English Aristocracy Research Articles

An essay on redefining tourism. An epistemological approach and town and country planning for tourism

Goal and objectives of the dissertationThe doctoral dissertation aims to identify the origins of tourism in order to shed light on its present state and redefine tourism both as a subject and a tool. The first objective is to understand the position of tourism in the scientific development process. The second objective that derives from the first is to apply the epistemological reading to the study of French town and country planning developments stemming from the changes in the tourist industry.MethodologyThe first theoretical part of our research mobilised some 600 bibliographic references including significant books, articles and doctoral dissertations worldwide in order to retrace knowledge development in the core areas of tourism research - economics, history, geography, and sociology. In each of these fields, the main lines of research along with the initial comments, theorisations, and conceptual basis, were identified, listed, prioritized and analysed. The second part of our work had only one source of factual information: the daily national press. Two daily French papers - Le Monde and Les Echos - were read over a couple of years (2014/2015), in addition to occasional reading of Marianne, Challenges, Le Figaro Economie, Liberation, and some fifty articles relating to tourism news were analysed with principal component and factor analysis methods.Theoretical conclusionsOur research has shown that the 18th century tourism revolution - alongside the industrial revolution - resonated in that of the 21st century born with the digital changeover because the analysis of the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) can be transferred there. Indeed the current digital upheaval corresponds to a new creative destruction with the introduction of innovative clusters. This forward momentum is quantitative - the number of international tourists quadrupled between 1980 and 2014, and increased by 44 since 1950 - and qualitative. In the 18th century, Northern Europe, and more specifically Great Britain, introduced the tourist flow. Nowadays, the South does. The first tourist revolution matrix was the British aristocracy. The second tourist revolution is based on the rise in power of the upper middle class linked to international tourism assessed between 700 million and 1 billion people. Related to the development of a global upper middle class, the main source of tourists, now representing over 15% of the world's population, the land use plan mainly based on traditional domestic clientele, hence a rather steady stream of income segment, has to switch to upmarket urban tourism.So, the evolution of tourism is marked by an innovative trend of the destinations, not following a development planning coming out of political bodies. The future is turning towards urban units. Tourism planning is no longer conditioned by secondary resorts in competition with each other, but by large urban units able to polarise distinct areas, that is to say to form ultimately new tourist development lines from a cutting-edge industry and a high class clientele.Practical application of the dissertationThis report is aimed at French tourism-planning decision-makers. Two lines of thought are suggested relating to the impetus and the role of tourist resorts on the one hand and the impact of the hotel and interrelated catering sector on the other. Tourism development based on digital technology has extended the scope of the tourist industry. These changes, together with the move upmarket and the widening of the range of accommodation - whether in hotels or not - has played a part in the diversification of the sector, confirming the necessity of redefining tourism. Tourism globalisation set up on upmarket structures does not challenge the trend known as 'mass tourism' but deprives it of any future prospects. Planning choices, even if they certainly depend on formal (such as the size of the towns concerned, the nature of the territory) and cyclical elements (the type of tourism developed, often inherited from a previous era), cannot ignore these new data. …

ANALYSIS OF EMBANKMENT HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT AS OPTIMAL ARCHITECTURAL AND PLANNING ENVIRONMENT FOR ALL RECREATIONAL TYPES AND FORMS

The analysis of historical development of the embankment, as technical construction which gains wide popularity during formation of coastal resorts of the English aristocracy of the XIX-XX centuries is carried out. Recreational development of the coast is defined as the major factor of transformation of natural landscapes. To give to the coast the correct form, strengthening, protection from washout, to increase city space embankments are under construction in a coastal zone. Again formed space is used for creation of promenades, esplanades, parks, piers, etc. The analysis shows that the embankment turns from an engineering construction in architectural and planning zones between the nature and the city which purpose is a creation of the optimal environment for all recreational types and forms. The obtained positive experience of city space increasing finds broad application by other countries. The conclusion is drawn, about what that in the course of historical development the embankment proved to be as a flexible architectural form, capable to develop, and its utilitarian functions was formed by its esthetic qualities.

