ABSTRACT
Part of the experience of growing old is the contemplation of one’s own mortality and deciding how to dispose of one’s worldly goods. For some this may mean the destruction of personal items—think of Miss Matty in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1852), ceremoniously burning family letters because “[n]o one will care for them when I am gone.” 1 For others, it may be an exercise of power over the living. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), the aging Peter Featherstone takes malicious delight from the way in which his relatives vie with each other to prove their entitlement to receive his money, whereas in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1875–76), the cynical Lopez notes that it is “a great pleasure to an old man [to leave his money to hospitals rather than kin] when his relatives have been disgusted with him for being old and loving his money.” 2 For the majority, though, it is the making of provision for one’s loved ones that is a priority when old age prompts them to face the prospect of their own death.
