At the age of seventy-nine, the grandmother of York lawyer Joseph Munby, Jane Pontey, gave a sorry account of herself to her grandson:
as to myself, the last two years have near wore me out. My active powers have departed and I now confess that I am an old woman, because I feel so.Footnote 1
Pontey would live for another ten years, dying aged eighty-nine, but already by July 1829 she self-identified as an “old woman, because I feel so.” Pontey's identification as an “old woman” accrued from her embodied experiences of body and mind. This study looks back over the long century before Pontey's self-declaration to explore the lived experiences of the older body: the embodiment of old age. It examines how older men and women felt, how they spoke about their bodies and minds, and the relationship of these embodied experiences to their understandings of their life-stage. In so doing, it approaches old age from the perspective of the older person themselves rather than as a normative category. There are several accounts of how old age was seen in the eighteenth century.Footnote 2 Experiences of old age were likely framed to an extent by social prescription,Footnote 3 although some historians have insisted on old people's refusal of wider expectations.Footnote 4 Existing work on aging in eighteenth-century Britain focuses on the expectations attendant upon the old and the ways that they could be cared for, such as within the household, community, or institutional support. Studies of the history of old age have thus examined important practical questions of work, resources, support, care, and family formation.Footnote 5 Our approach is a complementary but distinct one, focusing on the words and experiences of older people themselves. How did it feel to be old in eighteenth-century Britain?
To address this question, we use letters written by older people. The article draws on a corpus of over 5,000 letters written between 1680 and 1820 from a range of religious denominations and mostly from a broadly defined “middling sort,” with a roughly equal number written by men and women. These letters were selected for a project on the body, as part of which over 3,000 were transcribed and entered into a bespoke and fully searchable database that records metadata about the letters and their authors.Footnote 6 This corpus affords a number of opportunities to explore the experiences of old age amongst those of middling rank and above. It does, however, restrict consideration of the experiences of those of lower social status. First, it provides a large body of material that can be identified as written by older people themselves.Footnote 7 Second, rather than being steered to material where aging is the explicit focus, we are able to examine older people's descriptions of their embodied experiences without imposing a lens of “old age” upon them. This allows us to see the specific contexts in which older people identify as old, if at all. Third, the nature of our corpus means that in many cases we are also able to follow an individual as they age, sometimes over several decades. This enables a better appreciation of fluctuations in bodily health, uneven patterns in experiences of aging, and the rhetorical deployment of aging as a theme in letters. Fourth, the size of the corpus means that we are able to balance this depth with range, discussing a number of examples in detail within a broader corpus of material. This extends previous scholarship based upon (often single) case studies of old age.Footnote 8 Finally, the chronological extent of the corpus affords consideration of change over time.
Noting Susannah Ottaway's finding in Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England that in the eighteenth century, sixty was commonly seen as the start of old age, we have chosen to focus on letter writers we consider to be aged sixty and over.Footnote 9 As Devoney Looser has noted of the field, “it has proven difficult to determine what to count as old, whether considered a matter of chronological age, bodily decay, or other factors.”Footnote 10 Where Ottaway suggested sixty, Ella Sbaraini suggests instead fifty.Footnote 11 The variability in the age at which historians start their account of old age reflects that past categories of old age were not stable and that the criteria for defining old age have changed over time. Nonetheless, focusing on writers from the age of sixty identifies a group of people who we might reasonably expect to reflect on their own aging and enables us to consider if and how they did this. Out of a total number of 373 letter writers in the database, 47 (12.5 percent) are known to have been aged sixty or above when they produced the letters in the database (twenty women and twenty-seven men). In this article, we discuss the experiences of twenty-two of these: eleven women, and eleven men, aged between sixty and eight-nine.Footnote 12 Their letters have been selected to cover the entire chronological span of the long eighteenth century, with the earliest being written in 1684 and the latest in 1820. The letter writers are unevenly spread throughout the period, with three prior to 1700, three from 1700–35 and the remaining sixteen writing after 1750, five of whom were writing after 1800 (a pattern that will be addressed further below).
Our study engages critically with how historians and those in other fields have discussed past and present experiences of old age. A ground-breaking work in this area was Peter Laslett's A Fresh Map of Life, which argued for the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a “third age”: a period of activity following retirement but prior to the onset of a dependent “fourth age” characterized by decline and ill-health.Footnote 13 For Laslett, the third age was defined by the individual, “a point personally chosen—rather than a marker fixed in the calendar, biological, or social age,” but it was also only possible in societies that structurally and socially facilitated those with “the disposition, the freedom, and the means” to enjoy this life-stage.Footnote 14 Despite the primacy of individual self-identification in his definition of the third age, Laslett relied primarily on demographic data rather than qualitative sources or ego-documents. His work has not been widely used by historians and principal aspects of his argument are countered by work on the early modern period, especially that which uses qualitative material. Carvallo sees a seventeenth-century understanding of old age as decrepitude replaced by a more positive eighteenth-century vision that associated old age with longevity, for example.Footnote 15 Ottaway countered Laslett's argument for the modern invention of the third and fourth age with evidence of a prevailing idea of “green” (active) and “decrepit” old age in the eighteenth century.Footnote 16
Regardless of its reception by historians, Laslett's division of later life into a “third age” and “fourth age” is foundational for the influential work of the social gerontologists Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs.Footnote 17 Gilleard and Higgs argue that from the 1960s the third age came to be defined not just as active but by practices of self-care and physical management—such as fashion, exercise, and medical interventions—that focus on eradicating traditional markers of old age as things “to be sloughed off to reveal the valued ‘ageless’ self within.” The effect was to render “the ageing body more distinctly embodied.”Footnote 18 In this vision, the third-age body might be managed in such a way as to avoid becoming old.Footnote 19 The overriding objective of these practices is to disavow the fourth age: the site of abject old age, horror, and decay from which there is “little chance of return and restitution of the embodied self that existed before the threshold was crossed.”Footnote 20 It is worth noting that Gilleard and Higgs do not examine the experience of old age from the perspective of the old but instead approach the third and fourth ages as “contested cultural spaces.”Footnote 21 Work on the body and aging in the modern world that draws on the words of older people offers a significantly different account, with the older body acquiring shifting meanings or at times receding entirely from view in older people's understanding of their life-stage.Footnote 22
Evidently, the “what” and the “when” of old age has varied, while the approach taken to explore these questions yields distinct answers. Old age is and has been experienced as both an embodied and a social category, as well as being subject to cultural construction. In the eighteenth century, old age as a life-stage was fluid and flexible. It was not marked by religious or social rituals as was childbirth by churching or youth by apprenticeship. Nor was it a clearly defined moment of biological transition, such as that of menarche or the transition from maid to mother. Some have argued that menopause was widely regarded as the start of old age for women, particularly in the seventeenth century.Footnote 23 There is some evidence that this was the case in eighteenth-century France.Footnote 24 Yet this is not as clear for eighteenth-century Britain.Footnote 25 Indeed, the relationship between the physical body and old age is elusive. As archaeologists have demonstrated, “biological age”—let alone the social identity of old age—does not track “chronological age.”Footnote 26 Patterns and rates of human physical decline have themselves also changed over time.Footnote 27 Aging is a life-long process and symptoms of old age were felt long before the age of sixty. An alternative study might usefully consider the ways in which “age” was deployed by men and women across their life-course. But, as explained above, this article takes a different approach, tracking not the language of old age but asking what language older persons used to describe their experiences.
