Growing Old: Age

Teresa Mangum

doi:10.1002/9781405165358.ch7

“‘Old Age,’” muses the anonymous author of “The Art of Growing Old” in The Argosy for 1866, “in theory, demands respect, veneration, and even admiration. ‘Old Age,’ in reality, suffers contempt, ridicule, and neglect” (p. 39). Pulled between these extremes of expected veneration and practical neglect, Victorian writers and artists responded with diverse and often contradictory representations of old age. Even a quick survey of popular poetry provides evidence of the many ways of experiencing old age and of varied attitudes toward aging during the period. Thus, we find William Barnes's colloquial celebration of late love in “Uncle an' Aunt” (1840) and the speaker's booming invitation, “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be,” in Robert Browning's dramatic monologue “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864). Matthew Arnold's “Growing Old” (1867) mourns emotional paralysis caused by old age, a stark contrast with the speaker's gathering wisdom in Alfred Tennyson's “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (1886) or Dollie Radford's witty portrait of healthy elderly egotism in “Soliloquy of a Maiden Aunt” (1891). The visual artists of the period were also inspired by the faces, relationships, and social circumstances particular to the elderly. Larits Tuxen's famous family portrait of “Europe's Grandmama” (otherwise known as Queen Victoria), The Royal Family at the Time of the Jubilee (1887), places the aging queen squarely at the center of an enormous family gathering, while other family paintings push elderly figures to the margins, as does George Elgar Hicks's sweeping canvas of a bridal party, Changing Homes (1863). The consequences of being at once elderly, female, and poor are rendered with special poignancy in George Clausen's Schoolgirls (1880), where elegant young ladies in the foreground disdainfully turn their backs en an elderly worker struggling with heavy buckets. Even common speech reveals a fascination with old people and the experience of aging. Victorian synonyms and adjectives used to describe elderly people tended to attribute particular traits and habits to aging, as suggested by phrases like “old bird,” “old trout,” “old crow,” “tabby,” “old maid,” or “gay old dog” (Covey 1988).

Growing Old: Age

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