ABSTRACT
This book is about the experience of very old age in England today. It is about people who were born in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century and are the survivors of their generation. In future, there are likely to be more survivors from subsequent cohorts. We cannot say with any certainty if life after 90 will be the same or different for them, if only because future survivors will have come from a different generational and social background. The present book, however, is an attempt to offer the beginnings-a bench mark, perhaps-for a better understanding of very old age, and for further research.
