Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain, and: The Victorians and Old Age (review)

It seems particularly appropriate that these two books should be published in the same year. As these studies indicate, midlife and old age coexist in an uneasy relationship; the boundaries between the two states shift with time and individual circumstance. Kay Heath explores the emergence of midlife in Victorian Britain, while Karen Chase examines how old age became a category of political and scientific discourse by the first decade of the twentieth century. Inevitably there is some overlap between these studies of ageing. For much of the nineteenth century it was far from clear where midlife ended and old age began, an ambiguity reflected in the literature of the period; thus Heath and Kay both appeal to fiction by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, and H. Rider Haggard. An interest in the nature of personal and collective identities and in the cultural construction of ageing also informs both studies; each, moreover, provides a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between fictive lives and lived experience.

Heath's study focuses on the personal anxiety provoked by the onset of middle age. No longer regarded as the prime of life, middle age was increasingly associated with decline and its depiction in novels, medical literature, and advertisements reflected the ways in which it was formed in opposition to the ideal of youth and vitality. The book explores the nineteenth-century origins of the so-called midlife crisis and critiques our current preoccupation with ageing. Heath challenges the ageism of our own society by exposing the emerging narratives of ageing in the Victorian period. Thus, her study has a political agenda, and although some of her final comments on "the future of the midlife" seem more applicable to old age than to middle age (199), her analysis provides fresh insights into the cultural construction of identity. Taking inspiration from the way in which feminism has problematised gender, Heath suggests a new approach to age and ageing, one which exposes the "deterministic paradigms we use to limit our aging selves" (202).

Heath uses a range of sources to explore the nature of midlife in Victorian Britain. Her analysis of textual sources is supported by visual sources, including advertisements and cartoons that enrich her depiction of the cultural context. She takes care to address specific themes within a broad chronology and to link the emergence of midlife to key changes in social and economic circumstances. As a historian, I question some of the broad claims about the impact of the industrial revolution on old age and think the reference to the "establishment of pension and retirement age in the late nineteenth century" could be misleading (12). Heath's discussion of old age is, of necessity, somewhat condensed and at times it is not clear whether she is writing about the working or middle classes; however, her main argument—that there was increasing anxiety about midlife—is convincing.

One of the particular merits of Heath's study is the attention she pays to gender. As she demonstrates, women and men were aged into midlife at different chronological points, with women depicted as middle aged in their thirties and forties and men some ten years later. Through her study of Victorian novels, Heath reveals the cultural assumptions regarding the female body and argues that post-menopausal women were generally regarded as old. Heath suggests that all Victorian women were defined with reference to motherhood and that the principal role of spinsters was as "desexualised servants to their families and community" (90). Heath critiques this familiar account of the "old maid" in her discussion of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) (91), providing an excellent example of how novels not only expressed and reinforced social...