First and Second World War generations

Let’s work backwards beyond the post-1945 Baby Boomer generation. The question of how social and genealogical generation interrelate has been foregrounded by the effects of the Holocaust or Shoah (Weigel, 2002). In order to understand the way that Holocaust trauma (and by implication other traumas) plays out among the children of survivors and how that mediated legacy manifests, Marianne Hirsch has built on Eva Hoffman’s category of a ‘postgeneration’ (2004) to develop the influential concept of ‘postmemory’. This captures the way that one generation’s traumatic experiences can be transmitted to the next generation in highly mediated ways, which feel like memories but which are actually embedded in stories and photographs (Hirsch, 2012, p 5). She writes candidly of the ‘layering and belatedness’ of her own memories in relation to those of her parents and ‘the magnitude of my parents’ recollections and the ways in which I felt crowded out by them’ (Hirsch, 2012, pp 5, 4).

This has been a very fruitful concept for Memory Studies, partly for its foregrounding of the ‘multigenerational self’ that Williams elaborates on in Chapter 8, and for its recognition of the importance of visual media as well as verbal narratives. However, its applicability as a theory of transgenerational memory is limited by its focus on ‘transmission’, which implies a one-way relationship downwards within families, with a process that is somewhat passive and inescapable. Recent scholars have begun to suggest more reciprocal intersubjective dynamics, where two generations might renegotiate between them the meaning of those memories (Newby, 2020). This would also allow us to consider intergenerational dynamics not only within but beyond the family, reflecting on the relationship between social and familial generations.

People were already thinking generationally before the Second World War, with the concept brought into the foreground by the First World War. Memory Studies scholar Astrid Erll sees this as the ‘foundational moment’ for conscious generational identities (Erll, 2014). Over the subsequent interwar period, writers who had come of age during the conflict narrated how it had shaped, decimated and crippled them and their peers, such as in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues, 1928), R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End (1928) and Vera Brittain’s autobiography Testament of Youth (1933). Reinforcing the famous image of the conflict as ‘lions led by donkeys’, they expressed their sense of an unbridgeable divide between their own front-line generation sacrificing its youth, and an older generation of complacent army commanders, mirrored in the older generations sheltering in comparative safety at home. They also expressed a second divide of incomprehension, in relation to the slightly younger generation, coming of age just after war’s 1918 end, who turned away from it. Brittain, who served during the war as a volunteer nurse and then returned to her disrupted Oxford University degree in 1919, recounts in Testament of Youth how for the new generation of fresh-faced 18-year-old fellow students, ‘I represented neither a respect-worthy volunteer in a national cause nor a surviving victim of history’s cruellest catastrophe; I was merely a figure of fun, ludicrously boasting of her experiences in an already démodé conflict’ (Brittain, 1978, p 493). She recalls with particular intensity her sense of alienation from this only slightly younger but starkly demarcated generation. This was the group whose poets and writers were later characterized by Samuel Hynes as The Auden Generation (1976): they had been schooled on military values but found the war over before they could prove their heroism and turned against it as a result (Hynes, 1976, pp 18–19). Even though the term ‘generation gap’ was not coined until the 1960s – to showcase the gulf in values between young Baby Boomers’ and their parents – its dimensions were articulated in the First World War years.

The narrative of a lost First World War generation has persisted in the cultural memory, reinforced by historians’ works such as Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 (Wohl, 1979). Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) valuably analysed the myths in which participants made sense of their experiences, but in the process he ‘did some myth-making of his own’ by privileging the voices of youthful officers such as Robert Graves (b. 1895) and Wilfred Owen (b. 1893) (Brian, 2018, p 161). Overall, the soldiers killed in the First World War spanned a broader age spectrum than this acknowledges: army recruitment ultimately reached the ages of 41 in Britain, 43 in Russia, 48 in France and 50 in Austria-Hungary (Brian, 2018, p 152). Between 3 and 4 million women were widowed by the war, and 6–8 million children left fatherless: many of the war dead were married and had fathered children before the war (Winter, 1977). As Amanda Brian puts it, ‘there remains a disconnect’ between this scholarship and ‘the persistent image of the First World War soldier as young and unattached’ (pp 160–61). Winter pins down the reason for this disconnect, namely the disproportionately high number of deaths from young men in the social elite, since ‘casualty rates among officers were higher than those among men in the ranks’. The officers’ culturally influential accounts of the war cemented the ‘lost generation’ rhetoric, even though it applied more to their specific social stratum than to the population overall. As is so often the case, the experience of the social elite has become the overriding cultural memory.