Focusing on the perspectives of older people themselves, we show that old age was experienced as highly variable and that there was a range of criteria upon which older people judged the presence of old age. There was also a notable gap between chronological age and “felt age.” Indeed, although there were commonalities in how older people thought about and experienced old age, some older people chose not to identify as socially, chronologically, or biologically old. What constituted old age for an individual was subject to an ongoing process of recalibration. Central to that process was the corporeality of the aging body situated in the context of a range of social factors. Illness, changing relationships with younger family members, and the deaths of friends and spouses could all be watersheds in the way that an individual's later years were experienced. Sociological studies of older people in modern settings have highlighted the constantly shifting nature of older people's embodiment, given that old age, and particularly aging “well,” is defined in relation to others.Footnote 28 We should note that social dynamics were amongst the reasons people might choose to ignore or reject self-identification as old in their letters. Older writers sometimes sought to elicit sympathy from friends and family or to petition for care and company.Footnote 29 Just as often, they will also have wanted to avoid generating unnecessary anguish amongst their loved ones. That the experiences of old age in this study were communicated in familiar letters—those sent to family and friends—undoubtedly shaped their reporting in ways that are not always accessible to the historian.Footnote 30
The article begins by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people and their understanding of the relationship between these experiences and their later years. Written by those who retained the physical, mental, and emotional resources required to produce letters, our sample perhaps over-represents those who were aging well, yet it also shows that these writers shared common experiences of the aging body, from impaired mobility to low mood and mental decline. Significantly, they did not necessarily signify a descent into the frailties and indignity of a discernible “fourth age” nor frame these experiences in the “negative iconography steeped in a language of loss, erosion, lack, decline.”Footnote 31 Familiar letters tell a story that is significantly different to that garnered from other sources, such as suicide letters.Footnote 32 Many older people spoke about this later stage of life in positive terms regardless of decline, some did not attribute changes to their life-stage, and a significant minority acknowledged their life-stage without recording any form of decline. It is striking, nonetheless, that only one of the letter writers wrote neither about decline nor about old age. Regardless of their varied embodied experiences, older people generally shared an understanding that they occupied a discrete stage of life and that it could threaten health and happiness. Old age was a fluctuating state that encompassed activity and agency, decline and dependency, in varying degrees. Letter-writers adjusted their expectations of old age in response to embodied, relational, and emotional factors; they tended not to disavow old age but to accommodate and even embrace it. As such, we do not find evidence of a clearly demarcated or recognized boundary between the third and fourth age, or between the categories of green and decrepit old age. This article thus offers a revision to an approach to old age that carves it into definable stages. Our references to “older people,” rather than “old people,” indicates this wariness of imposing discrete stages onto the later life-course.
The article then turns to the responses of older people to this life-stage. They were active in making choices that improved their own day-to-day lives. Regimen—the proper maintenance of a healthful lifestyle through diet and nutrition, sleep, environment, routine, and exercise—played a particularly important part in keeping old bodies healthy. George Cheyne, a proponent of regimen, noted that for older people it could, “preserve their Health and Freedom of Spirits more entire and to a longer Date.”Footnote 33 Older people's manipulation of regimen, alongside other strategies, counters the historical claims made by Gilleard and Higgs (pace Laslett) and raises questions about the distinctiveness of the plastic body at the heart of their late-modern third age.Footnote 34 Certainly, the lack of medicalization of the older body in the eighteenth century contrasts with the prominence of late-twentieth-century medical responses discussed by Gilleard and Higgs. Regimen drew on medical knowledge but its application did not constitute a “medicalization” of aging: it did not involve a professional practitioner of medicine or approach aging as a medical problem in need of preventive treatment.Footnote 35 Letter-writers sometimes engaged with the medical profession in the treatment of illness. This was marginally more common amongst the wealthier letter writers in our corpus, but recourse to medical assistance rarely featured amongst older people's strategies to remain strong, alert, and happy: eating and sleeping well, travel, social contact, good humor, grandparenting, work, and faith. A self-consciously active, engaged, and embodied old age is not exclusive to late modernity.
These findings apply to the whole period from which these letters are drawn. Throughout, we identify major continuities in the experience of aging. Nevertheless, there are indications of some changes that need to be placed in the context of broader shifts in epistolary culture. Just as survival rates for familiar letters rise during the eighteenth century, so does this sample feature a preponderance of letters written between 1750 and 1820. Later letters tend to be more fulsome on personal matters, while their authors feature growing proportions of middling-rank and women writers. All of these changes may have affected the experiences and reports of older people. Transformations in the postal system, paper, literacy, and transport that fueled the expansion in letter writing facilitated greater social contact, which could generate more positive experiences for the old.Footnote 36 The huge growth in circulation of familiar letters in which people were open and informal—especially in letters by women—perhaps itself generated a caring culture in which older people might find affirmation, solace, and fellow-feeling. Together, these factors may have generated a growing positivity in letters by the old. There is not sufficient compelling evidence, however, for firm conclusions about change over time. The fewer and less-detailed letters prevent assured claims about the earlier period, while there remain many negative experiences scattered amongst the positive in later eighteenth-century letters.
What does emerge clearly from this study is the variability in older people's concepts and experiences of aging, together with their self-directed and proactive attempts to continue to live well. This underscores the value of historians—and those working on aging in other disciplines—putting aside cultural studies of widely circulating motifs of old people or social studies of structural responses to aging. If we want to better understand, account for, and meet the challenges of the lives of older people, listening to their voices is invaluable.
Embodied Experiences of Old Age
Older people were united in their recognition of old age as an identifiable stage in the life-course and many associated this especially with physical decline. A significant proportion of letter writers did not, however, explicitly identify old age as the cause of their problems. In this way, they reinforce Ottaway and Tague's findings from eighteenth-century personal narratives, in which the old did not “dwell on age as the sole cause for their distress.”Footnote 37 Nor do letters show that old age was itself seen as an illness, suggesting that these letter writers were able to disentangle illness and old age more easily than others.Footnote 38 Our letters underscore that older people were less concerned with physical markers of age than they were with the way they felt.Footnote 39 They focus almost exclusively on the impacts of old age on the interior body, rather than external markers such as hair or skin. In the rare case where there was concern about appearance, this was on the part of men, a finding that contrasts with previous studies that suggest such concerns would be a greater burden for women.Footnote 40 The lack of evidence of women commenting on their appearance in the context of aging perhaps reflects an epistolary context of family and friends in which such anxieties were allayed, that it was simply too difficult to admit to one's aging appearance as a woman, or that this was not in fact a major concern for women. Of the physical experiences of older people, historians have noted mobility and physical weakness as the challenges most commonly reported by the old.Footnote 41 In our letters, restricted physical mobility was common but there was a range of felt physical experiences of the older body.
