The Decline of Life. Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England by Susannah R. Ottaway

Abstract

329 cords and novels provide Ms. Joseph a ‘‘window into the processes through which colonial rulers produced their categories of self-understanding and knowledge of the other.’’ Ms. Joseph concludes that both English literature and the colonial archive deployed the figure of woman to facilitate ‘‘the ruses and deployments of colonial power.’’ The claim hinges on extensive archival research and brilliant, intertextual, close readings of disparate bureaucratic records and literary narratives . Representations of woman can ‘‘be read as metonyms of significant historical changes.’’ For instance, Ms. Joseph argues, that in the 1720s, Defoe employed the sexual odyssey of his protagonist , Roxana, to critique English colonialism and as well as England’s commercial relations to Holland. At roughly the same time, Francis Hastings, the president of the East India Company, heavily fined an English employee for raping an Indian woman. Hastings’s action was driven more by his desire to secure his own control of the Company, Ms. Joseph argues, than it was by a commitment to justice for colonial women. Ms. Joseph carefully places her argument in relation to canonical figures in postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Yet she largely overlooks the fact that her central question—how can one read for historical ‘‘fact’’ in archives shaped by the interests and fantasy of the colonizer—has been at the heart of the subaltern studies project in Indian historiography for over two decades. Partha Chatterjee’s and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critical analysis of the archive and of women’s place in national history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would constitute an important additional context . Previews of each chapter explain the significance of Ms. Joseph’s claims. These are, for the most part, unnecessary ; the material and the readings can stand on their own. The book would have profited if its explanatory apparatus were reduced and Ms. Joseph filled the space with her acute readings of the archive. For example, Ms. Joseph contends that while Indian women’s names were left out of birth records of the children they bore with British men, these women were frequently listed as heirs to property in the wills of Company employees. She presents this ‘‘unevenness’’as a window into the contradictions and secrets of colonialism. However, she says nothing more about those fascinating wills. At other times, the evidence Ms. Joseph provides seems insufficient for her farreaching claims. She asserts, based on one quick example (the Indian reformer Rammohun Roy), that the local elite— the bhadralok class—continued the strategic and colonial deployment of women and Indian culture. This important argument demands more evidence and space than the seven-page final section of the final chapter. Leah Reade Rosenberg University of Florida SUSANNAH R. OTTAWAY. The Decline of Life. Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. xiv ⫹ 322. $70. From the vantage point of the social legislation that began in the nineteenth century, we tend to see the eighteenth century as a harsh and unforgiving era. As the old system of parish relief broke down, with nothing to replace it, the poor were neglected and the very young and very old left to fend for themselves if they had no family. Ms. Ottaway’s ex- 330 cellent book complicates this narrative and shows that the elderly had much more agency than has been credited to them. She reconstructs the lives of older men and women. Particularly engaging are the many vignettes she offers, drawn from letters, diaries, and literary sources, of individual lives. Wills and parish records also give glimpses of the lower orders . These stories leaven the book’s use of statistical data, such as that from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Some of Ms. Ottaway’s conclusions are surprising. There were more elderly (defined generally as over-60) people in the eighteenth century than we might expect ; she points out that life-expectancy figures were heavily skewed by high infant and child mortality; if you survived to 30, you could reasonably expect to live 30 or 40 more years. Productive members of society, these people generally maintained their autonomy as long as possible. Retirement did not become a common concept until the end...