Adultery in the Courts: Criminal Conversation in Ireland

In April 1806, Valentine Browne Lawless, the second baron Cloncurry, noticed his young wife Eliza walking arm-in-arm with his friend, Sir John Bennett Piers, a notorious womanizer, spendthrift and gambler. His suspicions aroused, Cloncurry confronted his wife, who confessed to having an affair with Piers, then staying as a guest on their estate at Lyons, Co. Kildare. A miniature portrait of Piers and a lock of his hair were found among Lady Cloncurry’s possessions. Piers, unsurprisingly, made a hasty departure, but wrote several times to Cloncurry denying the affair and making vague offers to duel. Cloncurry and Piers had been friends since their school days; furthermore, Piers owed Cloncurry a sum of money. While nothing, presumably, could entirely assuage the hurt feelings and wounded pride of the husband in such circumstances, the subsequent award of £20,000 damages by a King’s Bench jury may have helped. Represented by John Philpot Curran and Charles Kendal Bushe, he sued Piers for ‘criminal conversation’. Meanwhile, Lady Cloncurry, having been portrayed as ‘an artless and weak girl of nineteen’, left the country, her reputation in tatters, and later gave birth to a son presumed to be Piers’. Criminal conversation or ‘crim con’ was a ‘notorious’ civil action which allowed a cuckolded husband to recover damages from his wife’s lover. It evolved out of de facto blackmail agreements in the late seventeenth century and gained popularity among the English nobility in the eighteenth century until its abolition by the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, but because this Act did not extend to Ireland, Irish crim con actions endured until the twentieth century.

A Damned Mob of Corinnes: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Daughters of de Staël

Consider the biography of a typical mid-nineteenth-century American woman writer: Born on the fourth of July, she grew up fatherless, living with her mother and sister in a large, cold household dominated by wealthy uncles. Early on she showed intelligence but not much practical ability, and so eventually her uncles sent her to one of New England's newly-established colleges. She made a few good friends, but seemed to live mostly in her own world. When she returned home with her impractical degree, she retreated to a gloomy attic bedroom, where she settled into a routine of scribbling through the nights, occasionally burning her writings because of her increasingly intense shyness. She wrote a novel based on her college years. A few copies were published, but she was so embarrassed by its publication that she destroyed every copy she could find. After ten years of seclusion, she gradually emerged, anonymously publishing a few delicate stories that won her some encouragement from the literary world. She married late, and shortly after her marriage published a collection of short stories that earned some real critical acclaim. Despite the praise, she continued to belittle her own writing as scribbling. But she was encouraged by her ventures into the public sphere and desperate for money to feed her growing family, and so she tried her hand at another novel. Eventually she would publish four major novels centered on the great issues facing of the era: sexual freedom, family and domestic economy, social reform, and finally a Corinne-themed novel about American artists in Rome. This thumbnail biography uses feminine pronouns to describe the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is a small pronoun switch, but the trick works. Hawthorne's writing career fulfills almost all of the critical commonplaces about nineteenth-century writers, from the decade of lurking in an attic to the rewriting of Germaine de Stael. Does all this imply that Nathaniel Hawthorne considered himself a literary woman? No, probably not. Despite the congruency between Hawthorne's literary career and many nineteenth-century American writers' careers, I am not arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne should be reclassified as a literary woman. It is not my business to adjudicate the gender identification of a long-dead stranger. Nor is it my intention to shame Hawthorne as a sissy. But I do suggest positioning Nathaniel Hawthorne as a member of the d--d mob of scribbling women who dominated American fiction in the 1850s. When we place Hawthorne's work into a female dominated--or at least female-identified--field of cultural production and read Nathaniel Hawthorne as a participant in a female tradition, many of the questions that are central to Hawthorne scholarship turn sideways. Is Hawthorne's writing Romantic or sentimental? Reactionary or revolutionary? Masculinist or feminist? For this essay, the central question is: Does Nathaniel Hawthorne belong within or outside of the female tradition? Or, to put it more sharply: Was Nathaniel Hawthorne one of the American Corinnes? Although may be somewhat obscure today, according to Ellen Moers, Corinne stands alone ... in its enormous influence upon literary women (174). Since everyone read Corinne, none of the lists quite do justice to the novel's central importance. Nonetheless, Toril Moi offers a partial list: Jane Austen, Mary Godwin Shelley, George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller (The Yankee Corinna), Kate Chopin--all of them read Corinne, passionately (145). Even readers today who may not be familiar with would recognize some elements of de Stael's plot, which was refracted through so many nineteenth-century novels. is a beautiful, dark-haired romantic genius who declaims her own improvised poetry on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. The crowds cheer and a visiting British aristocrat falls in love with her. …