Several letter writers in their sixties experienced old age as a progressive decline that affected multiple functions of the body, including sight, strength, mobility, and overall capacity. Writing from London to his brother in 1723, 62-year-old Job Marple (occupied in “business”) tied aging to overall physical incapacity, impaired sight, and a perceived proximity to death. Importantly, Marple's reflection on his own decline is framed by a discussion about his nephew's capacity for work, indicating that his sense of himself as old was compounded by his impression of those who were younger. He wrote,
did desire to know wt he is most inclined
to wt trade or business I am now
grown old and very much broke and in all [damaged]
probabily cannot live long my sight is exceeding
weak and I should be very glad to hear if Job
has any inclination to any particular trade eitherFootnote 42
Marple's body was a central agent in his understanding of himself as old. His impaired sight, strength, and mobility marked him as an old man and, to Marple, this suggested that he was not long for this world. Ten years on, Marple was still alive but felt much worse; the change in his handwriting is clear material evidence of his physical decline. “I am in the Land of ye Living but in a very weak condition,” he wrote in one of his final surviving letters, “so weak yt I cannot rise out of my chair without help.”Footnote 43 Marple had evidently experienced the physical decline of aging, but that decline had not happened as quickly as he had anticipated, nor did it restrict him in the ways he had foreseen in 1723. Aging was an uneven process that older people themselves were not always able to predict.
Like Marple, Giles Earle, a Yorkshire gentleman and owner of Beningbrough Hall, experienced old age as an all-encompassing physical decline. Aged 65 in 1806, he wrote:
My disorders are non-descript, and even by myself undescribable, all I know and can tell is I perceive myself unwell; and finally believe that Gout is in alliance with old age to torment me—Patience and flannel are the only rational panaceas hitherto devised for the former—I fear I must have recourse also to Patience, as in turning over all the Dispensories I can discover no other plaster against longevity and its satellites.Footnote 44
He clearly distinguishes between illness and old age, although it is their “alliance” that causes suffering. The language of his letter implies a grudging reconciliation of these corporeal changes with his sense of self. Though writing over 100 years apart, both Marple's use of the word “probably” in speculating about his likely demise and Earle's declaration “all I know,” suggest a degree of helplessness in the face of the process of aging, perhaps patterned by enduring beliefs in the intervention of divine providence in matters of the body.Footnote 45
By the following week, Giles Earle had not improved: “my health hangs, like Mahomet's coffin, between heaven and earth,” he wrote. His vivid description of his burden of poor health as “my bundle of infirmities on my back” drew on a long-standing lexicon referring to the weakness of the old body.Footnote 46 Terms such as “weakness,” “decay,” “feeble,” “frail,” and “infirmity” convey the sense of overall physical decline associated with old age. Ottaway has found not only that loss of physical strength was more prominent in representations of old men but that men themselves were more likely to frame their old age in this way, whilst women were more likely to complain of specific ailments.Footnote 47 Our large corpus of letters allows us to test these conclusions against suggestive quantitative data. In this context, our corpus demonstrates some significant differences in the language used by older male and female writers. Older male authors used the word “frail” twice (no older women did); but older women used the words “weak” (26:9), “infirm” (15:6), “decay,” (5:1), and “feeble” (4:1) more often than older men. Whilst the older men in our sample used the language of general physical decline, older women used it more.
Similarly, this lexicon of old age was used to describe both men and women but was more likely to be used when talking about old women. Of the twenty-six uses of the term “weak” in older women's letters, nineteen refer to women (ten to other women, nine to themselves) and seven to men; six of the nine instances of “weak” in older men's letters refer to themselves. Of the fifteen uses of “infirm” by older women, thirteen refer to women (five to other women, eight to themselves). Four of the five instances of women's use of “decay” referred to women, including three instances describing themselves. All four instances of women using the word “feeble” referred to women, including two instances referring to themselves. Eighteenth-century women's letters were more likely to include more bodily terms generally. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that older women felt more able to discuss their own and other women's physical weakness in familiar letters than did older men. Long-held understandings of the relative strength of gendered bodies echoed well into older age.
Regardless of quantities, however, the meaning of such terms reveals no noticeable gender difference. Whether used by women or men, terms such as “weakness,” “decay,” “feeble,” “frail,” and “infirmity” invariably connoted old age. Wife of a Herefordshire vicar, Mary Dangerfield used the word “infirm” in direct association with old age. In November 1775 she noted that “the weather has been trying for the old and infirm;”Footnote 48 a few years later, obliquely referring to herself, she darkly remarked that “infirmities and winter will return together.”Footnote 49 Seventy years earlier, Jael Boscawen (from a gentry Cornish family) expressed regret that she might never again see her niece Bridget Fortescue: “I am sensible of soe many infirmities & dayly find soe many decays in my self, yt I am apt to think I shall never more make such a jorney.”Footnote 50 Her comment, made as she and her correspondent mildly disputed the administering of Fortescue's recently deceased father's will, perhaps deployed a discourse of “decay” to strengthen her suit, reminding Fortescue of her advanced age and the family's duty towards her. In 1767, the Ulster wine merchant John Black II similarly plied the language of age and infirmity. In a letter requesting that his sons implement his plans for the payments relating to his estate after his death, he concluded:
that our gracious & mercyfull Lord God
Allmighty may Ever blesse & propose your well doing is the Wish & prayers of your aged
& infirm John Black SenrFootnote 51
His father had used the same terminology in 1723, referring to himself (then aged seventy-six) as “a Survivour: although: very Infirm.”Footnote 52 Throughout the century, the language of “decay” and “infirmity” served as synonyms for “aged” or “old,” as others have noted.Footnote 53 As the body aged, it became increasingly central to experiences and expressions of aging. The deployment of this language by older men and women suggests that they expected old age to deliver authority and inspire duty and deference amongst younger family members.
Becoming old—and feeling old—developed over time, as is evident in letters written over a period of many years. Elizabeth Elstob, the antiquarian and tutor, experienced very poor health for many years. Starting in at least her fifties, her symptoms became particularly acute in her sixties. Aged sixty-seven in April 1750 she reported, “just at this time my chief complaint is weakness, & the dread I am in of Loseing the use of my right Hand by a contraction in the sinews which Disables me from writing & obliges me to give my sweet Lady's the trouble of writing for me.”Footnote 54 Elstob expressed her fear of a functional loss that would prevent her from writing, an activity from which she derived considerable solace. This was a common anxiety in letters written by older people. Reading and writing were important outlets and, as we discuss below, letters were a principal method of maintaining social contact.Footnote 55 Elstob's sense of the sinews in her limbs contracting was a rare reference in these letters to the idea that the process of aging was a drying out and subsequent hardening of the body (and one that affected the brain as well as the rest of the body).Footnote 56 Unlike her descriptions of illness in her mid-fifties—illness that came from without—this process of later decline was taking place from within. As she approached the age of seventy, references to her “wretched health”Footnote 57 and “many infirmities,” and her admission, “I am so weak & infirm,”Footnote 58 suggest general physical deterioration rather than specific illnesses. Elstob's letters hint at a transition from cycles of chronic illness to an experience of irreversible decline, although she did not make any explicit connection between that decline and her advancing age.
