Old Age and Euthanasia in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period

Abstract

In this article, I examine Anthony Trollope’s futuristic fiction The Fixed Period (1882) to discuss how the author criticizes Victorian Britain’s general pursuit of national efficiency by depicting a seemingly utopian nation where euthanasia of old and less productive individuals is used as an expedient means of implementing utopian values. In reading how Period portrays aging as a sign not only of personal deterioration but also of social inefficiency, I situate the text in the late nineteenth-century context, in which euthanasia was viewed as a countermeasure against large-scale degeneration. It is necessary to note that Trollope’s interpretation of the future without decline—without the elderly—is satiric, for he indeed speaks about the present society, obsessed with the ideology of progress. That is, although Trollope locates the mandatory euthanasia system in the future, his portrayal of it as a pivotal means of national regeneration serves to problematize the late Victorian reality, in which people felt a need to increase the size of the young and efficient generation and decrease that of the old and inefficient generation in order to prevent collective degeneration. In exploring how Trollope’s depiction of the future illuminates the seamy side of utopian productivism, I therefore suggest that he debunks the myth of youth, efficiency, and progress, which governed Victorian Britain.