Category: Juvenile Delinquency

• The "Dime Novel" Arsonists

  This theory claimed that cheap serial fiction—especially penny dreadfuls and dime novels—did not merely entertain children but furnished them with criminal scripts, including ideas for arson, school destruction, and rebellion against authority. The historical basis lies in a real late nineteenth-century moral panic that linked cheap juvenile reading to delinquency, imitation crime, violence, suicide, and social disorder. Critics routinely exaggerated these effects, but their accusations reveal how seriously popular print for young readers was treated as a threat.