Introduction

Defining exactly what was meant by a ‘person’ in an eighteenth-century context has fascinated historians and philosophers alike, and has spawned an impressive historiography. The same conundrum was fascinating for our eighteenth-century forebears. As Felicity Nussbaum explains, ‘in eighteenth century England, “identity”, “self”, “soul” and “person” were dangerous and disputed formations’ that spawned ‘heated rhetorical battles … about the mystery of human identity’. This chapter explores this mystery from one particular angle – an age perspective – and considers a few specific and previously unexplored questions: How did eighteenth-century writers conceive age to affect the notion of the ‘person’ and the ‘character’ of that person? Did changes in character that occurred throughout life and the life cycle mean that people were said to experience multiple identities throughout life? Were these sorts of changes inherently destabilizing to the unit of the individual? By asking these questions, we engage with a key historical debate about formations of identity in eighteenth-century England – the rise of the individual agent, or making of the modern ‘self’. Using age as a lens for investigating the nature of personhood, I argue, challenges the hegemonic historical narrative and draws attention to alternative identity formations still alive in the eighteenth-century imagination.

By using age as a heuristic device, we draw attention to two particular aspects of personhood that scholars have been prone to overlook: the body-centric aspect and the longitudinal, changeable aspect. Nowadays we tend to want to locate personhood and character in mental activity, above the physical caprice of the body. Yet eighteenth-century notions of personhood, as this chapter will demonstrate, continued to be very dependent on the physical self: on configurations flesh and blood. In the eighteenth century, the terms ‘person’ and ‘character’ had physiological meanings quite distinct from the kind of mental conundrums that we associate with them today.