Like Elstob, the Scottish manufacturer and merchant John Glover had also suffered ill-health in his mid-fifties (from 1805 to 1809); this passed and he remarked that he was never better in health.Footnote 59 In subsequent years, he continued to see illness or ill-health as temporary and transient, rather than as an unavoidable result of his advancing age. Glover did not avoid contemplating old age. Indeed, in a letter from November 1812 he reflected on his own aging by comparing himself with the pitiable “old” Mr Wanklyn who suffered a painful stoppage of his water. Glover commiserated that “the common weakness attending age will bow down the most strong,” though he excluded himself from this group: “under such reflections I have great thankfulness that I am so slightly visited.”Footnote 60 In fact, Glover had previously suffered “a weakness in the limbs” due to gout in 1808.Footnote 61 He again reported a “small touch” of the gout in his letter of November 1812.Footnote 62 It is significant that this was written at the age of sixty-three, sometimes described as one of “the Grand Climactericks.”Footnote 63 There is a recognition of age on the part of Glover, then, but in accounting for his advancing age and his physical symptoms, he adjusted what he considered to be good health to accommodate increasingly frequent bouts of weakness caused by gout as a corporeal reality of his life-stage. By 1818, a severe fit of gout left him unable to walk and therefore unable to take more exercise—the first mention of problems with his mobility—yet even this was reversible for Glover. Noting “great weakness” and “considerable akes, and sever pain in my ancles knees and joints from the frequent shocks of gout,” Glover also focused on signs of potential recovery or improving health. Perhaps in an attempt to reassure her, he wrote to his daughter, “I look well, eat my food, and grow more in flesh than I wish.”Footnote 64 It was the ailment rather than old age itself that appeared to cause Glover distress. Nevertheless, whilst most of our letter writers made little explicit connection between old age and illness in their letters, the recalibration of what it meant to be in good health implies a tacit acknowledgement of the physical realities of old age.
Glover was not alone in cataloguing a range of physical ailments without making an explicit connection to his age. In the 1780s, the London merchant Joseph Salvador wrote to his long-standing friend and cousin Emanuel Mendes da Costa about the challenges he faced but without linking physical disorder and chronological age. In the year of his death aged seventy, Salvador, writing from his South Carolina plantation, admitted that, “My eyes and hands are very much Impaired.” He had lacked a scribe that month and had “been forced to write too much my self,” although the challenge this posed related to health not age: he had “been very Ill,” he reported.Footnote 65 In his reply, in contrast, Da Costa (a year younger than his cousin), underscored the causal connection between a weakened physical state and chronological age:
My advance in years, & Misfortunes, which fill me with cares and anxieties; are the sole causes of my apparent indolence in writing to so Dear & Beloved a Benefactor. I now begin to feel the Effect of years, my hands are often Paralytical, in so much, that I cannot write freely; my walk in enfeebled; and my memory & other faculties are somewhat impaired; so that I cannot study; which as you well know, was formerly my sole livelihood and occupation.Footnote 66
Da Costa went on to discuss “my agitated breast,” suggesting the changes that old age caused to the emotions and mind,Footnote 67 and echoing the “unease” or “frenzy” noted in other people's comments about older people in this period.Footnote 68 Disordered thoughts or feelings, and certainly mental incapacity, are not prominent in older people's letters, yet they sometimes featured in letters describing others.Footnote 69 Our sample reflects the experiences of those who retained the necessary mental capacity for letter writing, as well as the physical dexterity to compose their correspondence.
Yet these letters do show that low or bad mood was a response to the physical decline and social changes sometimes attendant on older years. Sadness was associated with old age in reference works from this period. This was nevertheless coupled with a recognition that older people's feelings were highly dependent on social situation.Footnote 70 Several older letter writers were sad, lonely, or both; low mood was reported especially by those who had lost family or felt alone. For Christiana Shuttleworth, wife of an army major, this was a result of a series of combined physical and emotional challenges in her early sixties, in what were to be the final years of her life. Christiana's experiences were communicated in letters to her younger friend Ann Hare—both of them lived in Derbyshire—the earliest of which survive from late summer of 1780, when Christiana was sixty-three and managing what would be her husband William's final illness. Those letters were both an expression of and a lever in Christiana's friendship with Ann, one on which Christiana relied heavily during this period. Written during Christiana's final year of life, they express the experiences of a person during their final decline. The early letters focus on William's poor health, although Christiana also noted her own physical struggles: “I am still so lame, that I move abt. wth. pain and recover slowly indeed.” In the next letter to survive, with her husband away taking the (hopefully restorative) waters at Buxton, she remained “so very weak that I am a thorough wearied Traveller long before Bed time.”Footnote 71 These challenges persisted once her husband died when she asked Ann to send her two bedgowns: “for I am grown such an Invalid of late that I now constantly sleep in one.”Footnote 72 By winter, Christiana was suffering a series of conditions involving her stomach and the “disagreeable sensations of the Gout,” which caused her to presage her own demise: they “rather allarms me least they shoud terminate in a fit which woud now be dreadfull to me—having lost my Dear Comforter who always consoled me in Afflictions.”Footnote 73 Like Da Costa, Shuttleworth's reports of her poor health combine the physical and affective, signaling how integral emotions were to eighteenth-century people's experiences of embodiment.Footnote 74
Physical and emotional challenges intensified for Shuttleworth. Widowhood she described as “my Melancholy lonely Fate.”Footnote 75 Following William's death, she also experienced “frequent disappointments” at her son James's (and Ann's husband, Thomas's) repeated failures to visit and was “very melancholy” on hearing news of James's poor health.Footnote 76 Friends acknowledged that Shuttleworth's low spirits were exacerbated by the departure of her sons to go to war in America. Mary Moore wrote to Ann Hare in 1780: “poor Mrs Shuttleworth I pitty her much; it must be very distressing to have her Sons took from her at this time; indeed I think Jack out to have provided her with a companion.”Footnote 77 By March 1781, physical debility accelerated. Christina struggled with “the Gout and Rumatism flying all over me particularly my Stomach and right Arm that I can scarce make a Letter.”Footnote 78 She asked Ann to delay sending another package as she was so poorly: “I must desire you will postpone sending for the Silk till my Health is more established.”Footnote 79 In April, Christiana began her letter in the third person, referring to “her naughty Stomach” and the tiredness she put down to the drugs she was taking.Footnote 80 That letter, dated 19 April 1781 (the year she died), is the last dated letter to survive. These letters suggest a progressive physical decline as well as intensifying low mood, all compounded by her evident grief at the loss of her husband. In communicating these to her younger friend, Ann, at no point did Christiana refer explicitly to her more than sixty years. However, the convergence of factors that left her feeling weak and low—physical decline, bereavement, and enforced separation from friends and adult children—were more likely to occur in later life.
