Helen Yallop - Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England

First published 2013 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Taylor & Francis 2013
Helen Yallop 2013

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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Yallop, Helen.
Age and identity in eighteenth-century England. (The body, gender and
culture)
1. Aging England History 18th century. 2. Aging Social aspects
England History 18th century. 3. Older people England History 18th
century. 4. Identity (Psychology) in old age England History 18th century.
I. Title II. Series
305.26094209033-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-401-6 (hbk)
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

My thanks go to Laura Gowing, Lynn Botelho, Colin Jones, Naomi Tadmor, Toni Weller, Tim Reinke-Williams, Eleanor Hooker, Matthew McCormack, Daire Carr, Ruth Ireland, Henry Yallop, Stephina Clarke, Richard Yallop, Gwyneth Yallop and my anonymous reviewers.

In November 2010, I was asked to speak at a conference organized by the Royal Society of Medicine entitled Our Changing Expectations of Life: What do we Really Want? The aims of the conference were to question why we wish for longer, healthier lives and what exactly aging means in our current culture. Most of the speakers came from a scientific background, but along with a few scholars and commentators from the media and humanities, I was able to give something of an alternative perspective. Still, I was the only one at the conference who was looking to the past in order to better understand our notions of aging in the present. Despite any preconceptions I may have had about this, the response I received was overwhelmingly receptive and positive. Listeners were keen to concede that the past can give us a keen sense of what is timeless about human endeavours to control and ameliorate the aging process. Moreover and this is the surprising part some of my findings about eighteenth-century ideas actually reflect what is current in aging research. Indeed it is often the case that those from a non-academic (or simply non-historical) background who read or listen to my work are keen to tell me how surprisingly modern some of the eighteenth-century views on aging appear to them, and how relevant they appear today.

Readers will probably find that some of the views from the past that this book shares will sometimes feel uncannily close to what we read about aging in our society. Now, as in the eighteenth century, we live in a society where aging is vigorously researched, discussed and represented in politics, science and the media. Anti-aging is big business, whether in medical research, medical aesthetics, cosmetics, dietetics or any of the various lifestyle strategies that we may choose to pursue. Whereas the specifics of each of these is of course unique to twenty-first-century global society, there is nothing new about our fascination with aging, nor about the apparently very deep human need to try to stop it, delay, or even reverse it. As David Boyd-Haycock has shown in his Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer (2008), the desire to extend healthy, human life has been with us since the Ancients.

In this context, perhaps the most striking idea that comes out of this study and certainly the idea that feels most relevant to our current thinking about the management of aging is the degree to which eighteenth-century people imagined that aging could be a matter of personal choice. Eighteenth-century writers thought that managing aging was largely a matter of what we might now refer to as positive mental attitude: they united in their faith in mind-over-matter and in their insistence that aging could be controlled through right thinking and sociable interaction. The sensational title of Tom Kirkwoods 1999 bestseller, Time of Our Lives: Why Ageing is Neither Inevitable Nor Necessary might suggest that there is something progressive, even futuristic, about the idea of choosing how our bodies age. But, as this book demonstrates, it is not only the current medical establishment that has taught us that aging can be a matter of choice rather than destiny.

Yet having noted how some of the ideas about aging in this book may feel relevant or modern, it is now attendant upon me to point out that however accessible these views might be, there is nothing ahistorical about the idea of aging. Let me explain. As a universal aspect of humanity, aging seems to be something very natural, almost ahistorical: all people at all times have experienced aging. Yet just as historians have come to realize that past societies could have very different concepts of apparently very natural and universal things concepts of the body and of the self, for example this study starts from the premise that there is nothing constant about aging. Although aging is a natural fundamental fact about human experience, different societies understand it in different ways and past societies have understood it and written about it in ways that are uniquely their own. The more we understand this, the more we can look critically and deeply about our own understandings and assumptions on the subject. This book looks at how one past society England in the eighteenth century understood aging, and explains how eighteenth-century people made sense of their aging processes.