ABSTRACT
Of all Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope may have been the most attentive to issues of age. His emphasis on “the necessity of progression in character, – of marking the changes in men and women which would naturally be produced by the lapse of years” ( Autobiography ch. 17) reveals an interest not merely in old age itself but aging as a process. Instead of focusing on the elderly pensioners of Hiram’s Hospital, The Warden centers around Septimus Harding wondering in his fifties whether he and his sinecure are outmoded. Miss Mackenzie ’s questionable marriageability intrigued Trollope, as a thirtyish spinster considered too old to be wooed – until she inherits money. Trollope especially was drawn to liminal moments that test whether youthfulness can be sustained. Trollope penned few fictional words about actual agedness, instead depicting characters’ relational challenges as marriageability and profession decline and the young become competitors. Writing about his own potential obsolescence in letters and his autobiography, he posited decline only to qualify or even deny the possibility. Trollope’s works are sensitive to aging as an aspect of lived experience, reflecting and questioning how culture defines age.