19th-century generations

In 19th-century Britain, my primary area of study, people tended to define themselves less regularly through generational identity than through social strata (class) and segmentation (religious affiliation, geographical origin, economic sector). Those who did reflect on their generational location tended as above to be from educated social elites. Such writers, nonetheless, are worth studying because they reflected in nuanced and provocative ways on the workings of generations, arguably doing so in more creative and varied ways due to the lack of any single agreed definition. What is more, even in the absence of self-consciousness about it among wider social groups, we can arguably see generational effects shaping behaviour, culture and beliefs.

The French Revolutionary period saw commentators using the rhetoric of generational succession to support a range of divergent political agendas. Edmund Burke in 1790 memorably described the social contract as being one between ‘those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke, 1999, p 96). This rhetoric of continuity was vehemently challenged from the 1790s onwards, as French Revolutionary radicals and reformers from Thomas Paine onwards imagined instead a dynamic of hostility between the living and the dead, and suggested that the traditions and precedents of past generations should give up their grim gothic clutch over current lives (McAllister, 2018, pp 26–7). In both cases, the generational category used is so broad as to be synonymous with the living population, rather than focusing specifically on groupings of birth cohorts. However, the French historian Pierre Nora has taken up the more precise ramifications of Mannheim’s focus on the French Revolutionary period. As he points out, the revolutionaries themselves emerged from a tight cohort generation, with many of the most influential figures (including Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton) aged only 20–25 when the revolution broke out (Nora, 1996, p 502). Among this small coterie, at least, a Mannheimian ‘generation unit’ can be seen in action.

Early and mid-19th-century Britain were shaped by the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, not least by the baby boom that took place in the years after the war’s 1815 end. McAllister argues for the significance of this, as a demographic bulge grew into adulthood and the UK birth rate then slowed, producing a relatively ‘top-heavy’ population pyramid of the sort we see as new to the 21^st century. As a result, life-course categories that we now see as familiar, particularly mid-life disappointment, ‘may have emerged with particular force and frequency in mid-Victorian Britain’ (McAllister, 2021). Charles Dickens evocatively depicts this phenomenon in much of his late fiction (including Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend), through ‘a new surplus of middle-aged and older Victorians’, leaving ‘more men waiting patiently in junior positions […] regretting their failure to advance in life and wondering where, for them, it had all gone wrong’ (McAllister, 2021). This analysis reminds us that experiences that shape social generations can also occur at life-stages other than Mannheim’s so-called ‘formative period’.

There is also a wealth of scholarship from historians and literary scholars on familial dynamics, and on ageing, in 19th and early-20th century Britain. This has enabled us to look beyond the marriage plotlines of many Victorian novels to recognize the variation within 19th-century marriage (Schaffer, 2016), and to acknowledge the equivalent importance of extended ‘family ties’ (Nelson, 2007) and of siblings (Davidoff, 2012). Others have probed the damaging ideals of masculinity that pushed fathers into the distant and disciplinarian persona (Tosh, 2007; Sanders, 2009); Laura King has further explored how fathers in the first half of the 20th century navigated changing expectations of their roles (King, 2015). The social transformations of the 19th century also brought about a changed environment for ageing (Thane, 2000; Chase, 2009; Heath, 2009). Botelho and Thane delineate how we evaluate age based on ‘chronological’ age, ‘functional’ assessment of physical ability, and ‘cultural old age’, meaning that it varies through history (Botelho and Thane, 2000; Thane, 2000). For example, before the Industrial Revolution, a man’s prime was seen (following Aristotle) as beginning at 50, but urbanization, taking paid labour out of the home, tied ideas of manliness to those of work and meant less employment for older people (Heath, 2009). As a result, although the numbers involved are far greater now, anxiety about ‘the ageing society’ is far from new in the 21st century.

