Wendy Mitchell’s memoir Somebody I Used to Know (2018) is not in the first instance a narrative about becoming old. Wendy Mitchell is only fifty-eight when her purposeful world of fulfilling professional work, keeping fit and single-parent family life begins to blur and lose definition. She goes to see her doctor to seek a diagnosis following a nasty, unexplained fall when running. Her doctor shrugs and unthinkingly accounts for it with one word: “age” (ch. 1). Mitchell’s narrative records a process of investigation that eventually produces a diagnosis of cognitive decline: specifically, young-onset Alzheimer’s (ch. 3). Prior to this, her doctor had unthinkingly read profound cognitive impairment as though it were simply a consequence of ‘age,’ or a taken-for-granted descent into longevity as inevitable physical decline. Indeed, even when she knows that her condition cannot be accounted for by age alone, the conventional stereotypes of old age are precisely the images that haunt Wendy Mitchell as she recalls picture-writing the dementia-to-come: “men and women at the end of their lives, old and white-haired … blank stares, the helplessness” (ch. 3, emphasis added).

Despite – or perhaps because of – this anticipated and perceived helplessness, however, Mitchell in fact writes a work of self-help. She tells a compelling story about sustaining rather than losing selfhood. Her narrative therefore participates in the wider tradition of self-help narrative that has a long literary and cultural history. What this essay will uncover is the way in which the self-help tradition itself has come to include ageing as one of its key concerns, and how, conversely, the writers of stories of ageing and decline often participate in this generic tradition, intending to help their readers as well as themselves.

The self-help narrative has been and continues to be an important contributor to the literature of ageing and gerontology (academic and popular) in ways that I shall seek to explore in this essay. The historical frame is important: we are, as Joan Bakewell observes, in the midst of experiencing “a changing place called old age” (the phrase from my title) because of changing attitudes to ageing; but also the appreciation of specific demographic challenges posed today.

Prologue

The interdisciplinary ‘Ages and Stages’ project, funded initially under the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme, has evolved into a continuing collaboration between Keele University and the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme. The first ‘Ages and Stages’ project (2009–12) examined historical representations of ageing within the Vic's ground-breaking documentaries and docudramas (produced between 1964 and 1995), and explored the contemporary recollections and experiences of older people who are, or have been, associated with the theatre in different ways. Archival and interview material was drawn together to create the ‘Ages and Stages’ exhibition and a new, hour-long, documentary drama, ‘Our Age, Our Stage’. Between 2012 and 2013, further funds were secured from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) follow-on scheme to focus on translational work, and we were subsequently awarded two additional grants by the AHRC under their Cultural Value Project. In this chapter we concentrate on the first three-year project; readers interested in following through what we have done subsequently are invited to visit the ‘Ages and Stages’ and ‘Live Age Festival’ websites (www.keele.ac.uk/agesandstages and www.liveagefestival.co.uk).

Act One: Setting the scene

Social and critical gerontologists, as well as literary and cultural scholars, are increasingly interested in the artistic engagement of older people, and in how the arts may construct, perpetuate or challenge stereotypical views of old age and existing models of the ageing process (Gullette, 1997, 2004, 2011; Basting, 1998, 2009; Small, 2007; Lipscomb and Marshall, 2010; Mangan, 2013). While recent reviews (Cutler, 2009; Castora-Binkley et al, 2010; Mental Health Foundation, 2011; Noice et al, 2014) affirm the value of older people's engagement in cultural activities, they also point to a lack of research on theatre and drama more specifically. This is despite the fact that, as Lipscomb (2012) argues, theatre provides us with an untapped potential for interdisciplinary collaborations and investigations; it is a cultural arena in which both ageing and older people are highly visible as audience members, participants, characters and increasingly, as performers (Bernard and Munro, 2015).

In terms of representations, there is a long tradition of theatre drawing heavily on stereotypes of older people and on deficit models of the ageing process, extending back to early Greek tragedies (Charney, 2005; Robson, 2009).

