I remember, I remember

By Alan Shelston

In Anne Marsh-Caldwell’s novel of 1861, Emilia Wyndham, the heroine undergoes a sequence of misfortune: an unhappy marriage, financial disaster and the loss of her childhood home. But the worst of these is her responsibility for her elderly father who has sunk into terminal decline. She writes:

The state of her father’s intellects was beginning seriously to alarm her. She could no longer disguise from herself that the weakness of his comprehension, his disjointed and almost childish talk, his whining and peevish temper, and his confused and imperfect memory were merely the temporary effects of the debility consequent upon a long illness.

I suspect few people read this novel now, but this reminds us that while we may have given the conditions of old age their scientific names, there is nothing new about their reality for those who suffer them. Victorian writers were certainly intrigued by old age. This might in part be because life expectancy in the 19th-century was considerably lower than it is now. From the statistics collected at the time we might wonder indeed whether there were many old people around at all during the period. Literature and art, on the other hand, tell us a different story in which those who survived into old age played a very prominent part. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Samuel Bamford, Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria all survived into their eighties.

Florence Nightingale in bed in her room in South St., photogravure after a photograph by Bosanquet, 1906. Credit: Wellcome Collection

Queen Victoria wearing spectacles, unknown photographer, c.1890. She once remarked: ’I do not think...much of artistic arrangements in photographs and God knows there is nothing to admire in my ugly old person.’ Read more.

What is perhaps problematic, however, is that we have only a limited sense from biographies of how these people died. Not only do their biographers lack the specific terminology, they tend to use cautious glosses in their final pages. Gladstone, we are told, was ‘becoming confused’; Tennyson ‘would absent himself from conversation’. Elizabeth Longford writes that Queen Victoria had difficulty with speech and mental confusion; while George Eliot’s biographer, Gordon Haight, writes of Eliot’s father’s ‘increasing infirmities’.

The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens, 1840.

These figures were all very old indeed, but we rarely get the detail that would indicate a specific diagnosis. Such symptoms would likely be associated with dementia, a term that continues to be redefined. It’s not just biographers that struggle either. Henry James, according to accounts, having suffered two strokes, sent for a thesaurus to find out about his condition. 

Henry James, age 63, photogravure by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 12 June, 1906.

Henry James, age 11, with his father, Henry James Sr., daguerreotype by Mathew Brady, 1854.

The Portico Library issue page from Poems in Two Volumes, Volume II, Thomas Hood, 1846

For many 19th-century writers who reached old age, memory appears to have been a common theme. The title for this piece is taken from a poem written by the popular Victorian poet, Thomas Hood. I have ‘remembered’ it since my childhood and it has always seemed to me that the repetition in the first line, repeated through the poem, acts out the way in which memory arrives in the mind. ‘I remember – yes, I remember’ as we might put it. If my discussion in this article has a literary bias, that is because I remember a long university career of teaching literature and the pleasure that memory still gives me.

Alan Shelston is a member of The Portico Library