Age In Great Britain Research Articles

Bending the Clock: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ageing: A Roundtable Conversation

Over the past decade, several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017). Following the publication of two significant new monographs — Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence (2020) and Jacob Jewusiak’s Aging, Duration, and the English Novel (2019) — the time is ripe for a synthesis of this dynamic cluster of scholarship, with special attention to where nineteenth-century perspectives on ageing is going, and ought to go, from here. Recorded in January 2020, this roundtable is a curated compilation of conversations with key scholars in the field: Devoney Looser (Arizona State University), David McAllister (Birkbeck, University of London), Ruth M. McAdams (Skidmore College), Jake Jewusiak (Newcastle University), and Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College). Edited by Andrea Charise, this roundtable assembles new perspectives on the present and future of nineteenth-century studies of age(ing), including: What’s next for age studies’ approaches to reading and teaching nineteenth-century texts? How might a better understanding of ‘old’ models inform our current day concerns with ageing populations and intergenerational discord? Can age studies research help make a case for the enduring role of the arts and humanities in a STEM-dominated culture? And how might attending to the old, ageing, and obsolete help address newly emergent global crises, including the rise of populism and climate change? Accessible in both audio format and textual transcription, this roundtable interview offers a timely resource for researchers, students, and a broader public interested in the literary present and futures of ageing and older age.

Mail, Rail, and Legwork: State and Nation Building through Postal Service in France and Great Britain, 1830–1914

AbstractA comparative spatial history using GIS, this article examines the similar and differing effects of railway expansion on the growth of postal communications in Great Britain and France from 1830 to the eve of the Great War. It argues that the modern Postal Age in Great Britain and France began in the 1830s. In Britain in 1839, the Parliament obligated private railway companies to convey the Royal Mail throughout the kingdom at reasonable rates. Thereafter, the expansion of postal services and railway networks went hand in hand. Over the years, thousands of new post offices were established and were closer to rail stations than before. As the years wore on the geography of postal communication expanded greatly and by 1914 the majority of rural districts became part of the system of regular, daily mail. In France, a country four or five times larger than England and Wales with a relatively vast rural population, the task of modernizing postal service was a greater challenge. The inauguration of a “rural service” in 1829 employed some 5,000 men as postal carriers to deliver and collect mail throughout the countryside. Thereafter, their numbers grew as new post offices were established to serve villages and small towns with mail deliveries every other day. In the 1880s, under the Third Republic, the state greatly expanded the postal service, deeming it a national mission. It was then that the growing rail network came to shape the national geography of postal service. Hence, at the turn of the century the patterns British and French postal expansions converged.

Inequality of opportunities in health and death: an investigation from birth to middle age in Great Britain.

ObjectiveWe assess the existence of unfair inequalities in health and death using the normative framework of inequality of opportunities, from birth to middle age in Great Britain.MethodsWe use data from the 1958 National Child Development Study, which provides a unique opportunity to observe individual health from birth to the age of 54, including the occurrence of mortality. We measure health status combining self-assessed health and mortality. We compare and statistically test the differences between the cumulative distribution functions of health status at each age according to one childhood circumstance beyond people’s control: the father’s occupation.ResultsAt all ages, individuals born to a ‘professional’, ‘senior manager or technician’ father report a better health status and have a lower mortality rate than individuals born to ‘skilled’, ‘partly skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ manual workers and individuals without a father at birth. The gap in the probability to report good health between individuals born into high social backgrounds compared with low, increases from 12 percentage points at age 23 to 26 at age 54. Health gaps are even more marked in health states at the bottom of the health distribution when mortality is combined with self-assessed health.ConclusionsThere is increasing inequality of opportunities in health over the lifespan in Great Britain. The tag of social background intensifies as individuals get older. Finally, there is added analytical value to combining mortality with self-assessed health when measuring health inequalities.

