The very sweeping nature of the title of Karen Chase's study is potentially misleading: a reader might expect either a comprehensive survey or even something like a chronological study of how Victorians defined and re-defined their attitudes to what ‘old’ actually meant. But as Chase points out in her introduction, the landmark events in Victorian old age unfolded neither as a coherent historical movement nor as a continuous public concern. She chooses instead a kaleidoscopic approach, coming at her subject through a series of complex analyses which are centred on representations of old age in fiction and art, and sometimes elsewhere – Dickens; Trollope; Oliphant and Gaskell; Queen Victoria's Highland Journals and Lewis Carroll; Wilde and the painter Hubert von Herkomer; William Morris and the proto-sociologist Charles Booth; and, finally, in a diffuse Chapter 7, ‘Gravestones, Obituaries, Epitaphs’, exploring fictional, visual and actual examples.

There are problems with this strategy. The first is that Chase is formidably well-read in her chosen authors – make sure you know your Dickens and your Oliphant – and can therefore sometimes move uneasily between literary analysis and social history. Her enthusiasm for, and intense engagement with the depiction of age in fiction is not always linked very securely to the living, breathing universe beyond the narratives. It's easy to get lost. The second is that the actual choice of authors, and the foregrounding of particular texts like (for instance) the Alice novels and The Picture of Dorian Gray, begs questions about what might be learned from other Victorian writers: let's say, Thomas Hardy, and the carefree old codger Grandfer Cantle in The Return of the Native or characters in Hardy's short stories. The exclusion of Eliot is presumably because her novels are set in the three decades before Victoria's reign: but her attitude to old people is revealing and interesting – and Dickens' Great Expectations, which is often cited, is set for the most part in pre-Victorian England. And equally, if Booth, why not Thomas Archer?

The focus on fiction in the first two-thirds of The Victorians and Old Age, although distracting and seeming to cause a structural weakness, does not mean that Chase is not constantly illuminating. Given that her thesis is that there is no coherence to the way the aged, old or ancient (such loaded terms, as she shows) are approached, it could be said that the study necessarily veers from workhouse to asylum to almshouse, from metropolitan to pastoral lifestyles, from stereotyping by gender to a discussion of cremation (in the latter case, why no mention of William Price?). The effect is to give us a well-informed sense of the struggle of the nineteenth century to work out what to do with the elderly: even to determine what the term meant.

There are some suggestions here which I don't accept, or find very tenuous. Chase would have us believe that the images of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland by Tenniel are parodies of Victoria (and that this is informed by Carroll's text). This seems fanciful to me, as does the suggestion that the decaying image of Dorian Gray is inspired by the appearance of ‘the Elephant Man’, Joseph Merrick (the novel was written in the year of Merrick's death at 27). However, Merrick, as it happens, can be used to prove one of Chase's assertions, which is that the association of old age with physical deformity troubled the Victorians. When Merrick was only 19 (1881), he was in Leicester's workhouse with 350 other men, two-thirds of them over the age of 60. Only five others were under 20, one an ‘imbecile’. Thrown out of work by the hosiery trade, the ‘old’ presented the Victorians with a problem akin to the problem of what to do with the feeble of body or mind of any age.

And this is the repeated gist of Chase's excursions through fiction and images and documents: that the Victorians had to develop a ‘syntax’ for the elderly, which had not been necessary in the previous century. Chase is particularly illuminating when she comes to von Herkomer's paintings (and the paintings of others), notably ‘The Last Muster’ (1875), an oil image of a group of Chelsea Pensioners, which had started out life as the subject of an engraving in 1871. Although von Herkomer found himself tagged as ‘the painter of old men’, at which he baulked, and which certainly does not do his range justice, what Chase carefully shows us is that he has hit a resonant chord. The Victorian art-watchers saw the painting as breaking new ground. This section of Chase's book is the very best, because it never canters away at any tangents. And even when, elsewhere, she lets her absorption with (say) Trollope confuse the narrative about old age, Chase is persistently engaging.