The Respect Agenda implies a version of history. As the Respect Task Force has put it, ‘when respect for self, others and community breaks down, anti-social behaviour takes hold’. It is therefore a history of breakdown and erosion: young people no longer respect the law, no longer respect their parents and neighbours, they no longer show any obedience to authority in all its forms, there is now a carnival of disorder in the streets of the ‘broken’ society. This in itself implies a time-scale, pointing to a time when communities were harmonious, whole and unbroken; when parents were dutiful; and children obedient and loyal to their elders and betters, uncorrupted by demoralising popular entertainments.

Within the remembered traditions of the ‘British way of life’ it is the Victorian era, particularly the golden years of late Victorian and Edwardian society – the times of our grandparents, our great-grandparents and their parents – that occupy a privileged position as a time of unrivalled tranquillity. The cosy fug of the music hall, the rattle of clogs on cobbled streets, the unhurried pace of a horse-drawn civilisation – before the motor car, before the cinema, before the sweeping changes of the twentieth century and their attendant disorientations – here, we are repeatedly encouraged to believe, is the original home of ‘Old England’ and a life ordered by tradition and familiarity. It may be helpful, then, to reflect on what the Victorians themselves thought about ‘Victorian values’, the morals of their own young people in the ‘good old days’, and their own version of the Respect Agenda.

My strange title is taken from a collection of essays, Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities, brought together by E.J. Urwick in 1904, three years after Queen Victoria's death. It did not paint a very reassuring picture of the youth of the nation, reflecting the anxious mood of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (as it actually existed) about declining standards and the erosion of the old traditions. There was mention of ‘Hooligan’ gangs in London, for example, who went in for streetfighting battles, as well as assaults on innocent passers-by, and who do not appear to have had a great deal of respect for the police (Pearson, 1983).