Feats and Feasts: The Valorization of Sir Gareth of Orkney’s “Grete Laboure”

In the late fifteenth century, when persistent political strife had dimmed the aura of the English warrior aristocrat and when non-nobles reshaped the discourses of power, Sir Thomas Malory reaffirmed chivalric society in a bold way. In his Tale of Gareth the Arthurian synthesizer closely aligned knightly worshyp with that same manual work—burden and mark of the peasant—traditionally juxtaposed to the noble lifestyle. There the young Sir Gareth of Orkney rejects aristocratic entitlement and parasitism, and his social advance carefully pairs martial laboure with the needful, Rabelaisian replenishment served by a good appetite.

On Eforgan’s <em>Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor</em>

On Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (revised 2d edition). By Estel Eforgan. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013. 296 pp., 978-0853039150 (pb). US $32.95.When actor and screenwriter Leslie Howard died in a mysterious plane crash over Bay of Biscay in June 1943, Guardian obituary described his most outstanding quality: the intensely English quality which made him popular everywhere.1 Even today, Howard is remembered primarily for his roles as English aristocrat in films such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (Harold Young, UK, 1934) and Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, UK, 1938), or as tragic hero in productions like Of Human Bondage ( John Cromwell, USA, 1934) and Gone with Wind (Victor Fleming [George Cukor], USA, 1939). As a symbol of refinement and gentlemanliness, Howard's character spoke to social instability British audiences were experiencing due to political crisis and war. It was a time when conceptions of Englishness were being challenged-not least because of influx of Jewish migrants and refugees escaping persecution in Europe who created a space of difference in British society. Howard, as Estel Eforgan's meticulously researched biography, Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor, reveals, was nothing if not aware of social and political influences of his dramatic persona.Eforgan's biography is a compelling and thorough overview of Howard's life and career within context of social and political upheaval, migration, and war. As such it makes an important contribution to fields of media and cultural studies, as well as Jewish studies, revealing influential role that actors and filmmakers played in political arena. As Eforgan uncovers, there was more to Howard's persona as ideal Englishman than most people consider. Leslie Howard Steiner, whose father was a Jew and whose mother's origins were also Jewish (from Russia and East Prussia), was intensely committed to political activism and anti-Nazi efforts in years leading up to World War II. And while biography covers much more than that-including Howard's career on English stage in 1920s and launch of his stardom in New York and Hollywood-Eforgan makes clear that by mid-1930s Howard was making career and life choices that were influenced by politics. More specifically, he began to use his fame as a tool to resist Hitler's rise to power and persecution of Jews in Europe.Eforgan's sympathy for her subject will strike a chord with readers and personalize exhaustive amount of detail on Howard's life. The chapters that trace Howard's development as an actor, screenwriter, producer, director, and public intellectual from 1920s to 1940s are filled with lively anecdotes as well as with valuable comments on social and cultural milieu. Some of most entertaining points in biography include Eforgan's musings on Howard's stage mishaps and love affairs, and colorful characters who peppered actor's professional and personal lives. Yet it is way Eforgan frames Howard's career in connection with Jewish migration and persecution during rise of Nazism and at start of World War II that makes this biography especially noteworthy. Eforgan's view that these elements played a key role in actor's life is underscored in way biography is bookended by Leslie Howard's little-known Jewish roots. The work begins with a story of Howard's real family history in Vienna and England (3), and ends with his last speech before his death, when he laughed at someone's suggestion that he was idealised picture of perfect Englishman. He surprised press when he publicly admitted, suppose we do not have to tell them that I began as a Hungarian (229).Indeed, there is a good deal to discover about British Jewish migration, as well as assimilation, at turn of century from Eforgan's description of Leslie Howard's background. …

