Views on age and life’s milestones have changed over time. In the last century average life expectancy exceeded what we would call middle age for the first time and in the process changed perspectives. Empress Matilda, one of the subjects of Eighteen, married Henry V of Germany, sixteen years her senior in 1114, just before her twelfth birthday. In Britain, the 1929 Age of Marriage Act raised the legal age of marriage to sixteen for both sexes subject to parental consent. Previously the age limit was set at the legal age of puberty: fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. The age of majority was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen by the Family Law Reform Act of 1969. Historian Alice Loxton has chosen the age of eighteen as a unifying theme for telling the story of Britain, capturing the experience of the transition into adulthood by examining the lives of a deliberately diverse selection of characters spanning fourteen centuries, beginning with Bede and ending with Vivienne Westwood.
All her subjects are imagined as invited to a dinner party for which Loxton supplies a seating plan. It is fun to contemplate Mary Anning, at eighteen already established ‘…as a tour de force in the fossil world’ placed between Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Richard Burton; or Horace/Horatio Nelson flanked by Princess Elizabeth [Tudor] and Rosalind Franklin. You would want to be there, and indeed you are invited. Place number eighteen, at the foot of the table opposite Empress Matilda presiding at the head, is reserved for ‘you, Dear Reader’. A neat conceit that fits well with the tone of the book which has a knack of making the reader feel directly addressed: ‘Let me for a moment, take you back in time.’
Loxton’s ‘guests’ comprise nine women and eight men, a nice dinner party balance that includes an African [Jacques Francis], the severely disabled fairground artist Sarah Biffin, and Jeffrey Hudson, born with dwarfism whose height was ‘… about the length of a rolling pin or a windscreen wiper’ who became a favourite of both Queen Henrietta Maria and Marie de Medici of France. Most went on to enjoy successful careers. ‘Elsie’ Inglis was a doctor, a surgeon, founder of Scottish Women’s Hospitals and the first woman to be awarded the Serbian Order of the White Eagle. An exception was Jacques Francis, who masterminded the salvage of guns from the Mary Rose and was the first African to give evidence in an English court, who disappeared from history at the age of 20/21.
Each guest’s life is set in historical context and celebrated with lively anecdotes and quotes that demonstrate the range of Loxton’s research. There are atmospheric descriptions of urban scenes [Vintry Ward beside the Thames in Chaucer’s London, Edinburgh’s Royal Mile] and landscapes are lyrically evoked, including the thousand-acre park at Vita Sackville-West’s Knole Park, and the Outer Hebrides of Fionnghal Nic Dhòmhnaill [Flora MacDonald] whose ‘…societal equivalent in England might be the likes of the Bennet family, who feature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’, one of many inventive analogies. Describing ‘Elsie’ Inglis, Loxton suggests ‘She would have been an avid supporter of Nike’s slogan “Just do it”.’ Isambard Kingdom Brunel was ‘The kind of child who would appear on the TV quiz show Child Genius.’
Alice Loxton has a considerable social profile [@history_alice] and is to be commended for bringing history to a new young generation with whom this book will clearly resonate. But it is most definitely a book for all, wonderfully entertaining and written with an assured flair that will appeal to history lovers of every vintage.
Richard Stone MA is an author and lecturer in history.
