The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise, and: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf by Jacob Jewusiak (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise, and: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf by Jacob Jewusiak David McAllister (bio) The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Andrea Charise; pp. xlv + 194. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, $95.00, $34.95 paper. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf, by Jacob Jewusiak; pp. xi + 202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $108.00, $29.99, $29.99 ebook. The nineteenth century has long been fertile ground for scholars in the field of literary age studies. The disruption of traditional communities of care by urbanization, the emergence of an economic model that valorized the youthful body, and the development of medical and scientific disciplines that focused on old age all mark this period as one in which discourses of age and aging were being transformed. Two new books on the subject indicate a field that remains in rude health, with both Andrea Charise's The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, and Jacob Jewusiak's Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf offering compelling new approaches to the study of age and aging in nineteenth-century literature. Both books are substantially focused on Victorian literature and culture, though each expands its discussion of aging across period boundaries. Charise traces the influence of Romantic conceptions of age on Victorian novelists including George Eliot, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, and Anthony Trollope, while Jewusiak discusses a similarly canonical range of authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells before moving forward, in his final chapter, to consider Virginia Woolf's modernist approach to aging. They share a broadly historicist and interdisciplinary approach, with Charise's work in particular drawing on an unfamiliar selection of scientific and medical texts that cast fresh light on the construction of age throughout the nineteenth century. [End Page 354] Charise identifies an "unprecedented … climate of crisis associated with growing old" in the period, which first crystallized in the 1798 dispute between William Godwin and Thomas Malthus (xix). This debate ostensibly centered on the issue of population, but as Charise points out it was also fundamentally concerned with antithetical conceptions of age and aging. She describes their dispute (in a characteristically memorable phrase) as a competition between "the imagined romance of immortality and the observed reality of dwindling food supplies" and suggests that by recasting aging as a biopolitical problem Malthus initiated a more complex understanding of aging and generationality (2). These new conceptions of age demanded (and shaped) aesthetic representation, and in chapters on Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), Charise shows how the novel responded to that task by developing narratives of aging that challenged conventional models of human temporality. It is here, she argues, that we see the emergence of a new "longevity narrative" capable of grappling with this emerging sense that both age, and its normative categories, were more fluid than had previously been recognized (31). The book moves decisively onto Victorian territory in its third chapter, which offers a compelling account of how G. H. Lewes's understanding of physiological change, as expressed in The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60), helped shape Eliot's treatment of aging in Silas Marner (1861). Lewes's conception of physiological life as a constant flux between forces of waste and repair, in which waste ultimately gains the upper hand and leads to physical decay and death, offers a vision of life in which age and youth coexist, rather than functioning as discrete stages into and out of which the body passes as if crossing a threshold. Charise's illuminating reading of Silas Marner argues that Eliot took this model of "interior physiological simultaneity" and transposed it onto the collective context of Marner's Raveloe, to provide her with a model of idealized intergenerational reciprocity in which the interests of old and young are not seen as antithetical but mutually beneficial (76). "Insofar as...