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The Victorians And Old Age
Karen Chase
Oxford University Press
August 2009
On Sale: August 10, 2009
300 pages
ISBN: 0199564361
EAN: 9780199564361
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Karen Chase examines old age as it was constructed in
Victorian social and literary cultures. Beginning with the
vexed relation between elderly people whose numbers and
needs taxed the state which sought to identify, classify,
and provide for them, she analyzes illuminating moments in
narrative form, social policy, or cultural attitudes. The
book considers the centrality of institutions and of the
generational divide; it traces the power and powerlessness
of age through a range of characters and individuals as
distinct from one another as Dickens's inebriated nurse,
Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; and it studies
specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions
attached to aging and the complexities of representing age
in pictorial and statistical 'portraits'. Chapters are
organized around major literary works set alongside episodes
and artifacts, diaries and memoirs, images and inscriptions,
that produced (and now illuminate) the construction of old
age through Victoria's long reign. The Victorians and Old Age shows that if old age became for
the Victorians such a conspicuous public topic and problem,
it also became an intensely private preoccupation. The
social formation of old age created terms, images, and
narratives that lone individuals used to fashion the stories
of their lives. The book is intent to respect the
specificity of aging: not only the wide diversities of
circumstance (rich and poor, urban and rural, watched and
forgotten, powerful and dispossessed) but also the distinct
acts of representation by novelists, painters, journalists,
sociologists, and diary-keepers.
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