Thursday 20th August

I have just finished reading all of Anthony Trollope’s novels, around forty or so of them.  And I am struck, amongst other things by just how many people died young.  Many infants never reached school age at all, many poor women died in childbirth or from complications soon after.  There were not a few cases of Consumption, the ‘Cancer’ of the Victorian Age, for which there was no cure, just a chance of prolonging life a few short years more.  And some died of drink, or soldiers in battle, or just of some undiagnosed debilitating disease.

Those that reached sixty without encountering any of the above might expect to live another ten years or so, but many died young.  The amazing thing is the amount they managed to accomplish in those sometimes short years.  Trollope himself died in his sixties but managed to write a huge number of novels and volumes of short stories and travelogues too.  Along with this he worked for most of those years as first a junior and then a senior member of the Post Office, never seeming to let his work interfere with his writing, or vice versa.  He also married and had several children, bought and sold houses and tried his hand at farming too.

People tended to leave school early, and the poor were barely educated at all.  Marriage was common in your teens and children too, many of them; families of ten children were not uncommon.  Men were elected to Parliament in their twenties and became ministers at thirty.  Of course the knowledge that life was short (or usually shorter than ours) meant that young age was no barrier to progress in many careers.

Nowadays with the sense that old age and retirement will come upon us later and later there is no such urgency.  Many are still pursuing their education well into their twenties, women are postponing having children until their forties or even later, and the young are still at home longer and longer.  Many may have to wait until their parents die before owning their own homes at all.  We can all expect (or hope) to live into our eighties and by then it could well be nineties, centurions may well become common.  But is a longer life necessarily a better one? Well, I sincerely hope so….