‘These days no-one bothers with old people, not even their children or their relatives.’ This familiar falsehood is important to us here because of its initial phrase, two words which are very often met with in familiar conversation and which imply comparison with the past. The statement is false both because research on the family relationships of the elderly shows it to be so today, and because historical work fails to show that familial support has declined over time. Comparisons with the past, scholarly comparisons properly worked out, which illustrate what history can tell us about ageing and about ourselves as members of populations marked by long life and by the presence of many elderly persons, are the subject of the present issue of Ageing and Society.

For evidence about the extent and experience of old age in classical antiquity, one must rely excessively on literature and mythology, with their heavy bias towards the leisured classes and their lack of quantitative data. Nevertheless, there are bases for some plausible inferences: both life expectancy and for most people the standard of living were low, with a consequence of an early commencement of ‘adult’ employment and the absence of any notion (or possibility) of retirement; those hardy and lucky enough to survive of ten appear to have retained a vigorous creativity into very old age; emotional relations (e.g. between parents and children) were coloured by such factors as high infant mortality and the relative early death of parents and grandparents. The absence of really large cities, other than Rome and one or two others, and of rural isolation (the homestead farm, for example) reduced the dangers of the kind of loneliness associated with the modern bed-sitter, though problems of old age fell solely on the family (rather than the community). Medical literature showed a surprising lack of interest in mental illness associated with old age or even in medical problems other than the obvious ones of debility, and there is no way for us to penetrate the silence.

There has recently emerged in the writings of those who have adopted an overtly ‘radical’ approach to social work and the welfare state, a coherent interpretation of how the status of older persons is lowered in the course of the development of industrial capitalism. The focus in these recent writings is on the social creation of dependent status and the structural determinants of the competitive relationship between elderly individuals and younger adults in the labour market. This paper reviews the arguments of this school of thought arguing firstly that it fails to take sufficient account of the longer term population history of England, suggesting that the contrast between the middle and later twentieth century and the nineteenth century is apparently so marked largely because of the atypicality of the latter period when high fertility and rapid demographic growth produced an historical minimum for the proportion of the elderly in the total population. A second failure in this recent radical or marxist research is that it also does not take sufficient account of the kinship system in north west Europe which appears to have created a situation of structured dependency of the elderly on the collectivity irrespective of the specific mode of production. Pre-industrial north west Europeans exhibited a striking contrast in this particular cultural trait with many, indeed most non-industrial societies outside Western Europe or regions populated by emmigrants from that area.

The persistence of greater life expectancy among women than men means that widowhood on a large scale is a feature of both pre-industrial and subsequent societies. This paper examines the changing structure of widowhood along with the familial and economic support afforded to women in this category, in the 17th and 18th centuries by contrast with the present day. It indicates, by drawing on parish data for England, that the incidence of the widowed status is today lower in each age group than two hundred years previously, but higher as a proportion of total population. Current widows are however twice as likely to be over 55 and to be heads of households. Further comparisons over time are used to make observations about the relative effectiveness of the parish, kin, and the Welfare State in providing material support.

Current searchings for ways to trim a burgeoning social welfare budget come at the end of a long period of decline in the value of pensions. The social welfare benefits paid in Britain today are not as valuable, relative to the incomes of non-beneficiaries, as were the pensions paid during the first half of the twentieth century, and they are worth very much less than the allowances distributed by the nineteenth century Poor Law. Demographic changes, including the growing numbers of elderly persons, the movement of elderly persons towards living alone, the decline in household size, and the return of large numbers of women to the paid workforce, have overtaken the Welfare State, which has failed to develop a programme for redistributing resources between the generations.

Since 1962 there has been a marked increase in the number of elderly people in Britain living on their own. The present paper presents a detailed examination of the composition of households containing elderly persons in pre-industrial England, in 1962 and in 1980 in conjunction with an overview of the situation in a number of other European countries and in the United States. On the basis of this evidence it is argued that it is impossible to sustain the view of a linear progression from pre-industrial times when the elderly lived with their children to modern times when they live on their own. The final section takes up the question of the variation in the residence patterns of pensioners in England and Wales in 1981 following from the region of residence and the type of property occupied by the household. The highest proportion of pensioners living on their own were found in the eastern half of the country, excluding London and the adjacent metropolitan area, but including Manchester. Pensioners who were owner-occupiers were more likely than council tenants to be living with 2 or more non-pensioners. On the other hand, only in the case of the private tenant did the nature of the tenure remove all trace of the regional variation and the inference was drawn that social class, occupation and local tradition were influencing the residence patterns independently of the effect of tenure.

The focus of this paper is on the part played by children and relatives in the care of the elderly in a Devonshire parish in the mid-nineteenth century. The cohort of men and women aged 50–59 years recorded in the 1851 census was divided into two groups, according to whether or not the parish registers or censuses showed members to have had offspring who survived childhood. Cohort members and their families were then traced through the 1861 and 1871 censuses in order to establish their residence patterns at different stages in the life cycle. It was found that children, whether married or single, played a considerable part in providing care for their elderly parents. By contrast, relatives living in the same household as the elderly were more likely to be receiving than providing care. The possibility that a proportion of the cohort members who left the parish during the period did so to join children elsewhere was investigated through an examination of those of comparable age coming into the parish.

The position of the older person in society as well as in the workforce is receiving an increasing amount of attention at the present time. However there is very little historical knowledge as to the forces which shaped the withdrawal of older persons from gainful economic activity earlier this century. The research outlined below explores some of the precedents which shaped contemporary attitudes towards older workers in general, and the relationship between age and unemployment in particular — during a period of low labour demand.