In Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain, Charlotte Greenhalgh aims to examine how older people—or “the elderly” in the dated terminology used throughout—in twentieth-century Britain expressed their experiences and emotions. Increasing numbers of people living longer is an important feature of recent cultural, social, and political change in all higher-income countries—a fact that historians have only begun to explore, though they have written more about the inner lives of aging people than Greenhalgh acknowledges.

Greenhalgh draws extensively upon the tradition of social scientists’ investigations of the lives of older people, starting with Charles Booth, the pioneer researcher into poverty, including aged poverty, in late nineteenth-century Britain. She credits Booth with helping to “create the social scientific category of old age” (24). But Booth was concerned with poverty in old age rather than old age as such, which was well established as a cultural category by 1900. He (born 1840) was himself aged 60 in 1900 when he campaigned for state pensions for poor people. His writings do not reveal whether he identified with the people he sought to help.

Greenhalgh criticizes social scientists, and state welfare policies, through the twentieth century for identifying old age with poverty and dependency, narrowing popular perceptions of later life and sidelining more positive realities. But neither most social scientists nor state policy makers assumed that all older people were poor, certainly not specialists in gerontology, a field that (unmentioned by Greenhalgh) expanded from the 1970s to study the whole, diverse category of old age. The limited number of social scientists discussed, particularly Peter Townsend in the 1950s and 1960s, focused on the poor because, like Booth, they wanted their research to lead to state action—in Townsend's case especially concerning residential care—to ameliorate need in old age. Greenhalgh uses Townsend's original interviews with older people at home in East London and in residential homes to explore their own expressions of their lives and feelings, but unfortunately she gives their words little more space than her own commentaries on the research. Townsend's own books—The Family Life of Old People (1957) and The Last Refuge (1964)—are more revealing.

Social scientists have been generally less active in examining the aging of the better-off, hence we arguably (and counterintuitively) know less about their experiences and innermost feelings past and present than about poorer people. Greenhalgh refers to the diversity of “old age,” which throughout time has included people from their 60s to past 100, monarchs as well as paupers, the very frail and the very active, and discusses representations of rich older people specifically in a chapter called “Grooming in Old Age,” which discusses fashion and, more briefly, cosmetics. Her analysis reveals, interestingly, how up-market fashion magazines, such as Vogue, from the 1930s to 1950s pictured stylishly dressed, attractive, older women who were then a substantial part of the market for expensive magazines and clothes. Men's magazines made similar appeals. By the 1960s, the younger market had grown, and older men and women were sidelined. Greenhalgh uses responses collected by Mass Observation in 1939 and 1950 to demonstrate how many, mainly middle-class, older people were indeed concerned about “making the best of my appearance” (the title of chapter 4). She apparently expects this focus on fashion to surprise historians, who she believes “have depicted the sartorial lives of older people as staid and conventional” (121), evidently unaware of studies describing how, from at least the seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries, older people who could afford it sought to look good to the outside world. It is a pity also that Greenhalgh does not use the many responses to Mass Observation in 1992, in which, as I have described (“Old Women in Twentieth Century Britain,” in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 [2001]), older people challenge this and many other stereotypes, describing their diverse feelings and experiences. She surveys autobiographies to convey how some prominent people—including writers Storm Jameson and Catherine Cookson, painter Augustus John, and some working-class writers—experienced aging, conveying some sense of class diversity. But, again, the survey is frustratingly brief.

Greenhalgh rightly concludes that dominant attitudes toward aging in twentieth-century Britain were negative, representing older people as overwhelmingly frail and dependent burdens on younger generations. Older people experienced discrimination at work, in health care, and in society generally, but she does not discuss their experiences of discrimination in any of these spheres. Nor does she examine challenges to dominant views. Panic about the negative effects of the aging of society in the 1930s–1940s led to positive social science research stressing the capacity of older people to learn new skills, to work and contribute to society and the economy. Greenhalgh notes recent evidence of the substantial contributions of people over 60 as they retire later, are active in the voluntary sector (all the more important as state welfare declines), help younger generations with childcare and financial support, care for disabled relatives, friends and neighbors, and give at least as much as they receive from others—though here as elsewhere, more detail would have helped readers unfamiliar with these themes. Greenhalgh does not mention the recent, contrary, tendency to describe “baby boomers” as the selfish beneficiaries of past prosperity, wrecking young peoples’ futures, or (on the other hand) the increasing assertiveness of older people, better educated and more confident than their predecessors, the 1968 generation grown old, publicly demanding fairness and equality through such associations as the Third Age Employment Network.

Greenhalgh touches on many important and perceptive points, but all too briefly, and sometimes accepts stereotypes and conventional interpretations too readily. Above all, she fails to convey older peoples’ own emotions as extensively as she claims or as fully as sources could allow. It is a pity that a book that originated as an Oxford University doctoral thesis, which might in a fuller version have provided readers with greater depth of understanding, has been compressed into a very short, sometimes superficial, book that tells us much less than it might that is new about an important theme.