The Long History of Old Age

Edited by:
  • Pat Thane
Thames & Hudson/Oxford University Press: 2005. 320 pp. £25/$49.95 0892368349, 0500251266 | ISBN: 0-892-36834-9

Even when advanced in years, Lady Sarah Cowper (1644–1720) was still a keen observer, especially of other women. After meeting with “Lady W.” she confided to her diary that W. had “rent her face with painting. She is at least as old as I am and hugely infirm yet affects the follys and aires of youth, displayes her breasts and ears, adorns both with sparkling gems while her eies look dead, skin rivell'd, cheeks sunk, shaking head, trembling hands.” Lady Sarah strongly felt that one should act one's age. She herself was perhaps ‘elderly’, but definitely not ‘old’. She admitted to being old only when she was in her mid-sixties, and then it was related to diminishing eyesight and the loss of her faculties for reading and writing, rather than to her age as such.

Lady Sarah's observations are discussed in The Long History of Old Age, a delightfully written and illustrated monograph edited by Pat Thane, who has herself a long history of writing on old age. Defining ‘old’ in terms of infirmities and physical weakness, as Lady Sarah did, turns old age into a category with diffuse boundaries — certainly more diffuse than they are today, when in many Western countries 65 is the age of mandatory retirement. For most of the history of old age, pensions or annuities never coincided with retirement from work, and most people laboured as long as their health permitted.

The team of historians headed by Thane sets the record straight on many popular conceptions of old age. It is not true that before the twentieth century hardly anyone reached old age. Life expectancy was considerably lower, but this was due to high infant and child mortality rates. Those who reached adulthood had a good chance of living into their sixties. It is equally untrue that older people are less respected today than they used to be, or that it was common for children to welcome their ageing, sickly parents into their own household.

The downward path: a seventeenth-century view of a man's progression through life. Credit: MUSEUM KURHAUS KLEVE

In her introductory chapter, Thane provides evidence that the belief that the elderly were treated with more respect in the past is itself very old. As for two or three generations living together in one happy household, demographic statistics tell a grimmer tale. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, a ten-year-old would have only a 50% chance of having any of his grandparents alive. And if you lived to be 60 in the eighteenth century, you had only a one-in-three chance of having at least one surviving child. Given the average age of marriage and the infant mortality rate in the nineteenth century, a three-generation family was probably rarer than a four-generation family today. When parents lived with the family of their children, it was often for reasons of need and poverty. Then, as today, the elderly liked to keep their independence as long as was reasonably possible.

What this book does superbly is the wedding of demographic information, scarce as this often is, to evidence taken from the visual arts, literature, philosophy and personal documents such as letters and diaries. Some of the finest parts of the story are in the illustrations. The captions are perceptive, brief essays in themselves, that re obviously written by an (unspecified) author with an eye trained in the history of art.

Considering the span — from antiquity to the twentieth century — and the diversity of sources, it is only natural that the overall image of old age is one of variety. In the fourteenth century, when Dante compared the final stage of life with a ship gradually lowering sail before entering harbour — an image of tranquillity and acceptance — miniaturists painted old people to symbolize vices such as pride, sloth and avarice, reserving elegant maidens for the virtues of mercy and charity. Old and ugly were often felt to be natural companions, as were young and beautiful. What strikes me in the various depictions of old age, both literary and visual, is the prevalence of mockery and hostility. The old were sometimes viewed as experienced and wise, offering advice superior to the “beardless counsel” of the young, but more often as distrustful, garrulous, obscene (if impotent) and miserly, sometimes all at once.

For a long time most old people were poor as well. In particular, day labourers and piece-workers earned less and less as their strength diminished. Often they were dealt the more menial jobs. There was no such thing as official demotion; nature took care of that by declining physical power. Under these conditions it makes sense that the grandparent spoiling the child only appears at the end of the seventeenth century, and then only in the leisured classes.

In this long history of old age the second half of the twentieth century can be seen to bring several paradoxes. Today there are many professions where the physical reasons for retirement have disappeared, yet retirement is still mandatory. ‘Old’ bodies are healthier and better conserved than ever — a 70-year-old looks perhaps like someone aged 60 at the beginning of the twentieth century — yet many older people seek cosmetic surgery to look younger or engage in activities associated with youth. It is still as if something isn't quite right about being old and acting your age. Perhaps this resistance to ageing shows the tenacity of age-old stereotypes equating ‘old’ with ‘obsolete’ and ‘infirm’. What's worse, these stereotypes may also reflect, as Lady Sarah Cowper's comments on Lady W. testify, the opinions of those who are old themselves — well, elderly.