The Rising Generation and the Fogram: Locating Adulthood in Eighteenth-Century England

Adulthood is surprisingly hard to locate in histories of eighteenth-century England. The historiography might be dominated by those between childhood and old age, but this reflects an unconscious bias in which the middle stage of life is an implicit norm, the default object of study. This all too easily obscures the diverse and frequently contested nature of adult status; and not only in the eighteenth century. But more than this, the predominance of inadvertently adult-centric history has relegated the young and old to the sidelines, left to be investigated as discrete categories. This is to underestimate the relational, or co-defined, nature of life stages. As a consequence, the role age relations play in changing attitudes towards these phases of the life cycle tends to be overlooked, as do any generational distinctions. Again, these oversights are not confined to the eighteenth century. This investigation therefore has broad-ranging relevance regardless of place and time, not simply in locating adulthood within the life cycle, but also in demonstrating the importance of age relations as a lived experience and an analytical category.