The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Ottaway's study of old age in eighteenth-century England builds on Thane's work, as well as others', which, over recent decades, has discussed aging from the perspective of social, cultural, economic, and demographic history.¹ By focusing on experiences, institutions and expectations in one particular time and place, Ottaway trades the possibilities of a broad chronological sweep or cross-cultural approach for a detailed analysis.

Central to the book is an early modern ideal of independence and autonomy: Older people supported themselves and their families as long as they were able. This pattern took shape within communities bound together by reciprocal obligations. Whether heading their own households or not, the elderly engaged with, and were assisted when necessary by, kin, peers, and parish. Since social and economic situation fundamentally determined the extent to which self-sufficiency could be realized, and late-century economic problems made it increasingly difficult for the laboring poor to maintain either their relations or themselves in old age, three of the seven chapters investigate the poor law.

Other chapters discuss definitions of old age (the extent to which infirmity, behavior, appearance, or calendar age identified this stage of life); expectations that the elderly should continue to work in ways appropriate to social position and gender; the capacity of older people to live independently; and the role of kin in supporting them. What emerges is a fluid and diverse picture in which continuities were significant. Changes across the century included greater reliance on poor relief, deteriorating standards of living, the growing significance of numerical age—usually sixty and older—in defining the elderly, and the effects of economic hardship and bureaucratic elaboration in making contemporaries aware of the aged as a dependent group on the margins of society. But this is no teleological study, since later developments—such as age retirement—are shown to have emerged only sporadically and tentatively.

Ottaway's approach has important benefits. First, she can challenge historical generalizations through close attention to social complexities. The myth of a premodern "golden age of aging" cannot describe a society fractured by gender and social differences. Second, by capturing a past social structure, she can engage modern preoccupations on her own terms. Today's concerns about aging do not overdetermine her agenda, since she shows, for example, that the idea of old age as a time of dependence is not universal. Third, her historical gaze can extend our knowledge of the society in which the aged lived their lives and cut across research boundaries, whether of family history, demographic reconstruction, or literary representation. Adapting Scott's statement on gender, Ottaway claims that aging is a "useful category of historical analysis" (277).² She has interesting things to say about the eighteenth- century poor-relief system, extended family relationships, and sexual difference.

At the heart of the book are three quantitative parish studies, which apply the methods of historical demography to a variety of local censuses, administrative records, wills, etc. Ottaway supplements them with qualitative sources, used predominantly to establish the discourses that shaped attitudes to old age. She aims to flesh out our understanding of aging, but her arrangement and interpretation of materials is conventional. From an interdisciplinary perspective, her work opens, but also leaves to one side, questions about subjectivity and the body that closer reading of texts and analysis of social dynamics would illuminate.