The Shady Side of Fifty: Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States

Dillon uses the census as both a qualitative document and a source of quantitative data and also draws on diaries and letters to show how subtle shifts in the living arrangements of the elderly, decreasing intergenerational interdependence, and the advent of retirement and the empty nest changed the trajectory of old age during 1870-1901. The Shady Side of Fifty analyses these social shifts to reveal two different kinds of age anxiety: facing a new decade and dealing with extreme old age.