Gang Membership, Violence, and Psychiatric Morbidity

Gang members engage in many high-risk activities associated with psychiatric morbidity, particularly violence-related ones. The authors investigated associations between gang membership, violent behavior, psychiatric morbidity, and use of mental health services. The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey of 4,664 men 18-34 years of age in Great Britain using random location sampling. The survey oversampled men from areas with high levels of violence and gang activities. Participants completed questionnaires covering gang membership, violence, use of mental health services, and psychiatric diagnoses measured using standardized screening instruments. Violent men and gang members had higher prevalences of mental disorders and use of psychiatric services than nonviolent men, but a lower prevalence of depression. Violent ruminative thinking, violent victimization, and fear of further victimization accounted for the high levels of psychosis and anxiety disorders in gang members, and with service use in gang members and other violent men. Associations with antisocial personality disorder, substance misuse, and suicide attempts were explained by factors other than violence. Gang members show inordinately high levels of psychiatric morbidity, placing a heavy burden on mental health services. Traumatization and fear of further violence, exceptionally prevalent in gang members, are associated with service use. Gang membership should be routinely assessed in individuals presenting to health care services in areas with high levels of violence and gang activity. Health care professionals may have an important role in promoting desistence from gang activity.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750‐1850 – By Devoney Looser

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750‐1850 – By Devoney Looser

Feminist Pioneers, Feminist Classics: Reflections on Age and Generation in Scholarship on Romantic-Era Women's Writings

This essay, conceived as a response to Anne Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (1993), considers the author's Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain 1750–1850 (2008) in the context of contemporary scholarship on Romantic-era women's writings. First, the author assesses her own work in relation to generations of feminism and feminists, arguing for the importance of adding investigations of age to our collective work. Next, she compares the reviews of her and Mellor's books to illustrate the ongoing benefits and pitfalls of publishing on Romantic-era women's writing.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 by Devoney Looser

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 by Devoney Looser Susan Staves (bio) Devoney Looser. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 252. $55.00. Susan Staves Brandeis University Susan Staves Susan Staves is Paul Proswimmer Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Brandeis University. Her most recent book is A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 166o-1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She is currently writing a book on the theory and rhetoric of rights in the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Copyright © 2011 by the Trustees of Boston University

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850. Devoney Looser.

<i>Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850</i>. Devoney Looser.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 Roxanne Eberle Devoney Looser , Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 252 pp. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, Devoney Looser suggests that examining the late careers of British women writers is a necessarily "compensatory gesture" for nineteenth-century critics who have focused upon issues of gender and genre without paying adequate attention to the significance of aging, particularly given the notably long lives of many of their literary subjects. As she trenchantly observes, "We have, for more than a century, comprehended the late lives of early modern British women writers too rosily, too darkly, or more often, not at all" (178). Looser unapologetically identifies the source of such misrepresentation and neglect as "ageism, whether malignant or benign" (168), and identifies some of the larger repercussions of disregarding the total arc of a literary career. Close analysis of the lives and works of nineteenth-century women writers reveals fissures — or perhaps more accurately bridges — between literary periods constructed around the lives and careers of male writers. The careers of many women writers are often incommensurable with standard literary periodizations, as critics such as Susan Staves, Anne Mellor, and Isobel Armstrong have also noted. Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, often identified as "eighteenth-century writers," both lived and published into the Victorian period, and it would have been impossible for Austen to have acted upon Virginia Woolf's injunction to pay homage at Burney's grave, since she died nearly two decades before her "predecessor." While the fact of the nineteenth-century [End Page 414] woman writer's longevity has been noted, Looser's book makes a truly original contribution to a comparative study of several different women writers. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain is written as a goad to other critics. Looser tends to ask questions rather than answer them, inviting her readers to follow avenues of study towards which she directs them. The exploratory nature of her critical methodology is evident throughout the volume: she examines the differences between the careers of several writers rather than construct a single unifying narrative. Indeed, she frequently refers to the chapters as "case studies," and she explores diverse perspectives on women writers and old age. As Looser notes, there was no single model for the aging professional woman writer in the nineteenth century, since it was only in mid-century that such a group came to be known: "These long-lived writers negotiated the literary marketplace early in their lives, during a time when women authors achieved greater visibility and, for some, greater respectability. Then, in their later years . . . these authors encountered a new set of complicated prejudices for which they were largely unprepared" (1). As Looser goes on to demonstrate, women writers chose various paths as they sought to sustain their cultural authority as authors, shape their posthumous reputations, or simply make enough money to guarantee themselves a relatively comfortable old age. Steadfastly committed to her contention that there is no single story to be told about old age and women writers, Looser synthesizes a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to construct a picture of the conflicting attitudes towards aging, gender, and authorship at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. She describes the multiple ways in which women writers responded to the range of unattractive representations of them in their culture, where they appear as rouged and bitter crones, benevolent and bespectacled wise women, or, more commonly perhaps, anachronistic nonentities. Much of the success of the Introduction, which is both compelling and persuasive, lies in its inclusion of a large group of women writers, ranging from Charlotte Lennox (whose prosperous career did not protect her from an impoverished old age) to Joanna Baillie (who publicly renounced writing for philanthropy) to Lady Morgan (who concealed her true age and refused to abandon an image of sexual desirability well into her eighties). The sweeping survey in the Introduction usefully situates the more detailed case studies that follow. In the first chapter of the volume, Looser contrasts...