Even further back beyond Mannheim’s putative French-Revolutionary starting-point, scholars are now carving out generational frameworks. Barbara Crosbie has recently investigated ‘age relations and cultural change’ in northern England of the 1740s–70s. She uses this localized geographical field, and non-standard periodization, to go beyond polarized views of the 18th century as being either a time before modernity, or a time of modernity (Crosbie, 2020, p 3). She traces, for instance, the transition from an ‘atrophied’ early-modern apprenticeship system to a ‘new form of youth employment’ and overall sees evidence among these groups, once they reach adulthood, of ‘self-aware generational cohorts’ (Crosbie, 2020, pp 14, 16). Overall, she identifies a ‘significant relocation of cultural capital from those who possessed the authority of age to those that held the key to the future’ (p 242). Her study does not seek, however, to delineate why her chosen decennial cohort, ‘children of the 1740s’, might (or might not) have coherence as a social generation: in other words, what demarcates them from children two or three years older or younger, and why would the social and cultural change line up so neatly with the birth decade?

One way of dealing with this is to narrow our gaze to a single-year birth cohort, to try to ascertain what commonalities we can find at this granular level. In a recent collaborative project that Trev Broughton and I co-led, we examined the cohort of Queen Victoria’s exact contemporaries, who were all born in 1819 and who thus had bicentenaries in 2019 (Kingstone and Broughton, 2019a, 2019b). We found some notable expressions of generational consciousness among this cohort. The great novelist George Eliot (pen name of Marian Evans; 1819–80) resisted identification with the mass of her peers as she fled from the predictable generational sequence of ‘provincial life’ to ‘upwards mobility in a cosmopolitan [London] literary world’ (Livesey, 2019, p 288). However, Eliot went on to depict the past world of her childhood repeatedly in her novels, most famously Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), showing how preoccupied she was with the enormity of the changes that had taken place during her lifetime. What is more, she shared this sense of rupture (and fascination with a recent but lost past) with many of her contemporaries. This was the generation who most painfully experienced crises of religious faith. Another contemporary, James Anthony Froude (1818–94), wrote in his later years that ‘the present [that is, younger] generation, which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean, […] will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars’ (cited in Hewitt, 2019, p 437). He presents his own generation as distinctive in being brought up in stability and thrown into uncertainty. He startlingly suggests that it might be easier for the generation born into, and accustomed to, pre-existing instability.

Generational consciousness was declaimed by various intellectual, artistic and creative movements throughout the 19th century. The most celebrated British Romantic writers emerged in two distinct generations: the first came of age with the French Revolution, the second 20–25 years later. When first-generation Romantic poet William Wordsworth says of the revolution that ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ equally important is the next line: ‘And to be young was very heaven.’ Many artistic movements in the 19th century were conceived as brotherhoods of close contemporaries. These rejected the long-standing model of paternalistic transmission epitomized in apprenticeship and saw themselves in direct challenge to (and competition with) their establishment elders: the best-known of these in Britain is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 (see (Flower MacCannell, 1991; Morowitz and Vaughan, 2000; Myrone, 2019). Later in the century, the Spanish modernist literary ‘Generation of [18]98’ had their youth shaped by the Spanish–American War, though it was 15 years later before the group took on this historically marked label.

While generational consciousness does seem to have been deep-rooted among certain 19th-century intellectuals, it was not necessarily widespread in its reach across the social spectrum. Class and economic considerations remained the most prominent factor in social movements, such as the 1810s Luddite movement among skilled artisan weavers against the imposition of industrial machinery that challenged their livelihoods, or the 1840s Chartist movement among industrialized working-class men for political and electoral rights. The women’s movement in the latter part of the 19th century, campaigning among other things for women’s suffrage (voting rights), was focused by sex and its membership was similarly not centred on any one generation.