Like Shuttleworth, the London merchant Eliezer Isaac Keyser (1746–1820) recounted being progressively more indisposed and confined to his house without once mentioning old age explicitly. Keyser also wrote to a younger correspondent: his cousin by marriage, Leah, who was twenty-six years his junior. This may have encouraged him to accentuate some of his symptoms to garner Leah's sympathy, although it is equally likely that he tried not to overburden her, particularly because Leah's husband, Assur Keyser, had died in 1816. In the winter of 1817–18, aged seventy-one, Keyser suffered a period of severe illness: a “deplorable affliction” that produced a “distressd state of health,”Footnote 81 left him confined to his home, reduced his appetite, and triggered “afflictions on my mind.”Footnote 82 After six weeks of medical treatment in London, he was glad to arrive home, “patchd up,” to a good night's sleep, with medicine to take twice a day and strict rules for food and drink.Footnote 83 The advice suggests that his was considered a distinct illness. So much does Keyser himself wish to draw a line under the episode, that he spent many hours writing thank you cards to those who had paid him a visit or sent their good wishes.Footnote 84
Yet the autumn of that year brought new physical challenges. By October he referred to his “feeble powers” and poor health.Footnote 85 While Keyser did not relate his experiences to old age, he does acknowledge a period of long-term decline from around 1812, noting in 1819, and at the time of a Jewish fast, that he had “not fasted so well for these seven years.”Footnote 86 One consequence of his decline was his inability to engage in the social life he had worked so hard to maintain. By 1819, Keyser explained that visitors on one day “Entirely put it out of his power to repeat the attempt.” On returning home, he wrote of himself, “he was very Glad to get home as the spasm afflicted him much.” The suggestion of powerlessness chimes with the objectification effected by his striking use of the third person in this letter.Footnote 87 In using the third person, both Shuttleworth and Keyser briefly suggest the “simultaneous recognition and distancing of old age” that Culley sees in the later personal documents of Mary Berry.Footnote 88 Keyser, like Shuttleworth, returned to the first person, describing the continuation of his condition, his pains, and being instructed by a physician to stay at home and rest.Footnote 89 By the summer of 1820—his last—Eliezer was “indisposed,” confined to the parlor and bedroom, and only able to “hobble” into the garden, although a doctor “gives me good hopes, of getting better,” he assured Leah.Footnote 90 In this final year of life, Keyser's difficulty in walking was accompanied by poor hearing, weakness, and an afflicted mind. Even in his final months, however, he hoped he would improve and become well.
Most letter writers in their sixties discussed some physical, mental, or emotional challenge borne of the physical and social conditions often attendant on later years. While some writers clearly linked the physical challenges they experienced to their advanced years, others—such as Elstob and Glover—did not mention old age when discussing these challenges, despite elsewhere explicitly recognizing themselves as old. This does not necessarily mean that these men and women did not see old age as the cause of their troubles. Ottaway has noted that “Old age was viewed as a disease regardless of the gender of the older person.”Footnote 91 That aging was seen as synonymous with illness or poor health could mean that these descriptions of a progressive catalogue of ills took for granted the impact of advanced years on their physical body. There may have been other reasons why old age was not explicitly recognized as the cause of poor health, not least that an admission of aging would mean acknowledging—to oneself and one's correspondent—that life is finite and its end drawing inexorably closer. A still vitally important religious context, which counseled a need to be always prepared for death, shaped these men's and women's experiences of their frailties.Footnote 92 Yet a refusal to admit old age expressed resistance to decline, as well as a kindness to the loved ones to whom the letter was addressed. This may have driven Keyser's tight grip on hope in his final summer, writing to a younger woman who had herself been widowed just a few years before.
Other factors, however, were evidently at work. The physical body itself—the nature and extent of specific conditions—naturally produced different experiences of old age. That some of the older people who explicitly claimed an identity as an old person nevertheless reported very little physical incapacity or decline in later life is important. Aged around seventy-seven in 1804, the Lancashire grandmother Ann Hatfield claimed herself “advanced in years.”Footnote 93 She conceded that her age wrought changes to her body. She was proud to be able to write at an advanced age, although simultaneously acknowledged that her ability to write had become impaired: “I am very Thankfull at my age I am able to write you must not Expect Fine Writing at the age 77.”Footnote 94 Yet even into her eighties Hatfield did not describe the major physical incapacity noted by some other letter writers, including some of those in their sixties. At eighty-seven she acknowledged that there was more “Danger” for an “old person,” but explained why she herself had thrived: “I suppose I have Been cautious about that, makes me Live so Long.”Footnote 95 Only in her final letter, written just a few months before her death at the age of eighty-nine, did she intimate late and irreversible decline: “I am pretty well of my self, but my complaint is no better, neither do I Expect it to be Better, I hope I shall be Resighn'd.”Footnote 96
Other older people evidently enjoyed good health into their seventies. Philip Papillon, a London merchant and member of parliament, appeared to stay well into his old age, signing off his letters with conventional reports of good health: “we are very well here,” he wrote to his cousin William Turner.Footnote 97 A rare reflection on his age in another letter to Turner was prompted by the death of an acquaintance in 1732. The seventy-two-year-old Papillon commented: “I believe he may be about my age or a little older, we being both together at Utrict when my Father lived there, these are warnings for us to take care, to Endeavour to take care to prepare for our future state when we are in health & strength not knowing how soon we may be taken away.”Footnote 98 Papillon's reflection on his old age, and the implication that he currently enjoyed good health, signal the material role that the physical body itself played in the experience of aging. Poor health or incapacity was not a necessary facet of living to an advanced age. Papillon's reflections—and the absence of any complaint—were perhaps also shaped partly by his knowledge that the cousin to whom he was writing suffered ill-health and had lost a son the year before. They may also have been affected by his experience of caring for his own father during his late decline in 1699, when Philip Papillon was thirty-nine and his father was seventy-seven. By the end of October of that year, Thomas Papillon (1623–1702) had been ill for ten weeksFootnote 99 and continued to be confined to the house for a further three weeks, suffering from “a long & tedious indisposition.”Footnote 100 In 1732 and in his early seventies, Philip Papillon was surely cognizant that he was approaching the age at which his father's final decline took place. He was certainly acutely aware of the life-course of family members, recording their births and deaths in “the family book.”Footnote 101 He recognized he was well, but the principal purpose of his comment to Turner was to acknowledge that at this time of life, “health & strength” could be replaced by ill-health and weakness at any point. Yet in the end, Philip Papillon appeared to live a well life until he died, aged 75.
That both Papillon and Hatfield expressly remark on their good health despite their years underscores that although for older people themselves there was a strong association between poor health and old age, some felt themselves lucky to have avoided this. Experiences of the over sixties varied. Their experiences might range from poor mobility and weakness to loneliness and sorrow, although old people might well profess their relative good health. Their reports of these experiences are uneven and do not correlate with chronological years but instead reflect a range of physical and social factors.
Strategies of the Old
Even if some older people used letters to describe their joyful and active lives, they understood the old body to be distinct from younger ones and requiring particular treatment and care. That older people took thoughtful care of themselves is evident from their letters. One important model of self-care that letter writers often employed was the management of their overall well-being through regimen, which involved the manipulation of factors including food, drink, sitting up, clothing, temperature in the room, circulation of air, exercise, and the regular changing of bed-linen to maintain good overall health.Footnote 102 Regimen was flexible, allowing it to be adjusted to suit an aging body and maintain a person's sense of agency over their physical and mental decline. Old letter writers had clear views of what they needed to do to stay healthy in body and in mind. This aligns with Yallop's argument that agency over the aging body was particularly pronounced during the eighteenth century.Footnote 103 If in the seventeenth century, old age was “associated with disease and decrepitude, accompanied by dependence and impotence,”Footnote 104 scholars detect an emerging positivity towards aging in the eighteenth century. This is epitomized by David Troyansky's account of “the emergence of a new view of old age” based on optimism (both with regard to the potential of old people to live well and of society to care for them).Footnote 105 These letters certainly demonstrate that old people hoped to live long and healthily.