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston

Reviewed by: The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston Jenny Barker Devine (bio) The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. vii, 345. $47.50 cloth) Most historians agree that the emergence of free-labor principles in the 1850s and regional divisions along economic lines fueled sectional antagonism leading to the Civil War. Narratives crafted by historians Eugene D. Genovese, Eric Foner, and others have described how an urban, industrial North outpaced an antiquated, agrarian South. Historian James L. Huston takes this interpretation to task in The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America, by arguing that the sectional crisis was actually rooted in rural America, where concepts of land use and ownership created very different societies in the North and South. Southern planters emulated the landed, leisured British aristocracy, seeking large holdings that relied on a subjugated (enslaved) labor force. Northern family farms, on the other hand, required small parcels of land, a family workforce, and the services [End Page 250] of independent, small-town merchants and artisans. These systems created vastly different societies that each hoped to replicate in the West, giving rise to tensions over slavery and landownership. Huston’s highly readable narrative opens by explaining the evolution of the British landholding system and the eventual triumph of the landed estate in the wake of the English Civil War. The gentry created a social system that eschewed manual labor and upheld leisure as an ideal. As leaders, they believed their time was best spent on education, politics, the arts, and the “mastery” of commanding subordinates (p.11). Their hunger for land compromised a dwindling yeomanry and middle class that adhered to Puritan doctrines of achieving moderate, sustainable livelihoods. Huston’s transnational approach takes a much longer view of landownership and explains how British colonizers transferred this conflict to North America. In the colonies, however, an abundance of land and resources, as well as the introduction of African slavery, allowed for family farms and plantations to flourish simultaneously in different regions. In constructing his argument, Huston pays careful attention to settlement patterns, geography, and climate, taking into consideration the suitability of the North to grains and livestock and the South to commercial crops such as cotton and tobacco. Ultimately, though, Huston argues that landholding patterns are a “man-made determination,” and here is where readers will want to focus their attention (p. 131). Recounting decades of historiography, he argues that southern planters “ruined the chances of the small farmers to obtain land,” and he provides persuasive evidence through a quantitative comparison of land use within congressional districts (p. 131). He takes this argument a step further by adamantly asserting that the sectional crisis was purely a dispute over landownership and that the growth of industry should be removed from the equation entirely. After all, the politicians who crafted the endless compromises related to slavery and westward expansion, including David Wilmot and Stephen A. Douglas, represented rural districts. Huston goes so far as to say: “the obsession of historians with urbanization and industrialization has [End Page 251] had a warping influence on the understanding of American history prior to 1880” (pp. 212–13). Huston neglected to take into account the growing literature on yeoman farmers in the South, as well as the growth of commercial agriculture, mining, cattle, and timber industries in rural areas that fueled the growth of urban industrialization. This complicates the story because, in many ways, the lines between industry and agriculture are not as distinctive as Huston portrays them. Nonetheless, The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer demonstrates that the causes of the American Civil War are far from resolved. Huston’s call to reconsider the rural nature of the sectional crisis introduces new life into an old debate and his conclusions warrant further investigation at the federal, state, and local levels. Jenny Barker Devine JENNY BARKER DEVINE teaches history at Illinois College in...

Enhanced Life Expectancy During the Golden Age of Islamic Civilisation

People living in Muslim countries in 2013 had an average life expectancy at birth of just 67 years - four years lower than the global average of 71 years! Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the number of years an individual is expected to live. Global average life expectancy today is much greater than what is was in 1900 - then only 31 years. During the period of the medieval Islamic Caliphate, however, life expectancy at birth of the general population was relatively high, above 35 years, according to Conrad Lawrence (1995) in the book, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800. This is greater than longevity figures estimated for late medieval English aristocracy (30 years), and for populations in classical Greece (28 years) and classical Rome (20-30 years).

