The term “generations” is everywhere. Successive demographic cohorts are construed as being in zero-sum competition over authority, airtime, resources, or power.Footnote ¹ In the British press, for instance, it is commonplace to see the interests of newly pensionable “babyboomers” pitted against those of “millennials,” and for such rivalry to be seen as personal, structural, or both. From serious sociological and economic analysis to pop-quiz punditry, it is taken for granted that the idea of a generation is useful. In cultural historiography, too, the term is ascribed explanatory force: first and second generation Romantic poets, “Bloomsbury” defying “Victorian,” and so on. In practice, however, such commentaries often rely on ahistorical assumptions about the meanings of age-identity (“child” versus “adult”), Freudian accounts of family structure (child vis-à-vis parent) and dialectical readings of historical change (such as revolution/reaction). So does the term do more than offer a crude signpost to social context and a checklist of remembered ephemera?Footnote ² What is its value as a heuristic?

The term “generations” can point either laterally or vertically: across to an imagined cohort stratum, or up/down to other generations. In literary theory the idea of strife between poets and their precursors, broadly cast as sons and fathers in an Oedipal clinch and theorised from the perspective of the sons, has had critical purchase since Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973).Footnote ³ Retrospective accounts of the Victorian period can appear to endorse the Bloomian paradigm: think of the generational confrontations depicted in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903) or Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). Such instances, however, suggest the contingency as well as the force of the model—the likelihood, for example, that Butler's and Gosse's representations of generational conflict were shaped by their shared consciousness of Darwinian thought.

This kind of vertical parent-child face-off may be most salient for those with a collective identity to forge like the Bloomsbury set, or for only children like Gosse junior. It is perhaps less relevant for daughters, or in large multi-child families, where the older siblings may be raising younger ones, or reaching maturity and having children of their own while the youngest are still at home, or indeed in a working-class dynamic where children join the wage-earning or productive part of the family. If we consider the operative unit to be the household, the association or neighborhood rather than some imagined version of the nuclear family, the Oedipal model of generational competition comes under pressure.Footnote ⁴

Since the Victorian period, the theorist arguing most forcibly for the significance of generation as a sociological category was Karl Mannheim, whose seminal essay “The Problem of Generations” (1952) asked his reader to imagine “what the social life of man would be like if one generation lived on forever and none followed to replace it.”Footnote ⁵ He used this hypothetical scenario to demonstrate that the continual supersession of one generation by another needed to be factored into analyses. While his model has been criticised for oversimplifying and conflating age and cohort,Footnote ⁶ he acknowledges and challenges these distinctions: “do we put the [Prussian] peasants, scattered as they are in remote districts and almost untouched by current upheavals, in a common actual generation group with the urban youth of the same period? Certainly not! … [But] they are similarly located, in so far as they are potentially capable of being sucked into the vortex of social change.”Footnote ⁷ Mannheim's initial exploration thus offers a rallying point around which later scholars of generation have clustered.Footnote ⁸

One of the few current Victorianists to take up Mannheim's challenge is Martin Hewitt, who has recently revived attention to this keyword, arguing that Victorianists use “generation” anachronistically. The Victorian period “offers few of the sorts of movements of generational revolt visible in the subsequent century, and indeed there was nothing in Victorian self-conceptions to match the readiness with which they themselves interpreted the contemporary history of the European continent in broad generational patterns.” He suggests that Victorians themselves understood generation as “less a matter of rupture than of modulation.” He shows for instance how the history of ideas maps onto the birth dates (and shared historical experiences) of contributors to high-status periodicals, highlighting “generational effects” that can include stagnation as well as change.Footnote ⁹

Other scholars have followed similar lines of inquiry, though using the idea of generation less explicitly. Art historian Martin Myrone, for instance, has examined the cohorts of artists who enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools between 1760 and 1830 (a total of 1,600). Myrone observes that if we turn away from the striking or canonical figures of nineteenth-century British art—the Turners and Constables—and consider instead the “origins, social trajectory and values” of obscurer but more typical R. A. scholars, different determinations, and different generational rhythms, become audible. Looking at institutional cohorts as a whole throws light on changing cultures of artistic practice and their dynamic relationship to other variables such as professionalization, market oversupply, embourgeoisement.Footnote ¹⁰ Myrone's project thus queries conventional periodization, and through this some of art history's conventional wisdom. Mark Curthoys’ sampling of students matriculating at Oxford in selected years across the nineteenth century likewise enables him to identify moments of shift. He shows the third quarter of the century to be decisive in finally diversifying and secularizing Oxford graduates’ career paths. Almost half of those who matriculated in 1818 and 1848 went into the Church, whereas among the 1878 and 1897 year groups it fell to 29% and 18%.Footnote ¹¹ By contrast, the landed families only lost their dominance in the student body in the wake of the 1870s agricultural depression.Footnote ¹²

There has been a realization that the digitization of large data sets, and the “distant readings” of cohorts they allow, empower historians to gain a more granular picture of the links between structural change and biographical profile, and hence perhaps a more objective account of generational patterning.Footnote ¹³ One such large online data set that offers a window into how the late-Victorians saw preceding generations is the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900), a key tool in a current project by the authors. The DNB includes a disproportionate number of entries on nineteenth-century individuals, suggesting that the urge to commemorate these generations trumped deference to the recently deceased.Footnote ¹⁴ The peak of this trend was the birth year 1819, with a record-breaking 244 entries. This apparently unusually eminent generation born in 1819 includes Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, George Eliot, John Ruskin, war photographer Roger Fenton, radical Ernest Jones, “sewer king” Joseph Bazalgette, and many more.Footnote ¹⁵ Using this resource as a starting point, and supplementing it with data collected by Helen Rogers from the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies and other sources, we hope to explore how these figures understood the relationship between contemporaneity, age identity, and historical consciousness. While these individuals are often considered separately, they are rarely recognized as exact contemporaries. Nor are they often seen in their Regency context, born in the inauspicious year of Peterloo. Examining these figures as part of a generation, however, can recast our sense of periodization and offer us Victorians before they knew they were Victorian.