Regimen counselled that the appropriate air and climate would sustain healthful bodies. In 1751 Robert Black was concerned when his brother John announced his intention to return to Ireland from Bordeaux at the age of seventy: “I hope it is for the best but my Concern is not the Less for your changing a Climate at this stage of Life & moving so far away from me.”Footnote 106 When John arrived home in Dublin after traveling to Bristol later that year, Robert was relieved that, “your native air had renewed your years & vigor; may it long continue.”Footnote 107 Given its potency, a change in environment could be harnessed by the older person themselves. In 1805, aged seventy-one, Mary Huddleston, married into a Cambridgeshire gentry family, changed both her environment and her diet, visiting the seaside at South End in Essex. Her letters to her daughter Jane describe bathing, drinking seawater, hearty breakfasts, shopping, and walking, all with the assistance of Martha, a servant who also washed her clothes and ran errands.Footnote 108 Mary's change in regimen seemed to be successful as she reported that “my health & spirits are so much mended.”Footnote 109 Taking the waters was a popular restorative and preventive for those within easy reach of spa towns such as Bath and Cheltenham. For those who could not travel, the waters could be transported to them. In 1782, Mary Dangerfield (aged approximately seventy-four) was unable to travel to Cheltenham due to poor weather and resultant bad roads, “but without license from any Physical director have drank a single glass of that water between breakfast and dinner which agrees well with my stomach and in that gentle alterative way can be no force upon the Constitution.”Footnote 110 Dangerfield's decision to deploy her own expertise rather than seek medical advice was typical of most older people, who endeavored to manage their own health.
Other aspects of diet were adjusted to ensure continuing health in old age. When in 1808 John Glover experienced an episode of illness at the age of fifty-nine, he adjusted his intake of food and drink both to help his recovery and to guard against further attacks:
I drink no Malt Liquor but soda water or Common
Water wt a bit of Toasted bread: this altogether I
found would not do without a Little Wine
wch I take after Dinner, I am convinced Spirits
wt Water is not friendly:Footnote 111
Like Dangerfield, Glover decided on his own treatment. After receiving six weeks of medical care away from home, Eliezer Keyser instead followed medical advice concerning diet on his return: “I am Orderd to drink Barley Water with Gum Arabic, my Supper to be know Root Gruel of such like beside the medica I take night & morning.”Footnote 112 Keyser accessed medical assistance at other times, too. In February 1818 he sought medical advice for deafness, a complaint often associated with the old. Much to his delight, the condition turned out to be treatable with “a slight operation, and which, he performed, this day and without Causing the least pain,” the “WAXATION” was removed from his ears and he could hear again.Footnote 113 As we have already discussed, Keyser had a generally positive approach to the corporeal experience of aging, hoping and expecting an improvement in his physical condition to the last. When he did seek advice regarding treatment from a medical professional, it was for specific complaints that he rarely attributed to advanced age. Professional medical treatment was rarely accessed by middling-sort older people, confirming Yallop's finding that old age was not subject to medicalization in the eighteenth century.Footnote 114
Instead, old people sought out other remedies for the physical and mental challenges associated with their advanced years. Warmth was particularly important for old bones and was frequently harnessed for the benefit of old bodies, as the body's heat was thought to naturally decline in old age in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 115 Winter could be a period of endurance for old bodies, when the cold exacerbated rheumatic complaints, irritating old joints. A letter from John Black, written in Spring 1761, describes the captain of a ship on which he was traveling who “gave me his own bed & a constant warm fire side to comfort your dada's old age.”Footnote 116 Rest on a comfortable bed was seen as important to good health in older age, particularly in the colder season. As Eliezer Keyser got older, he imposed restrictions on his travel such that he was not required to stay overnight, “so as not to change my bed.”Footnote 117 Even more pronounced than the desire for rest in older people's letters is their intention to keep moving expressly for the physical and mental benefits it brought. Mary Dangerfield explained to her friend that, “no lameness appears in walking, & I take that exercise moderately whenever weather permits.” As the summer of 1782 came to an end, she admitted that, “infirmities & winter will return together but am thankful for a tolerable use of my feet several months past.”Footnote 118 Eliezer Keyser's attachment to the village of Hampstead derived from the clear health benefits the rural location provided. Hampstead was, he said, his “Load stone … not only on account of my health … … which is the chief, the air being not only very good, but the the walks, and ride, about the surrounding Countries, so delightful, that I declare I regret when I am compell'd to go to London.”Footnote 119 Exercise was an important part of John Glover's routine and he understood that it played a role in his continuing good health. During a severe attack of gout at the age of sixty-nine, he complained that his affliction “prevents me from Walking as I could wish to take more exercise.”Footnote 120 The letters from the second half of the eighteenth century show that older people proactively took steps to improve their physical and mental state and were evidently frustrated when prevented from doing so.
While in the previous century older people might express disappointment that they had survived illness, there are no examples of a wish for death amongst this sample.Footnote 121 Some writers expressed comfort at the thought of their own death within a distinctly confessional register and alongside a vision of their resurrection. Writing in 1805, John Glover, for example, knew that “The Other World (which I thank God, thro’ Jesus Christ my known Redeemer) is fast approaching” would reunite him and his daughter with his wife, in a kingdom that “shall never decay.”Footnote 122 Religion could be a principal source of solace, as well as authority, for the old.Footnote 123 Yet the more powerful response to old age was as full an engagement with the present world as possible.Footnote 124 These letters demonstrate a recognition that “being lonely was viewed as potentially unhealthy for body, mind and soul, especially in old age.”Footnote 125 Letters were themselves a prophylactic against this. Productive work might also provide continued physical and mental activity. John Black II was closely involved in the management of the family business until well into his seventies. While he stepped away from active management in his late seventies, Black nevertheless remained engaged in the business accounts into his early eighties.Footnote 126 It is fair to say that John Black never retired. Women's work continued into later old age, too, and also involved the continuance of close social contact with family. John Glover's mother-in-law, Lucy Lowder, was the primary carer for his only daughter (also Lucy). A widow in possession of two properties in Bristol, Lowder cared for the nine-year-old Lucy during her seventies and Lucy lived with her grandmother until Lucy married; Lowder also occasionally cared for her two grandsons.Footnote 127 Ann Hatfield's letters report her continued domestic work well into her old age, particularly work with textiles. Like many women, Ann sent the products of her work to family, especially her grandchildren. Aged seventy-seven, Ann wrote that she was working on a finer “white worsit,” while the following year she was knitting socks for Dorothy to wear in winter.Footnote 128 Ann's knitting kept her busy and involved. The work that older people undertook as grandparents, especially as grandmothers, could be considerable.Footnote 129
There is some evidence that grandparenthood was becoming a more clearly defined role by the later eighteenth century.Footnote 130 Later letters in particular show that grandparenthood was a common prompt for older people to reflect on aging and their own status as older people. Ann Hatfield's letters to her grandchildren show a strong sense of time passing in references such as “in former time.”Footnote 131 Her letters to her grandchildren often convey advice, framed by her belief that youth “is the time to Gain Knowledge.”Footnote 132 Hatfield had an apparently lively social life and evidently thrived on the company of youth, yet her letters show her occupying a pronounced “elder role.” In a letter from 1807, for example, she counseled her granddaughter expressly from the perspective of advanced years, her reference to chronological age girding the authority she sought to claim:
it is very necessary for
young people to see Different ways, to Prepare
Them for Engaging in the World That is
Full of Variety & Changing Scenes, my Ex=
=perience of 80 years Hath convined me That
to Endeavour to Govern our passions in our
youth, is the most Certain way to secure
a peaceable passage Thro’ LifeFootnote 133
Grandparenthood was a prompt for men to adopt an elder role, too. The seventy-six-year-old merchant John Eliot spoke from an acute consciousness of his advanced years in an advising letter to his grandchildren. A native of Cornwall, Eliot wrote to his grandchildren from his adopted home of London with health and dietary advice, hoping that his granddaughter Mariabella would visit the town of St Austell, a place that took him back in time; this was, as he put it, “where I drew my First Breathe.”Footnote 134 Younger people brought to mind the time that had passed in the life-course of the older person.
