“Exhausting the Powers of Life”

During the nineteenth century old age as a distinct phase of life with a sizable length seized public attention on an unprecedented scale, provoking new legislation as well as literary and scientific publications. As Karen Chase states, “the decline of mortality rates in childhood and in youth swelled the numbers at the other end” and even though the very young were still more numerous, ¹ Boyer and Schmidle emphasize that “Victorian Britain had a large elderly population. 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, or 4.7 per cent of the population, and 800,000 aged 70 and over.” ² Discussions of numbers aside, there was a new quality of systematic thinking about old age, a new emphasis in medicine, social hygiene, and the fledgling science of sociology on statistical approaches, and on comprehensive measures from increasingly centralized medical and political institutions. Many of the “survivors” into old age eventually became unable to sustain themselves by their own labor, requiring help from the social body, ³ and the question of nineteenth-century old age is, therefore, a political question. According to Chase, whereas old age might be defined by either “looks, experience, feeling, or by the inability to bear arms or to work,” “not surprisingly, it [was] the last—the capacity for work—which lent increasing value to the chronological definition of old age” during the nineteenth century. ⁴ Indeed, conceptions of the aging process and the “invention of retirement” were closely linked with questions of individual achievement; the legal and cultural debate about “deserving” and “undeserving” poor generated by the 1834 New Poor Law and the workhouse system continued in the discussion about legal provision for the aged and was arguably still present in the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. ⁵ Observations about aging, in a capitalist, middle-class, success-oriented framework, were automatically facing a dilemma, and it was during the Victorian period, whose “primary virtues [of] independence, health, success required constant control over one’s body and physical energies,” that this came to a head for the first time: “The decaying body in old age, a constant reminder of the limits of self-control, came to signify precisely what bourgeois culture hoped to avoid: dependence, disease, failure, and [even] sin.” ⁶