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (review)

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (review)

Reviews: Cultural History, History Meets Fiction, the Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, the Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition, Writing Lives. Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modem England, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modem England, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage,

Reviews: Cultural History, History Meets Fiction, the Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, the Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition, Writing Lives. Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modem England, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modem England, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage,

Is Eocarcinus Withers, 1932, a Basal Brachyuran?

Abstract Eocarcinus praecursor, the putative earliest member of Infraorder Brachyura of Early Jurassic age in Great Britain, cannot be accommodated within that infraorder. Numerous characters are inconsistent with placement within Brachyura, including: a lack of fusion of the epistome with the dorsal carapace; chelipeds on the first and putatively second pereiopods; lack of true orbits; development of large, strong antennae; notches in the carapace to accommodate the antennae; articulating rings on the pleomeres; development of prominent epimeres; and orientation of the chelipeds. Rather, E. praecursor must be referred to its own superfamily and family within Infraorder Anomura.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1730–1850 by Devoney Looser

536 Reviews Leibniz's calculating machine and Swift's Lagadian text-generating machine, while Sarah Kareem focuses on the sometime mineralogist, fabulist, and treasure-hunter Rudolph Raspe. Finally, Larry Stewart writes on attempts to quantify power dur ing the Industrial Revolution, culminating in James Watt's establishment of horse power as an arbitrary but necessary measurement. The strongest essay of the last section sees Carole Fabricant debunk the imper ial triumphalism of voyage literature by showing that,when not read through a perspective of Eurocentric national and technological superiority, these 'narratives tell a number of different,often conflicting stories?of defeat, humiliation, and vul nerability (p. 320). Fabricant demonstrates that James Cook's and Mungo Park's travelogues have an often overlooked Gulliverian, mock-heroic quality, wherein the European is frequently well out of his depth. Like all the best essays in the collection, Fabricant's contribution shows tensions between ideals and realities, planning and execution. Collectively, the book portrays the period as a delicate balance between dynamic forces of change, resistance to that change, and widely varying ability to implement change, individually and institutionally. Though the essays range in quality, the standard is consistently high. Keele University Nicholas Seager Women Writers and Old Age inGreat Britain, 1750-1850. By Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2008. xvi+234 pp. ?29. ISBN 978-0-8018-8705-5. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 Devoney Looser purports to investigate what she calls Titerary historical gerontography', a neolo gism of her own coining which might appear at first sight confusing, although in fact ?it suggests thatwriting about lives with a focus on advanced age is a compensatory gesture, following what has so often been a slight to that life stage in traditional literary?and even feminist literary?biography' (p. xii). That is to say, Looser chooses towrite about the late and very late production of women writers straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, regardless of the age of the characters that appear in their lateworks; indeed they are not all novelists and theworks under consideration are not necessarily works of fiction.What the author is trying to do is to extricate, out of themass of data on thewomen writers considered which she has assembled and correctly supplies to the reader, a pattern of theway contemporaries would judge old women when writing. The troublewith this aim is that she does not appear to be able to identify a pattern deriving from this search: we are therefore to follow her in her presentation of case studies and draw single conclusions from them. She remarks that for contemporaries 'Old age was presented as a woman's source of shame' (p. 4), old women being accused of querulousness and garrulousness, although at the same time 'Agedwisdom, though more readily tied tomen than to women, could adhere to old age' (p. 15). The only general conclusion to be drawn, it would appear, is that agism or proto-agism [. . .]played a role in the neglect ofmany women authors in their late lives', thus MLR, 105.2, 2010 537 impairing literary historical periodization' (pp. 168-69). It is a fact that literary history is habitually organized by authors' birth dates, whereas itwould look ra dically different iforganized by authors' death dates' (p. 169).To give an example: JaneAusten (1775-1817) andWalter Scott (1771-1832) would come before Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840). In pursuit of her purpose, after a very richly textured introduction, Looser dedi cates a chapter to Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and then single chapters to Catharine Macauley, to JaneAusten, to Hester Lynch Piozzi, to Anna Letitia Barbauld, and to JanePorter: all of them, except JaneAusten, lived to considerable and even advanced old age (between sixty-one and eighty-eight), which brings the reader towonder in the firstplace why a chapter should be dedicated toAusten, who lived only to be forty-two: in this case Looser definitely turns her interest to narrative characters, and precisely to old maids, whose peculiar plight, however, is contained within quite loose age-brackets, not necessarily definable as belonging to old age'. This uncertainty of a theoretical scheme does not mean...

