Abstract
In this article, I examine Anthony Trollope’s futuristic fiction The Fixed Period (1882) to discuss how the author criticizes Victorian Britain’s general pursuit of national efficiency by depicting a seemingly utopian nation where euthanasia of old and less productive individuals is used as an expedient means of implementing utopian values. In reading how Period portrays aging as a sign not only of personal deterioration but also of social inefficiency, I situate the text in the late nineteenth-century context, in which euthanasia was viewed as a countermeasure against large-scale degeneration. It is necessary to note that Trollope’s interpretation of the future without decline—without the elderly—is satiric, for he indeed speaks about the present society, obsessed with the ideology of progress. That is, although Trollope locates the mandatory euthanasia system in the future, his portrayal of it as a pivotal means of national regeneration serves to problematize the late Victorian reality, in which people felt a need to increase the size of the young and efficient generation and decrease that of the old and inefficient generation in order to prevent collective degeneration. In exploring how Trollope’s depiction of the future illuminates the seamy side of utopian productivism, I therefore suggest that he debunks the myth of youth, efficiency, and progress, which governed Victorian Britain.
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Notes
The population was estimated to be eleven million in 1801, but it skyrocketed to thirty-seven million by the end of the century. See Soloway (1988, 617–618).
The average life expectancy was thirty-six years in 1801, but it rose to forty-eight years for men and fifty-two years for women in 1901. See Laslett (1995, 3–80).
Australia and New Zealand (1873) is a travel narrative in which Trollope discusses the indigenous culture and the conditions of settlers’ lives. It looks into the relationship between England and its colonies through its account of the conflict between settlers and indigenous people.
The 1834 New Poor Law was fundamentally associated with the cultural debate over “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.
Euthanasia was discussed for the first time in English literature by Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. In Utopia (1516/1997), More states that the sick in utopia are allowed to “choose rather to die” when they clearly see that life “become[s] a burden to themselves and to all about them” (58). The same question was addressed in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, who used the word euthanasia in the medical context to refer to “a fair and easy passage” for the sick (1808, 233). Bacon is still known as the first scholar who employed the term after Roman historian Suetonius (A.D. 69–130), but it is hard to say that Bacon actually favored euthanasia, for his “low opinion of doctors” did not let him consider medical euthanasia as a viable social practice to be implemented widely in real cases (Dowbiggin 2005, 23).
Williams’s suggestion was initially made through a speech at the Birmingham Speculative Club, an amateur philosophical society, in 1870. It was published as a book in 1872.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the English scholar Thomas Robert Malthus addressed a dystopian vision of overpopulated human societies, in which population growth exceeds agricultural production.
Britannula’s state-of-the-art facility for cremating dead bodies reflects late Victorian England’s heightened interest in the habit of cremation. Sir Henry Thomson’s 1874 article on cremation illustrates this issue, starting from the concern about the overcrowding of urban cemeteries and the decay of the buried body in England. Thomson proposed the substitution of less expensive and hygienic furnace in disposing of the dead more efficiently. In 1875, Thomson formed the Cremation Society, of which Trollope was a member. However, cremation was adopted very slowly. In 1885, the Society enacted its first cremation at Woking, and only three people were cremated during that year. See Thomson (1874/1884) or Wilson (2004).
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Ahn, S. Old Age and Euthanasia in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. Neophilologus 104, 439–451 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09626-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09626-5