In 1894 the young Cambridge biologist William Bateson published a book about evolution entitled Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species. Bateson hoped it would be a groundbreaking book; he signaled that in the reference to both “discontinuity” and “the origin of species” in his sub-title, the book announcing its intent to begin to question the received authority of Darwinism. Skeptical of the dominant paradigms for organizing and interrogating evolutionary evidence of variation and selection, Bateson accumulated and published a vast range of facts to challenge Darwin's ascendancy. Among the huge range of sample specimens from museums, private collections, journals, and illustrations, Bateson included some beetle (Coleoptera) specimens manifesting an oddness of character – supernumerary legs – that he sought to explain with reference to a phenomenon that became known as Bateson's Rule. As I will argue, Bateson's Rule presented multiple, and thus over time quite far-reaching, implications for ideas about replication – or “reduplication,” as Bateson called it – adding to the stockpile of terms that we have inherited from the Victorian period for assessing the place of ideas about mimicry, imitation, replication, and reproduction in biology and culture.

Gregory Bateson was an ethnographer, biologist, ethologist, theorist of systems, and author of the seminal work Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972); he was also William Bateson's youngest son. Over time – seventy-eight years, to be precise – he came to appreciate the role of his father's rule in understanding patterns of replication and variation in morphogenesis – or the development of shape in an organism – to begin with, and then over a wide range of contexts and systems. He set this out in the essay “A Re-examination of ‘Bateson's Rule,’” and other essays that were collected together to make Steps. One of the aims of this present volume is to explore the historical roots of both imaginative and anxious responses to replication in scientific and cultural systems. Consequently, this chapter is framed around the complex passages of time and acts of information exchange through which the passing on of ideas across three generations in an intellectual family occurred.

Introduction

Ageing can be both understood and described as a storied process, part of what Holstein and Gubrium (2011, p 103) have described as ‘the narrative quality of lives’. We hear and tell stories about growing old; we read and watch published and filmed stories about older people; we are surrounded by images of ageing with their implicit narratives. Such stories permeate our social world and shape our expectations about older people and about growing old ourselves. In this chapter we intend to explore this process further, drawing on research that has explored the character of the stories that older people tell about their lives and, in some cases, making the links to more formal narratives found in genres such as fiction and other representational practices, in collaborative artwork, in art galleries and the theatre. We are particularly interested in how dominant social representations of ageing (Moscovici, 2000) can be contested through a process of active narrative work, that is, engaging older people with representational processes at various levels as consumers of such narratives (as readers, as members of group interactions, as theatre goers, as social beings) and as producers of them (discursively, in interviews and groups, using diaries and through various forms of artistic expression). In highlighting such elements, we are interested in ways of challenging negative social representations of ageing through the active participation of older people in different art forms.

Both narrative making and narrative exchange are everyday processes of making sense of a changing world by which we provide a certain meaningful coherence to a series of events. Such narratives have a certain form and structure which can convey not only particular thoughts about those events, but also incorporate gestures, feelings and actions. As such, narratives can become not only descriptions of past events but plots for future actions. Freeman (2011) has described the phenomenon of ‘narrative foreclosure’ or the process by which we come to believe that life is over before it is physically ended. We stop developing initiatives and accept that decline and exclusion are inevitable. Public institutions often reinforce this narrative in their negative representations of ageing and in their exclusion of older people from a range of activities.

Narrative accounts are habitually and constantly exchanged and shared in everyday social interaction.

In June 1829, a remarkable essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review. Entitled ‘Signs of the Times’ it prophesied, in an unusually energetic and compelling style, the crisis facing an industrializing – indeed mechanizing – society. Urban experience was in the ascendant and responding to an increasingly complex, rapidly expanding social machine. Exploring the ways in which traditionally constituted modes of inward reflection, such as religion, were fragmenting under the pressure of speculative and journalistic over-production, the essay feared that even ‘literature’ had been re-organized by the ‘Genius of Mechanism.’ Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the Times’ has long been regarded as a seminal work for appreciating the onset of the urban, industrial, and intellectual expansion that characterized the distinctive tensions organizing Victorian culture. It needs also to be seen as part of a wider challenge: how should one see, understand, and record the vast material expansion that was being experienced? One answer came in the form of the compendious Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, the catalogue which preserved for posterity the contents and layout of the great Crystal Palace in South Kensington in 1851. The three volumes might be seen as the triple-decker novel to end all triple-deckers, nothing less than a vast map of mid-Victorian ‘things’ and the machinery that produced them.