Enhanced Life Expectancy during the Golden Age of Islamic Civilisation

People living in Muslim countries in 2013 had an average life expectancy at birth of just 67 years – four years lower than the global average of 71 years! Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the number of years an individual is expected to live. Global average life expectancy today is much greater than what is was in 1900 – then only 31 years. During the period of the medieval Islamic Caliphate, however, life expectancy at birth of the general population was relatively high, above 35 years, according to Conrad Lawrence (1995) in the book, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800. This is greater than longevity figures estimated for late medieval English aristocracy (30 years), and for populations in classical Greece (28 years) and classical Rome (20-30 years).

Book Review: Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000: An Open Elite?

Book Review: <i>Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000: An Open Elite?</i>

WHY AUTHORS USE MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS IN NOVELS, PLAYS AND SHORT STORIES?

MS is a relatively new disease probably first described in 1843 by an English aristocrat Sir Augustus C'Este'. Earlier description of symptoms typical of MS such as Lidwina Von Schiedan...

Os desafios de traduzir Flaubert e Zola na Inglaterra vitoriana

The late-Victorian two-tier public (circulating libraries, e.g., Mudie’s Select Library) and private (secret literary societies, e.g. The Lutetian Society) publishing field was at the centre of profound social transformations tied to literacy. The hierarchical structure of the field reveals the degree to which speech has traditionally been controlled in Britain, in alignment with the country’s rigid class structure. This reality marks a sharp contrast with the generally held view that Great Britain has historically been a model of free speech and democratic values. The article explains that the bourgeoning moral majority preoccupied with protecting the moral integrity of newly literate working class readers and women readers of all classes wished to quell the perceived scourge of pornography, believed to be promoted by dissolute foreigners and British aristocrats. In order to avoid prosecution, editors and translators needed to consider not only patterns of reader expectations, but also the discursive constraints that aligned with Victorian values. An example of an editor who overestimated the degree of freedom of expression was Henry Vizetelly, who attempted to provide working class and female readers with translations of Zola’s and Flaubert’s works. While Madame Bovary was not banned by the courts, many of Zola’s novels were.

:Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000: An Open Elite?

:<i>Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000: An Open Elite?</i>

Coda

Coda

Brendan Smith. Crisis and Survival in Late Medieval Ireland: The English of Louth and their Neighbours, 1330–1450.

Brendan Smith's central tenet in this book is that the English in Ireland were part of a larger English world. In doing so, he acknowledges an intellectual debt to the pioneering work of Robin Frame, whose work emphasized that Englishness did not end at the frontiers of England. What distinguishes Smith's work, though, are his chosen methods. Smith focuses on the English of Louth, a region in Ireland possessing both a coast and a deeper hinterland. Louth, through its ports, was an integral part of the medieval English maritime empire, in contrast to towns such as Ardee and Kells, which were located in the marches and exposed to the great Irish princely families of south Ulster. While Smith's approach is avowedly regional, his is also a study of English nobility, drawing upon the earlier work of K. B. McFarlane and Robert Rees Davies. Smith advocates that the history of medieval Ireland is very different when viewed through the prism of a regional case study, challenging old interpretations. Fortunately for Smith, the surviving medieval source material relating to the English of Louth is relatively plentiful in comparison to other parts of Ireland, although Smith freely admits that there are gaps in comparison to those available for the counties of England. Even so, he marshals the evidence with skill to set forth a convincing case for the Englishness of the Louth colony, drawing upon family deeds and charters relating to land and marriage, church records detailing Louth's holdings, as well as the surviving revenue records and parliamentary proceedings of the colony. In turn, he blends this mix with Irish annalistic sources, depicting the settlers at war with the Irish.

