Introduction
Old Age in Pre-Modern England
1. Did People in the Past Grow Old?
Representations
2. Representations of Old Age in Ancient Greece and Rome
3. Medieval Images of Old Age
4. Old Age in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Experiences
5. Independent Old People: Making a Living in Medieval England
6. The Aged Landless Poor: Work and Welfare in Medieval and Early Modern England
7. Old People and their Families
8. Lives of Expedients: Old People and the Old Poor Law
Inventing the Old-Age Pensioner
9. The New Poor Law and the Aged Poor
10. The Campaign for Old-Age Pensions
11. The First Piece of Socialism Britain has Entered upon? - The Introduction of Old-Age Pensions
12. Pensions for the Middle Classes: The Growth of Occupational Pensions
Living Longer in a Changing World: the 1830s to 1930s
13. An Unfailing Zest for Life: Images and Self-Images of Older People in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
14. Work and Retirement: the 1830s to 1930s
15. Kinship does not Stop at the Front Door: Old People and their Families, the 1830s to 1930s
16. Pensions and Pensioners in War and Depression
17. The Menace of an Ageing Population, the 1920s to 1950s
'I Don't Feel Old': The Reinvention of Old Age in the Welfare State
18. A Remarkable Discovery of Secret Need: Pensioners in the 1940s
19. Pensions from Beveridge to the Millennium
20. Shocked into Idleness: The Emergence of Mass Retirement
21. The Family Lives of Old People
22. Inventing Geriatric Medicine
23. You're as old as you Feel: Images and Self-Images of Older People at the End of the Millennium
Conclusion
24. Into the Twenty-First Century: An Ageing Society - Burden or Benefit?
Bibliography
Index