Today we assume all too often that the processes of transformation during our journey into the contemporary world – industrialization, population growth, urbanization – are advances and good in themselves. Yet even when these processes were beginning at the start of the nineteenth century, there were those who warned of the perils of modernization, ranging from Malthus and his fears concerning population growth to those who, Engels included, were critical of the consequences of industrialization. Included in this last group we also find those who observed a link between urbanization and the corruption of social customs, something which would leave ample traces in literature and other forms of representation (Capel 2000).

Madrid, as a major city, did not avoid these narratives of condemnation. There is a substantial body of literature on the Spanish capital as a ‘hateful city’ (Castillo Cáceres 2010) as there is for other great cities (Marchand 2009). It has similarly been observed that such writings and references, particularly those linking the city to delinquency, had scant relation to reality. They were at heart an expression of fear and moral panic in the face of social change, and the emergence of new players on the social scene – members of the lower classes – with new forms of behaviour and identity (Walkowitz 1992; Kalifa 2010; Pallol and Gómez Bravo 2013; Vicente Albarrán 2014). In this chapter I will concentrate on the critical discourse applied to Madrid, with its roots in fear, which ran parallel to urban development in the first decades of the twentieth century. Going further than a simple record of evidence that attests to the appearance of this moral panic, I shall pay particular attention to the change and persistence of discursive themes in this area. I shall discuss the topic through two texts that were both widely available in the period and which, despite belonging to different genres, had many points in common – medicine and public health – as well as through the writings of political propaganda. On the one hand I shall draw on La mala vida en Madrid (1901) by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas de Aguilaniedo, a ‘psycho-sociological’ work that was the culmination of a whole cluster of writings on medical hygiene and public health and criminology that were in vogue at this time in Europe (Campos 2013: 8–10).