent challenge to the moral order.

Our review of media related anxieties suggests that what renders a panic a moral one is its relation to the moral order. By its very existence, the printed media have the potential for raising questions about values, norms of behaviour and authority. Doubts raised about such fundamental moral issues invariably provoke uncertainty about the workings of society. That is why the literary habits of the reading public were a constant source of concern to the guardians of the 18th and 19th-century moral order.