Review: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850, by Devoney Looser

Review: <i>Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850</i>, by Devoney Looser

DEVONEY LOOSER. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850.

Devoney Looser’s study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers in old age has a striking opening: Virginia Woolf’s claim, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), that ‘Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney’. Burney died in 1840 aged 87, having outlived Austen by some 23 years. Woolf’s ‘impossible admonition’ arises, Looser argues, from a commonplace failure to attend to women writers after they reach old age—a failure that has impoverished accounts of women’s writing lives, and that in certain cases (Woolf’s included) has produced oddly distortive literary periodisations. Looser’s book is an attempt to make good the neglect, and to pose a set of conceptual challenges to literary history: how far was the old age of women writers a factor in their critical reception? How far did it shape their self-perceptions, including their perception of their literary powers and their right to an audience? Could older women expect to find success more readily in certain genres than in others? What might it mean to speak of women writers in old age as an identifiable grouping that cuts across differences in economic power, social status, and earlier reputational standing?

Women writers and old age in Great Britain, 1750-1850

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim-despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of classics, adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.

Use of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire to assess the mental health needs of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities

Background Over the last decade increased attention has been paid to identifying and responding to the mental health needs of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. There is, however, little information available on the use of self‐report scales by young people with intellectual disabilities. This study sought to determine the reliability and validity of the child, carer and teacher versions of the extended Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) when used with this population.Method Secondary analysis was undertaken of a nationally representative survey of the mental health of 4,449 children between 11 and 15 years of age in Great Britain. Data were extracted on an operationally defined sub‐sample of 98 children with intellectual disabilities, and on 4,074 children without intellectual disabilities.Results All scales on the SDQ proved to be internally consistent. Acceptable levels of validity were found by examining: (1) correspondence between parallel child, carer and teacher versions of the SDQ; (2) association between SDQ scores and ICD‐10 diagnoses.Conclusion The extended SDQ appears to provide a simple robust measure of the mental health needs of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities.

Adult life experiences and health in early old age in Great Britain

In Britain and other developed countries older people comprise a large majority of all those reporting long term illness or disability. However, most studies of socio-demographic variations in health have focussed on those in younger age groups. Moreover approaches to the study of health variations are often fragmented. In this study we have adopted a life course approach to analyse differentials in health in early old age. The data comes from the Retirement and Retirement Plans Survey and follow-up, a two-wave study of persons aged 55–69 in 1988/9. As well as information on current circumstances, the data set includes occupational, marital, and fertility history information. At baseline a nationally representative sample of the population of Great Britain were interviewed at home by trained interviewers ( n=3543). The sample was followed up and in 1994, 2247 survivors were re-interviewed, a response rate of 70% (of survivors). The data were weighted to adjust for non-response bias. Two outcome measures were used: self rated health and presence or absence of disability assessed from a scale derived from detailed questions on thirteen domains of disability. The severity score used was that developed for the 1985/6 ONS Surveys of Disability. The findings indicate that health and disability status at baseline and at follow up were associated with socio-economic and geographic variables, such as proportion of adult life spent unemployed and residence outside the Southeast of England; demographic factors, such as early age at marriage and high parity; and experience of adverse events, such as the death of a child and being dismissed from work. The results show that socio-economic, demographic, and geographical and ‘life events’ factors are all associated with health status in early old age and that integrated, rather than bifurcated, approaches to the study of health differentials are needed.

Where do People live and Where are They going? : Net Migration by Age in Great Britain

Where do People live and Where are They going? : Net Migration by Age in Great Britain

Accidents among children under two years of age in Great Britain

The object of this paper is to discuss the incidence and cause of accidents among young children. The material on which the study was based was collected in the course...