IN IANMCEWAN's Enduring Love, Joe Rose, the narrator of the story and a science journalist by profession, undertakes some research towards his next project, about ‘the death of anecdote and narrative in science’ (McEwan 1998, 41). In doing this, he ventures to the London Library, a place that the philosopher of neo-Darwinism, Daniel C. Dennett, might refer to as a branch of ‘the library of Babel’. Rose is more at home in the harder edged world of Babel's analogue and antithesis – what Dennett referred to as ‘the library of Mendel’, or the DNA holdings of letter sequences, codes and ‘paragraphs’ that compose the genomic templates organizing life. Rose despises the Victorian London Library for the paucity of its scientific collections, and bemoans the library's ‘assumption… that the world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared to call themselves educated individuals, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilisation?’ (42). The question of literature's role in generating and enhancing ‘civilization’ remains, for intellectuals trained in science, a contested one.

Rose's purpose is to locate scientific writing on the edge of extinction: he peruses a key nineteenth-century source of scientific inquiry and debate, the journal Nature, established by T. H. Huxley in the late 1860s. The narrator locates an anecdote from a correspondent about a dog which appears, through its actions in relation to its human masters, to display some strikingly human traits: having been ordered off its favourite spot, it seems to dupe its master into a course of action that permits the dog to return, triumphantly, to the spot from which it has been removed: for the correspondent of 1904 this demonstrates canine memory, foresight and cunning. Of course, to the modern scientific journalist this merely represents a tendency of thought among ‘Darwin's generation’ which ‘was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles’. What draws the narrator's attention to this anecdote is ‘how the power and attractions of narrative had clouded judgment … No theory evinced, no terms defined, a meaningless sample of one, a laughable anthropomorphism’ (41). As this chapter will argue, narrative in science is far from dead.

CULTIVATING THE SINS OF WRITING IN THE FIELD OF EVOLUTIONARY SPECULATION

When contemplating the gentlemen of science in Leslie Stephen's metaphoric theatrical ‘box’, Samuel Butler inclined towards a hermeneutic of suspicion. Writing in 1890 about scientific exposition in the context of what he held to be the theory that ‘deadlocked’ progress in evolutionary thought – the theory of evolution by natural selection, elaborated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – Butler remarked that:

In looking for the place where the sources of this suspicion were acted out, Butler appealed to the concept of the field; writers worked in fields of intellectual endeavour, synchronically and historically. From the early 1860s, Butler found himself working in the same field as Charles Darwin. In writing about evolution, Butler came to the view that Darwin had failed properly to acknowledge the contributions of those earlier evolutionists who had shaped the common speculative endeavour, in particular Erasmus Darwin, Buffon and Lamarck. Crucially, for Butler, style marked out a writer's distinctive and resonant place in the field.

‘LIFE, LIFE, LIFE’: A READING AND WRITING RELATION

In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold offered his gospel proclaiming sweetness and light. ‘Culture’ would speak through ‘all the voices of human experience … of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion’. The many-sided receptor of culture would then look and listen: ‘Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice’ (97). Arnold had listened, and his response was to satirise. One vocal tone to receive this treatment belonged to the poet Robert Buchanan, who had celebrated God’s ‘move to multiplicity’ and ‘divine philoprogenitiveness’. Arnold cites Buchanan’s language praising God’s ‘love of distribution and expansion into living forms’ at length:

Arnold’s discourse on ‘culture’ here cites and confronts a discourse on ‘life’ and its divinely sanctioned reproductive urges. Buchanan’s language celebrating divinely created and cherished swarms of living things is derived in part from Christian traditions of agape, and in part from the popular science of phrenology.

