Owen Kelly discusses Teenage: the creation of youth 1875 – 1945, and reads excerpts to show just how wide a canvas Jon Savage uses to paint a picture of life for young people in the industrialising west in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth.
According to Wikipedia, Jon Savage “is an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his book about the Sex Pistols and punk music, England’s Dreaming”.
He has also written a lengthy and very detailed book called Teenage: the creation of youth 1875 – 1945, and in this episode Owen Kelly looks at that, and points to some of the many interesting and useful connections and examples that Savage has dug up.
The blurb on the back of the book says that “Savage fuses popular culture, politics, and social history into a stunning chronicle of modern life”. Certainly it provides a mass of details drawn from an extraordinarily wide range of sources, that will provide many surprises for everyone who has not spent the last decade reading exactly the same sources as Jon Savage.