Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (review)

Pat Thane is not the first historian to challenge the narrative of decline in the history of old age, but she is certainly the most thorough. Though stronger on modern than pre-modern England, her book is the most comprehensive national history of old age yet to appear. It surveys a considerable secondary literature on the aged and offers a critical look at works ranging from historical demography and economic history to cultural history, social gerontology, and the history of the welfare state. In returning to her own original contributions on the welfare state, including a 1970 Ph.D. thesis on old age pensions in the United Kingdom, 1878–1925, and providing a sensible reading of contemporary social scientific data, she goes beyond the basic requirements of a survey.

At the most general level, Thane puts to rest the master narrative of decline. In setting forth the ancient and medieval high cultural backgrounds to early modern English representations of old age, she reveals the common rhetorical tendency in virtually every period to speak in terms of decline and, at the same time, the diverse and even conflicting images that have existed. Like others before her, Thane points out the wide range of aged characters from Chaucer to Shakespeare. She provides hints of changing medical views of post-menopausal women but opts for continuity from ancient and medieval to early modern representations—”green” old age has always had potential, decrepitude has been with us too. She contrasts such continuity with shifts observed by historians of France (including myself) in the eighteenth century. But early modern England is one area about which we will know more after the publication of some current work in progress.

More detailed than the sections on representations but still constructed mainly from secondary sources, chapters on material life, work and welfare, and family life in premodern England depict what Olwen Hufton has described as an “economy of makeshifts.” Thane demonstrates that functional definitions of old age were most important. Most of the aged were poor and labored as long as possible. Communities provided some assistance, but Thane’s early modern elders led “active lives, giving to their communities as well as receiving. There is no obvious sign that they were despised or degraded because they were old, any more than were poor people of any age” (p. 118). In describing early modern family life, she denies any social obligation to house elderly relatives but does report on cases of coresidence at the very end of life, modest support of aged parents, and some poor relief. In early modern and modern periods, she demonstrates a fairly consistent desire to maintain both independent residences and contact with nearby kin. Her discussion of the Old Poor Law concerns a small but variable communal supplement to other sources of income; income packaging is nothing new. In the debate over the extent of Poor Law support, she agrees with Thomas Sokoll that David Thomson went too far in claiming falling state support for the aged since the early nineteenth century. She sensibly contrasts the certainty of welfare-state support with earlier variation and expresses skepticism over the literature that purports to find structured dependency in the position of the aged or to distinguish neatly between those who depend upon family resources and those who depend upon state support.

Thane’s own contribution is greatest in the modern period, tracing the invention of the old-age pensioner, the experience of greater longevity, and the positive contributions of the welfare state. As in her critique of Thomson, she engages the literature by debating with some of the more influential scholars in the field. For example, while she accepts some of the emphasis Peter Laslett placed on twentieth-century demographic change, she finds that old age became viewed as a social problem well before the demographic aging of the English population. She criticizes John Macnicol’s “political economy” approach to the development of the welfare state...