In nineteenth-century England ‘culture’ signified, variously, occupation and tilling of the land; the ‘harrowing of selves’; and, increasingly, a space which writers and critics came to see as ‘a court of appeal’ for issuing judgements and evaluations of human artistic and intellectual practices, and their educative capacity. The court of appeal was one venerated location within the totality of culture's sphere of operations, a sphere that came increasingly to be imagined as a field, thereby neatly looping back to the horticultural origins of the term. Conceiving the operations of culture's field always involved symbolic imaginings: from Wordsworth's wandering pedlar to J. H. Green's Coleridgean fenced field, cleared of noxious speculative growths, to Herbert Spencer's ghostly ‘secondary environment’ to J. G. Frazer's ‘ether’ mysteriously connecting the different strands of the ‘tangled skein’ of magic, science and religion and, finally, to T. H. Huxley's garden-colony, as both a site of judgement and a volatile ‘hothouse’ of symbolic activity. In imagining the power and reach of ‘culture’, scientific discourse, especially from the evolutionary life sciences, sought to engage audiences with the wonders of its new and challenging revelations, and to fashion symbolic substitutes for a crumbling Christian religion. In doing this, the life sciences contributed what Gabriel Tarde described as ‘insertions’ into various imaginings of culture's work. Those insertions gave rise to powerful supplementary meanings; in short, they have contributed to the emergence of a practice of counter-insertion that we recognise to be ‘literary’.

RE-LOCATING COLERIDGE’S ‘CULTURE’

As Robert J. Richards has pointed out, Charles Darwin read John Stuart Mill’s famous essay on Coleridge during the course of his reading on the species question. He used it to speculate on instincts, but consigned the notation to a bundle of notebooks that were labelled ‘Old and Useless Notes’. Coleridge has in fact proved to be highly usable, and his legacy has resonated widely in a variety of domains of the intellectual field. Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society explored the legacy of Coleridge’s contribution to the formation of the culture concept by focusing on John Stuart Mill’s essays on Coleridge and Bentham. While Williams thought it would be a ‘mistake’ to suppose that Mill was presenting ‘an impartial judgement of the ideas of Bentham and Coleridge’ (65), if anything Mill was being excessively judicious, striving to occupy the place of ‘culture’ imaged as a court of appeal. Mill crafted a unity of purpose between Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in two essays for the Westminster Review, ‘Bentham’ (1838) and ‘Coleridge’ (1840). As Adrian Desmond’s work has argued, Benthamites and Coleridgeans had been at intellectual war with one another from their respective enclaves of University College and King’s College, London. Medical education and the politics of transmutational speculation in the life sciences were battlegrounds in the warfare between these institutions and the intellectual formations that gathered around them; they have left their mark on Coleridge’s invention of an idea of ‘culture’.

COLONIAL AND HOME AND THE ‘MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES’

Charles Darwin's influential account of his Beagle voyage, the Journal of Researches, was published in 1839; The Origin of Species was not published until 1859. Between these two events, Darwin published a second edition of his Journal in 1845, a year after he had written his private sketch on the solution to the species question (‘the Essay of 1844’), an essay that was produced out of his experience of the voyage, as well as the voluminous reading that Darwin recorded in his private speculative notebooks. Indeed, it was difficult to draw a definitive boundary between private and public forms of inscription among the gentlemen of science who took possession of the species question in the 1830s and 1840s. Sir John Herschel, in a private letter to Roderick Murchison and Charles Lyell, referred to the appearance of new species tantalisingly as ‘the mystery of mysteries’. Such a formulation invited ambitious speculation towards a solution. Herschel's letter was published by Charles Babbage as an appendix to his Ninth Bridgewater: A Fragment (1837). Darwin read the published version of this letter, and marked the occasion in his notebook: ‘Babbage, 2nd Edit. p. 226 – Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries & has grand passage upon problem! Hurrah – “intermediate causes”.