Introduction

This essay collection develops new perspectives on evolving constructions of old age in British literary, legal, scientific, and periodical cultures during the second half of the nineteenth century. ¹ Compared to today’s demographics, the percentage of older people among the population was less pronounced during the nineteenth century: George R. Boyer and Timothy P. Schmidle note that in “1861, there were 932,000 persons aged 65 and over in England and Wales, representing 4.6 per cent of the population. By 1891 there were nearly 1.4 million persons aged 65 and over in England and Wales, or 4.7 per cent of the population.” ² However, the rapidly expanding market for print publications, social reform movements that laid the groundwork for the slowly emerging welfare state, and the growth of new scientific fields of inquiry focused an unprecedented level of cultural attention on the experience of aging and old age. Statistical science started to conceive of the aged as a group, representing old age as a distinct phase of life, reformers inquired into the living conditions of aged people, inheritance law became a thriving field of jurisprudence, and gerontology gradually developed into a medical discipline. ³ Literary writers engaged ambivalently with these debates: they appropriated and transformed newly emerging configurations of old age by including vivid portrayals of old age in a wide spectrum of genres and literary forms, ranging from the realist and naturalist novel to New Woman fiction, domestic drama, and Gothic narratives.