British Aristocrats Work and Play on the U.S. Frontier

British Aristocrats Work and Play on the U.S. Frontier

Leviathan and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms

The problems of the Stuart multiple monarchy provide an important context for Hobbes’s Leviathan. His fellow Royalists were divided over whether to use Scottish or Irish assistance in regaining Charles’s throne, and Hobbes’s work can be read as a qualified endorsement of his patrons’ Scottish invasion strategy, to which a caustic assault on clerical power was then added. But Leviathan was more than a factional position paper; it was a Utopian masterpiece designed to secure lasting peace. Leviathan proposed to end the structural differences between the three kingdoms and to curb the power of an overmighty British aristocracy.

Horrors at Home: From Sensation Scandal to Gothic Melodrama

On the surface Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula and Mary Cholmondeley's 1899 Red Pottage seem alike only in their fin de siècle publication dates and their popularity with the reading public. Yet Stoker's bloody chronicle of vampire hunting and Cholmondeley's melodramatic domestic tale share a common interest in horror as an affective state and an aesthetic technique. This essay argues that by grafting the affect and imagery of horror onto domestic scenes, Red Pottage, like Dracula, envisions a British society assaulted by a corrupting force that saps its vitality and health. But unlike Dracula, Red Pottage locates that monstrosity not in a foreign threat but in the hypocritical degeneracy of the English church, aristocracy, and most fundamentally, bourgeois matrimony. Breaking with contemporaneous imperial gothic and with the earlier generation of sensation fiction that influenced her work, Cholmondeley shifts the blame for corruption away from both the feminine and the foreign, traditional (and often synergistic) sources of threat. The novel portrays patriarchal marriage as destructive to community and to intellectual attainment for men and women alike. Alternatively, it depicts appealing characters that disrupt the gender binary and remain unmarried, traveling abroad as the story concludes. Red Pottage locates hope for the future beyond the traditional domestic sphere: outside romantic and familial relationships and outside Great Britain itself. By infusing realist representation with the emotional and visceral force of more popular literary modes, it also participates in the nascent renegotiation of literary goals and methods that modernism would carry forward.

Avoiding “Aunt Tomasina”: Charles Dickens Responds to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Black American Reader, Mary Webb

This essay analyses Charles Dickens’s April 1857 letter to the Earl of Carlisle about Mary E. Webb, a mixed-race American actress for whom Harriet Beecher Stowe had written a one-woman performing version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Webb tried to see Dickens, bringing a letter of introduction from the Earl. Though clearly familiar with her status as a refined, trained elocutionist sponsored by British aristocrats, Dickens’s letter mocks her as a stereotypically uncultivated “Aunt Tomasina expounding King Lear,” a racially inferior outsider attempting unsuccessfully to invade the precincts of high culture and respectable public readings. Though Dickens was staunchly antislavery, the letter shows Dickens as obviously racist; my analysis contextualizes his response to Webb in relation to Victorian racial attitudes, blackface minstrelsy, the history of public readings, and the reception of African Americans in Britain, as well as Dickens’s personal anxieties about the security of his class status and his rivalry with bestselling author Stowe.

Prosper and Live Long: Productive Life Span Tracks Increasing Overall Life Span Over Historical Time among Privileged Worker Groups.

Life expectancy has increased continuously for at least 150 years, due at least in part to improving life conditions for the majority of the population. A substantial part of this historical increase is due to decreases in early life mortality. In this article, we analyze the longevity of four privileged sets of adults who have avoided childhood mortality and lived a life more similar to the modern middle class. Our analysis is focused on writers and musicians from the 17th through the 21st centuries. We show that their average age at death increased only slightly between 1600 and 1900, but in the 20th century increased at around 2 years/decade. We suggest that this confirms that modern life span extension is driven by delay of death in older life rather than avoidance of premature death. We also show that productive life span, as measured by writing and composition outputs, has increased in parallel with overall life span in these groups. Increase in age of death is confirmed in a group of the minor British aristocracy and in members of the US Congress from 1800 to 2010. We conclude that both life span and productive life span are increasing in the 20th and early 21st century, and that the modern prolongation of life is the extension of productive life and is not the addition of years of disabling illness to the end of life.