Markers of age and maturation also varied greatly across the classes. Civil registration of births only came into force incrementally across the United Kingdom (the practice began in England and Wales in 1837 but only became compulsory from 1875; in Scotland it began in 1855, in Ireland 1864), so among Queen Victoria’s contemporaries, a notable proportion of people never knew their precise age. Among the working-class majority, who entered the labour economy at a younger age than the middle-class intellectuals discussed above, the ‘formative’ coming-of-age period might not happen at Mannheim’s projected age of around 17. For parents trapped in severe poverty who were obliged to use their children’s labour capacity to help produce goods for sale (as Henry Mayhew describes in his London Labour and the London Poor, 1851–52), there may have been no clear distinction between childhood and age of responsibility. For others, coming of age may have been determined by other factors. We can gain rare insights into one such working-class life from the autobiography of a very different contemporary of Queen Victoria, cabinet-maker James Hopkinson (1819–94). He describes how in his teens, his place in a generational hierarchy was determined by seniority. When he entered into an apprenticeship aged 16, as the youngest of the lot, he was given the most menial tasks, but after eight months ‘a younger one came at which I was very glad’. The other key marker of maturity for him was that under the terms of his apprenticeship he must ‘abstain from Matrimony until I was 21’, so as this birthday approached, his peers often teased him about his impending ability to become ‘a full blown man’ (Hopkinson, 1968, pp 30, 21, 57, qtd Broughton, 2019, p 420). Throughout Hopkinson’s autobiography, his relative place among his fellow workmen, and his ability to secure a sexual and familial identity, are more significant than any society-wide generational identity.

Nonetheless, cohort effects and generational patterning can perhaps exist even without explicit generation-consciousness. If so, we can gain useful insights from applying generational taxonomies to the 19th century. Martin Hewitt suggests that we can see generational patterning in the way that Darwinism took hold from 1859 onwards (Hewitt, 2024). Darwin’s theory of evolution drew on existing ideas but combined them in a new and shockingly impersonal mechanism of ‘natural selection’. Hewitt shows that rather than people gradually becoming reconciled to this theory, responses quickly crystallized along generational lines. People born before 1830, who were already past their ‘formative period’ when On the Origin of Species (1859) was published, did not or could not overhaul their worldview. Those currently in their adult prime, including the born-1819 cohort, were daunted but felt an obligation to engage, and a ‘rising generation’ of those under 30 years old became Darwinism’s most zealous proponents. Public opinion only shifted as the generation for whom Darwin’s ideas were formative rose to prominence. The ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn, 1962) to Darwinism may have taken place not through the changing of minds but through gradual generational supersession.

Current humanities scholarship is taking social generations seriously at last, after a period in which they were buried under the intersecting weight first of class, and more recently race and gender. A new article by digital humanities scholars Ted Underwood and Wenyi Shang, and social scientists Stephen Vaisey and Kevin Kiley (2022), makes the bold argument that, as the title has it, ‘Cohort succession explains most change in literary culture’ (Underwood et al, 2022). While the ‘most’ referred to is a modest 54.7 per cent, their statistical research, based on topic modelling of keywords, suggests that birthdate has a far greater significance on literary styles than has hitherto been acknowledged and is more important than age or period. Historicist literary studies currently place emphasis on the context of the date when a literary work was written or published in order to understand its meaning and implications. However, according to Underwood et al’s findings, we should be attending at least as closely to the date when a writer was born. That study used narrow birth-year cohorts as its units of analysis; in future work, Hewitt and I plan to examine how measurable change might cluster together across generational-length periods. As Erll herself argues, ‘“Generation” deserves to be put on the agenda of a “new” literary history’ (Erll, 2014, p 385).

Age and generation

Throughout the novel, Oliphant resists easy age categories, especially binaries. As we move to a new time period 40 years after the opening, we are told that ‘Catherine Vernon had become an old woman – at least she was sixty-five; you can call that an old woman if you please’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 23). Oliphant is highly conscious of the generational differences within the sweeping category of ‘old’. For Catherine, going to visit her fond elderly godparents, ‘it still gave her a certain amusement to think that she was old like these old people’, ‘and yet it was true; for though sixty-five and eighty-five are very different, nobody can doubt that sixty-five is old. It was still strange, almost ludicrous, to Catherine, that it should be so’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 83). Both of these two distinct generations are now labelled ‘old’ by their neighbours, even though one pair stands in a parental relation to the other. Oliphant seizes this chance to remind her readers that people’s self-perceptions do not necessarily match those imposed from outside. Terms like ‘old’ have been imprecisely precise long before our new hundred-year life expectancies (Christensen et al, 2009).

