On her book Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain
Cover Interview of January 12, 2010
In a nutshell
In an 1852 Punch cartoon, a middle-aged man looks in a mirror and says, “Good gracious! Is it possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes, by Jupiter, it’s a grey hair in my favourite whisker!” Jokes like this might be routine to us, but in Victorian England they represented a new way of thinking about age.
Middle age had been considered the prime of life since Aristotle, an idea evident in “steps of life” drawings that were popular from the medieval era into the nineteenth century. They feature a fifty-year-old man—or less commonly a woman—who stands proudly on the top of an arched set of steps depicting the decades of life from ten to ninety. In the eighteenth century, concern about aging remained on the elderly. Longevity texts, describing elaborate techniques and rituals for living into a “green” or healthy old age, became the rage.
Though scholars usually discuss midlife anxiety as a product of the twentieth century, I argue that age anxiety was expanded in Victorian Britain to include the middle of the life course. The word “midlife” itself first appeared in an English dictionary in 1895 to designate this developing idea. In Aging By The Book, I demonstrate that concern about midlife became common during the Victorian era, that we inherited our obsession with being “over the hill” from the nineteenth century.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
In an 1852 Punch cartoon, a middle-aged man looks in a mirror and says, “Good gracious! Is it possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes, by Jupiter, it’s a grey hair in my favourite whisker!” Jokes like this might be routine to us, but in Victorian England they represented a new way of thinking about age.
Middle age had been considered the prime of life since Aristotle, an idea evident in “steps of life” drawings that were popular from the medieval era into the nineteenth century. They feature a fifty-year-old man—or less commonly a woman—who stands proudly on the top of an arched set of steps depicting the decades of life from ten to ninety. In the eighteenth century, concern about aging remained on the elderly. Longevity texts, describing elaborate techniques and rituals for living into a “green” or healthy old age, became the rage.
Though scholars usually discuss midlife anxiety as a product of the twentieth century, I argue that age anxiety was expanded in Victorian Britain to include the middle of the life course. The word “midlife” itself first appeared in an English dictionary in 1895 to designate this developing idea. In Aging By The Book, I demonstrate that concern about midlife became common during the Victorian era, that we inherited our obsession with being “over the hill” from the nineteenth century.