Aging and Generations in Margaret Oliphant’s Fiction

The concept of generation has two dimensions – familial and social – that together make it central to lived experience of temporality, and worth salvaging for both Aging Studies and Victorian Studies. This essay showcases the concept’s affordances through the work of Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897). Oliphant suggests that rather than aging being a smooth continuum, it is relational, given meaning by the coalescences and discontinuities of familial and social generation. In Hester (1883) and “Mr Sandford” (1888) particularly, Oliphant’s work shows us (1) the damaging and gendered effects of the binary category “old”, (2) the need to embrace a multi-generational society, and (3) the value of intergenerational relationships beyond vertical family ties.

This essay takes a particular strategic presentist approach, testing the applicability of modern sociological theories of generation to nineteenth-century literature. It makes a case for literary scholars to take such work seriously, and suggests how we might best do so.