An inability to travel was one of the most common complaints of older people precisely because this limited their engagement with the world. In 1776, Mary Oliver (d. 1783) wrote from Dorset to her niece, Mary Huddleston (jnr), in Cambridgeshire, detailing Oliver's physical restrictions: “I have been verey ill & weak bad stoomke and verey lame it's with much difficulty I goe cross the Rome.” Later in the same letter, she continued, “I am so Lame scarce able to goe over the room by my slefe without great danger.”Footnote 135 Her physical incapacity prevented Oliver from traveling to be with friends and family, too. In a letter to her niece, she was explicit about the toll this took on herself and her relations and (like Marple before her) explicitly linked her immobility and age:
I think it's a misfortain to us
all being at such distants from each other
I wishe to see you all but its not in my power
so to do being in years and so disabled I think
you might once do it whilts I am alive its
a concern to me that I cannot am sure in maney
things it's a losse to us all.Footnote 136
Oliver's next letter to her niece ended with a hopeless sign-off: “I wish we was nearer Each other but that is In vain,” adding that she missed Mary Huddleston's deceased father, and closing with the self-conscious apology, “I will not Trouble you with any more Complaints.”Footnote 137 A few years later, Mary Huddleston (now Scully) would hear that her mother, aged around seventy, was now also unable to travel:
it wod give me real pleasure to see you and them [her family] in Ireland but so long a expensive journey and crossing the seas at my time of life renders it quite impracticable.Footnote 138
Such melancholy regrets highlighted the main reason that older people traveled—to remain connected through social relationships.
We know that older women put considerable effort into maintaining networks of family and friends that sustained them;Footnote 139 men did this too. In his letters to his daughter, Hugh Boscawen (Jael's brother-in-law) gives an impression of resolutely active and sociable older man well into his mid-seventies: “We are still full of company, seldom free,” he wrote in 1699.Footnote 140 His last surviving letter details travel without mention of his seventy-six years, travel that may have been undertaken to enjoy company.Footnote 141 Women's letters certainly show they took full advantage of all the joy that travel and visiting offered. In 1796, Sarah Clegg, the sixty-three-year-old wife of a timber merchant, seemed almost boastful when she reported to her daughter of her busy social life: “last week we had company [deleted] to Dine two Days & we Dine'd out two & This week have had Dineing company three Days & been out one.”Footnote 142 Women also travelled despite physical deterioration. In 1803, aged sixty-five, Barbara Johnson, daughter of a vicar and creator of albums of fabric samples, complained to her brother that her eyes ached with writing so much.Footnote 143 Nonetheless, the following day she planned to travel the over eighty miles to Bath to enjoy the social life on offer.Footnote 144 Over a hundred years earlier, the sixty-three-year-old Joanna Pury had shared Johnson's passions. Unable to travel for a few months, she not only urged her son Theophilus to visit but also insisted that if his sister was going to town that she must buy Joanna something in the “newer fashon” to wear.Footnote 145 Such letters by older women echo the determined refusals to accept norms of female aging—the “tenacity and vitality, at the age of fifty, sixty, seventy”—that Joan Hinde Stewart and others see in the lives of eighteenth-century women.Footnote 146 Older British women were determined not to lose out on the pleasures that travel permitted.
An appetite for social excitement could wane, no doubt expressing personal disposition.Footnote 147 Aged around seventy in 1764, John Campbell, a lawyer and member of parliament until he was seventy-three, explicitly contrasted his pleasure in traveling to London with his experience when “younger”: “The pleasure that dear Town now gives me is like strong perfumes too high to bear much of it.”Footnote 148 Campbell did not remain confined at home, though. Having traveled to London from his home in Pembrokeshire, he noted that, “I had a little stufyness & found my self so well as to venture on the journey which I perform'd better than I expected.”Footnote 149 Campbell overcame his “stufyness”—suggesting a closeness or thickness—and was pleased to have managed the journey. Similarly, the activities of Mary Dangerfield changed during the 1760s and 1770s. Her “solitary Travels” without her husband provided her with the benefits of sociable visits: “change of place & conversation certainly enlivens the mind; and is at the same time conducive to health.”Footnote 150 She expresses an ambivalence about the quiet, even dull, life at home that then awaited her: “coming from a good deal of company into an extream of retirement is not quite the thing.”Footnote 151 Yet she assured her friend that returning to a husband in health and with “a budget of chat” saw them through the long evenings.Footnote 152 Increasingly, her own health and disposition placed limits on her travel. Her “very low state” all of the winter of 1771–72 prevented her from visiting her sister in the Isle of Wight;Footnote 153 but while her social activities narrowed, in her final letter of 1782 she still reports being recently away in Gloucester.Footnote 154 The appetite for a lively social life might fade for some, but older people were united in their acknowledged need for companionship and company.
The satisfaction of some older letter writers with their social lives is palpable. In 1813, at the age of sixty-seven, Eliezer Isaac Keyser regaled his cousin Leah with news of his very active social life. Writing on a Friday, he reported that only on Wednesday he “was much solicited to take a Cup of Tea with some Ladies, and which I could not refuse, and was after Tea entertained with a Concert, Dancing & Supper.”Footnote 155 On Thursday he should have attended the new theatre in Hampstead but was “was engaged at home with a few visitors.” This was the second invitation he had been compelled to decline in one week. He hoped to attend the next two performances, on Saturday and Monday, in the “Company with several Ladies.”Footnote 156 Keyser's outline of his social engagements was, as he explained, a direct response to his cousin's enquiry: “I live as it were alone, and how can I find any Comfort, I will then answer you, that I make myself as Comfortable as possibly my situation will admit of, and notwithstanding all this I find no lack of amusement In my domestick situation.”Footnote 157 Doubtless, these writers’ reports of being “alone” skate over the presence of servants in the house who also likely cared for them.Footnote 158 Keyser's remark that he lived “as it were alone” may well have been some acknowledgement of this. His insistence on how much company he enjoyed certainly refuted any suggestion that he was lonely and unhappy. Yet Keyser also insisted that even in his solitary pursuits—reading, writing, walking and angling on Hampstead Heath, and dining alone—“I pass the time very well.”Footnote 159 To be sure, his life was shaped by his “health” (if not explicitly by age), but he was keen to communicate the joy he gleaned from both solitary and sociable pursuits at the age of sixty-seven.
