Journal Article

‘New Elizabethans’: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in 1950s British Fiction

Bentley, Nick

2010

Overview

[...]the term becomes shorthand for any identification of teenage, or adolescent delinquency.13 As Stanley Cohen argues, the Teddy boys 'were perceptually merged into a day-to-day delinquency problem'.14 Although this is the dominant image of Teddy boys circulating in the 1950s, there were a few contrasting representations in the popular press. According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into civilized sections of the city and had a coffee with me, he lived the high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing crockery in all-night cafes and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted.32 This passage identifies a number of characteristics that are common to the representation of Teddy boy subculture generally in the 1950s. [...]in the context of the 1950s it provides further 'evidence' of what would be perceived as the very real delinquency of this group. [...]Trevor Lomas, the Teddy boy figure in Spark's novel, is representative of the prevailing dominant culture rather than a potentially subversive threat to it.

• Publisher: SAGE Publications,Sage Publications Ltd
• Subject: British & Irish literature / Contextualism / Fiction / Juvenile delinquency / Literary criticism / MacInnes, Colin / Parent-child relations / Scottish literature / Semiotics / Sillitoe, Alan / Sociology / Spark, Muriel (1918-2006) / Subcultures / Waterhouse, Keith / Working class / Youth culture