CONVENTIONAL wisdom has long decreed that modern adolescence was conceived and defined during the 1950s, the heyday of "American Bandstand," amid the post-World War II economic expansion. But in "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture," Jon Savage argues that the historical moment when adolescence began to be recognized as a separate phase of life came in the late 19th century.
Savage, author of "England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond," arguably the definitive study of 1970s youth culture, shows in this well-researched, readable new book the "symbiotic relationship between mass media and youth."
From the start, Savage's focus is more sociological than literary. Popular fiction and pulp magazine articles are examined as case histories; studies of juvenile delinquency and the lives of doomed poets are given equal weight. He nods respectfully to French poet Arthur Rimbaud and Romanticism, but his muse is pioneering American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, whose 1904 book "Adolescence" put a name to something that was in the air, but elusive and little understood.
Media sensationalism played a defining role too. Savage cites the case of Jesse Pomeroy, convicted at 15 of brutally murdering two Boston children in 1874. He achieved infamy when his jailhouse letters were serialized in the tabloid press in 1875. And in 1899, when Illinois became the first state to establish a separate court for accused offenders under age 16, it marked a "crucial step in the construction of adolescence as a separate stage of life," Savage writes.
A veteran English journalist, Savage compares and contrasts youthful troublemakers and fledgling criminals of all stripes on both sides of the Atlantic: ruffians and prowlers, hooligans and turf-defending "scuttlers," Mohawk-wearing delinquents in London and the "Apaches" of Paris. "By the time they were in their early 20s," he observes, "they were either in prison or all used up." There are echoes of "Low Life" by Luc Sante and Herbert Asbury's "The Gangs of New York," but Savage looks beyond the underworld, noting the growing number of youthful "porters, domestic servants, errand boys and street sellers" by the early 1900s. This emergence of child labor coincided with a deluge of consumer products aimed at young people, most prominently a new entertainment medium that included the shocking crime stories of British "penny dreadfuls" and uplifting so-called boy books. The new market was not gender-specific. "By the end of the 1900s," Savage reflects, "there were already a bewildering number of products targeted at young women."