Keyser's use of the term “amusement” is consonant with the humorous tone he adopted in many of his letters. A determination to poke fun at old age—as well as to have fun—is a prominent feature of some of these letters. People's disposition or feelings about old age differed. Individual responses to old age were not only highly personal, they were also a way in which people might meet the challenges sometimes inherent in later life. If old age was commonly associated with wisdom and a denial of frivolity in the eighteenth century,Footnote 160 older letter writers were not beyond making a joke of their experiences, often with their younger correspondents. Mrs. Collier teased her friend Ann Hare, “you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, to let two such old Folks as Digby & I be so much cleverer than yourselves.”Footnote 161 The same gentle type of humor is suggested in a letter Ann Hatfield wrote to her granddaughter, Mary-Ann Nicholson, about a possible visit in 1804: “you know my Dear I am Far advanced in years & can't Doo without Assistance. You are very kind in wishing me To Come, are you aware that an old Person will Require waiting upon, will my Dear Maryann & Betsey Doo it with pleasure?”Footnote 162 Hatfield's grandson, James, was treated with similarly jocular self-deprecation later that year: “you will say we have been very Gay, I shall be glad when we have paid our visits, it is a Deal Trouble when old people Goes out.”Footnote 163 As others have noted, older women could write about themselves in ways that contrasted with “deadening prescriptions,” including “graceful, self-deprecating humor.”Footnote 164
Humor, however, might cast merely a thin veil over the poignancy of older age. The compass of Eliezer Keyser's sociable life narrowed as he became incapacitated in his seventies. The few letters we have from the year of his death—1820—suggest that while he had several invitations to see his family, his poor health prevented him from accepting. One of the last letters explains that he will therefore have to keep “at hampstead by myself.”Footnote 165 Keyser met this regrettable development with hope (as we have seen) and with humor, sending a comical but also profoundly poignant note and sketch to his cousin:
There was a person who happened indisposed to be
and for many Days few of his Relations did he see
Therefore the Burthen of his song used to Be
I care for nobody, no not I since nobody care for me
whoever the cap fits May wear itFootnote 166
The letter was illustrated with an ink drawing of a night cap. Humor was a prophylactic to the low mood sometimes attendant on old age, as well as a deterrent to the changes in temper that were associated with older people. The “Lady of Quality” who wrote a text called Age Made Happy as Well as Honourable, published in 1747, advised the old not to be “obnoxious.”Footnote 167 The solution was to maintain a cheerful disposition, taking care not to criticize the young, or to be too forthcoming with advice. Ann Hatfield was fully conscious of wider expectations that older people became less tolerant and more difficult in company as they aged. She was adamant that she would not become an objectionable older person. “I have very long been striving to prevent the peevishness that often attends upon old people,” she wrote to her granddaughter, “how far I have succeeded you will be able to judge when I come amongst you.”Footnote 168 In making light of being old in letters, older people assured their correspondents that they remained good and easy company. They might also reinforce a friendship through camaraderie. Giles Earle referred to his balding pate with some humor in the context of series of letters with his younger attorney and friend Joseph Munby in 1806. Earle asked him to collect “a couple of wigs of a Mr Hands to cover my bald pate” but requested discretion for, “whatever I know, and the Fair Sex may suspect, I wou'd not have it published in Gath or Ascalon, that I am reduced to a dry bob.”Footnote 169 The joke reinforced a homosocial bond grounded in shared experience and witty self-deprecation; their bodies, these old friends agreed, really were a laughing matter.
Conclusion
One's status as an older person accrued from a number of embodied experiences that were physical, cognitive, and emotional. The aging body shaped daily activities and occasionally frustrated the plans of older letter writers as it became increasingly unreliable. It could demand recognition, even in those that did not explicitly identify as old. But the body did not define old age. Some of our letter writers acknowledged neither the restrictions of the body, nor their chronological age, in later life. Even illness was not always seen as an inevitable feature of aging. Some, such as Elizabeth Elstob, explained illness by decline and old age. Others refused to give up hope of a recovery from illness despite being chronologically old. Longitudinal analysis allows us to see how some, such as John Glover, recalibrated their expectations of health over time, claiming good health despite their advanced years. Experiences of old age were both relational and social. When John Glover compared himself to “old” Mr Wanklyn, he did not feel so old and expressed gratefulness for his comparative youth and vigor. When Job Marple compared himself to his young namesake, however, he felt old and “broke” despite living another ten years with limited change in his physical health. Ann Hatfield appears to have felt invigorated by the company of young people, as did John Black. Gender shaped the experiences and expression of older men and women but not always in the ways we might expect. We know that in eighteenth-century society, “a woman's age signified in ways that a man's did not.”Footnote 170 Yet the specter of the monstrous older woman is absent in the comments of older people, while substantial evidence of older women's sociability underscores other accounts of positive cultural representations and experiences of older women.Footnote 171 Physical weakness was more often associated with older women, but it was men who more often voiced worries about their aging appearance. Overall, though, the attitudes and strategies of older men and women in these letters show remarkable convergence.
Just as old age is relational and social, so are letters. While some older people no doubt wanted to present an independent image to distant relatives, others will have wanted to court sympathy and support. It is important, then, that throughout this period older people sought proactively to manage and mitigate the effects of old age. At the same time, many affirmed the joyful aspects of the later stages of life and continued to seek out satisfying and positive experiences. This provides a valuable historical perspective for what scholars in other disciplines refer to as “active aging” and “positive aging,” demonstrating that the expectation that people can enjoy their later years—and take active steps to ensure this—is not the product of modernity, nor are pressures to “age well” limited to neo-liberal societies.Footnote 172 Aging well in the eighteenth century combined strategies for keeping physically, socially, and mentally active, at least amongst those with the means to do so. Diet, exercise, and environment were regularly adapted by older people to suit the needs of their older body, but movement, relationships, and a positive attitude were particularly important. These strategies find striking echoes in the World Health Organization's summary of the requirements for well-being in older age in its policy framework for the United Nations’ “Decade of Healthy Ageing” (2021–2030).Footnote 173 Older people in the eighteenth century had a good understanding of their well-being and needs. The physical, mental, and social challenges of old age are certainly palpable in eighteenth-century letters, but we occlude the agency, resilience, and determination—as well as the good humor—of older people if we fail to listen to their equally insistent statements of a life enjoyed.
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, UK, and PI on the project, “Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680–1820,” Leverhulme Trust (2021–2025, Ref. RPG-2020-163), https://socialbodies.bham.ac.uk.
Sarah Fox worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the “Material Identities, Social Bodies” project, before being appointed Senior Lecturer in History at Edge Hill University, UK. The authors would like to thank Susannah Ottaway, Alexandra Shepard, Amanda Vickery, Emily Vine, Jonathan Willis, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on the article. Karen Harvey would also like to thank the audience at the History Seminar/Eighteenth-Century Studies Centre, Queen's University, Belfast. Please address any correspondence to [email protected].
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