ABSTRACT

Age is a category which should be placed alongside and occasionally perhaps above race, region, religion, gender and class when attempting to describe and explain the ways in which British people lived and the ways in which British society developed during the course of the twentieth century. The study of the subject must constitute a reasonably significant advance in our understanding of a fundamental but easily overlooked aspect of modern British economic, social and cultural history. Middle age was a period of decline and convergence: these were the years, it was believed, during which the differences of early adulthood gave way, in the face of decay and decline, to the dispiriting homogeneity of early and late middle age. It has been shown that such views are exceptionally misleading; middle age, it has been stressed, was a period of change but not necessarily of decline, a period of divergence much more than of convergence.