September 15, 2009 — Karen Chase, English professor, College of Arts & Sciences, "The Victorians and Old Age." Oxford University Press.

From the publisher's catalog: "The book … traces the power and powerlessness of age through a range of characters and individuals as distinct from one another as Dickens' inebriated nurse, Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; and it studies specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions attached to aging and the complexities of representing age in pictorial and statistical 'portraits.'"

The book covers the specificity of aging in its wide range of circumstance (rich and poor, urban and rural, watched and forgotten, powerful and dispossessed) in the distinct perspectives of novelists, painters, journalists, sociologists and diary-keepers.