The novel also exposes the way that age-definition is used to patronize and homogenize: from her perspective as matriarchal benefactor, Catherine says of three financially dependent neighbours that ‘the dear old ladies want something to amuse them’, even though they ‘were all younger than [her], and one of them a man’ (Oliphant, 2009, pp 127–8). ‘Dear old ladies’ has clearly long been a reductive diminutive that disregards the differences between people (in this case, the individuals in question are actually catty and disliked rather than ‘dear’). This Victorian novel thus shows us that our ageing society’s failure to distinguish effectively between different generations within the ‘older’ population is nothing new, and that it has always had damaging social effects.

Intergenerational dynamics

So what can be done about this mis-categorization and misunderstanding? Initially, the novel is fairly negative about the chances of intergenerational understanding. Oliphant emphasizes a whole plethora of generation gaps, especially between parents and children. The reckless John Vernon was very different from his grandfather and great-grandfather, who we never meet but are told of their probity and dedication. Catherine’s mother tried to persuade her to marry that cousin John, ‘But what is the use of a mother’s remonstrances? The new generation will please itself and take its way’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 6). Hester’s own feather-brained mother does not understand her daughter’s aspirations and restlessness, and nor do most of their elderly neighbours, who are fellow financial dependants. But as gradually becomes clear, these clashes are more often driven by imbalance of power than by age or generational differences. The ‘dear old ladies’ referenced earlier are all resentful at their state of dependency, and their benefactor, Catherine, is aloof and disdainful (even contemptuous) because of it.

Catherine’s aloof disdain has its most damaging consequences on her otherwise potentially vibrant relationship with her cousin’s daughter, Hester. This novel’s two heroines long misunderstand each other. Eventually, they are brought together by a second banking crisis and come to realize that they are each other’s mirror image after all. In the moment of calamity they face one another alone, ‘both very pale, with eyes that shone with excitement and passion. The likeness between them came out in the strangest way as they stood thus, intent upon each other. They were like mother and daughter standing opposed in civil war.’ And eventually Catherine concedes that ‘“I think you and I have hated each other because we were meant to love each other, child.” “I think I have always done both,” said Hester’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 442). Both kinship and kindred spirithood eventually triumph over resentment and inequity.

The novel also critiques what we might now call ‘generation gaps’ that are rooted in age difference, implying that no generation is sufficient by itself. When the most frivolous female Vernon cousin organizes a series of dance parties, she refuses to invite anyone but young people, so the few chaperones who attend are bored and isolated. As the narrator recounts, ‘All was youth, rampant, insolent, careless – feeling that the world was made for it, and rejoicing to shake itself free of every trammel’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 218). This mono-generational group, careless of the lessons of the past and reckless as a result, does not spot the clues that trouble is brewing, and that the family bank which supports their whole social edifice is being threatened from within and could lead to financial ruin for all of them.

The way out of this blinkered mono-generationality is intergenerational communication and understanding. The novel depicts an intergenerational friendship between Hester and the 85-year-old Captain Morgan that involves joint daily walks and evenings spent at the fireside of him and his wife. The young girl brings joy to the older couple, and the older people give her support and advice. The more petty and status-obsessed neighbours frown on this friendship – less from age than from class differential – but ‘when Hester did that which so horrified the other neighbours, old Mrs Morgan [the Captain’s wife] looked out after them from the window and saw the tall slim girl walking by the side of the stooping old man, with a pure delight that brought the tears to her eyes’ (Oliphant, 2009, p 78).

He says all this before we ever meet his grandchildren, but once they come to visit they unfortunately prove to be frivolous, short-sighted and self-centred. It is difficult to know whether that might have been different if they had received more input and support from their grandparents after their mother’s early death. While carefully refraining from moral judgement on this, Oliphant makes us think about the relative weight that should be accorded to familial or social intergenerational responsibility. Should our most important intergenerational relationships always be with those in our own family, and (as many current children of older parents with dementia are facing), might non-family sometimes be better placed to provide much-needed care?

The novel has worked hard to show us that a woman – whether young or old – can desire a great deal more from life than this. Although Victorian novels condition us to expect marriage plots, in this story, intergenerational friendships are represented as much more mutually fulfilling, mind-expanding, and potentially transformative.