Three Score Years and Ten: or More?: A Study of Cult Interest in People of Extraordinary Age and its Origins in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

By Trevor James Cooper

Three Score Years and Ten: Or More? delves into the enduring fascination with individuals who live beyond 100 years. The intrigue centres not only on the accomplishment itself but also on the mysteries of how and why these people achieve such remarkable longevity.

This research shifts its focus from contemporary centenarians, whose ages can be more reliably verified due to improved record-keeping, to an earlier era marked by less clear historical records. It investigates the genesis of this interest and the emergence of what could be termed a ‘cult of centenarianism.’ During this period, claims of extreme old age sparked debates between believers and sceptics, creating a cultural divide.

The book also examines the significant role media played in this phenomenon. The portrayal and promotion of centenarians by the media of the time laid the groundwork for themes explored in this book, contributing to the ongoing public intrigue surrounding individuals of advanced age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035841448

Trevor James Cooper

Trevor Cooper has always worked in higher education as a lecturer and manager, more recently for the Open University. His interests are in local and family history, which is where this research has arisen.

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About the Author

Trevor Cooper has always worked in higher education as a lecturer and manager, more recently for the Open University. His interests are in local and family history, which is where this research has arisen.

Dedication

Hercules Humphreys 1699–1801, aged 102. He is my ancestor. In trying to find out more about him led to this research.

Copyright Information ©

Trevor James Cooper 2024

The right of Trevor James Cooper to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035841431 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035841448 (ePub e-book)

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Synopsis

There is a constant interest in people of great age in the 21st century. They are reported upon in the media, there is interest in who is the oldest person alive today. There is a substantial interest in how and why some people live this long in terms of lifestyle, diet and whether people today can benefit from their advice and experience.

This interest can be traced to its origins in the 17th century when the same themes drove interest in rare example of longevity. This research’s intention is to explore and demonstrate how this reached the wider public through articles in magazines, newspaper reports and portraits. It is not to test the veracity of such claims to great age made by the person themselves or by others on their behalf.

This is because in the period that will be considered, record keeping is generally too poor to be able to prove or disprove claims. This research therefore ends at the late 19th century when such claims started to be subject to closer investigation because of improved record keeping.

This allows the research to consider the notion of whether there was a cult surrounding centenarians, which can be understood to have divided on a fault line of believers and non-believers.

Introduction

This research is done to fill a gap in the literature on old age in respect to the extremely elderly centenarians (100 years old), and supercentenarians (those over 110 years), for which there is very little secondary literature. It will concentrate entirely on how it was manifested in popular culture at the time.

This research will consider and explore the issues raised by centenarians in the later chapters, which will be organised around the themes of interest that became common to interrogations of centenarian claims. It will confine itself to the 17th to 19th centuries to avoid the better (if not perfect) record keeping in the late 19th and 20th century.

This is because this research is not concerned with the veracity of such claims to great age in themselves, but more with the belief in them and proliferation of such examples in various media, like reports in magazines and books on the subject of centenarianism, as well as newspaper reporting in obituaries.

A particular interest is the portraits of centenarians, which featured in all of these media and gave life or presence, to the reported individual. The focus of this research is not on whether such cases were proven, or not, but on why and how they were nevertheless accepted and continued to be reported, like Thomas Parr after their demise; he was believed to be aged 152 in 1635.

This research will deal mainly with British (UK) based examples of longevity, while referencing reported cases internationally where they are relevant to the particular themes being considered. Many of the subjects were British (UK), with reference to non-British and non-European ostensible exemplars of great age where relevant and informative of the British interest in such people.

The reportage and coverage of these aged people was diverse in terms of what was of interest to the reading public but based on the themes, it can be argued, derive from Thomas Parr and the interest in his great age that surrounded him.

This research is not intended to be a compendium of all known cases of centenarians, but a concentration on the well-known, less well-known and the influential alleged centenarians, where they may contribute to some understanding of a popular interest in great age. In particular, it will consider how and why it engaged the popular interest.

Influential centenarians are the cases whether true or not, it will be argued engaged the public appetite for reading about their lifestyle, diet, general health, sexual prowess and physical well-being, and was the substance of their ascribed fame.

The condition of their general health and the retention of mental and physical capacities was a matter of great concern in terms of whether they could still look after themselves and even continue to work, and understand what was being said to them. There was a particular interest in the extent of their memory of the past, beyond living memory; this was important to readers, and often taken as proof of their alleged great age.

The lifestyle of centenarians in terms of their diet was a particular concern, perhaps in case (as is often believed today) that there is something to be learned in respect of you are what you eat and hence, you have a long or short life. An aspect of this was the consumption, or not, of alcohol, and whether its consumption was seen to affect life expectancy.

The reading public were also interested in the sexual activity of centenarians, and other people of significant age. There was an interest in how many actual children they had. This then readily moved into the number of grandchildren and great grandchildren, often conflating them all into either the total number of children, or the total number of descendants in subsequent generations that they supposedly had.

It was also a matter of interest as to how old these centenarian people were at the birth of these claimed children, in terms of whether they were still active, and potent in their extreme old age. This popular interest was perhaps to demonstrate an ongoing potency and ability to father, or give birth to children at an extremely old age.

These are the themes that the popular audience was interested in, and which were subsequently applied to other centenarians for centuries after Parr, which will be engaged with in the chapters, which constitute the substance of this research.

There is not much published material directly addressing the issue of centenarians specifically in the period being considered. There is very little to address the issue of popular interest, and a possible cult interest in people of exceptional age, which is the main concern with this research. Petersen and Jeune, Jeune and Vaupel, and Laslett are the main sources, which inform this research, because they engage with the history surrounding the early exemplars of centenarianism.¹

The focus of Jeune and Vaupel was on wider issues, which ranged beyond the remit of this research. It was investigating the issue of validating, or not the ages of alleged centenarians, which was confined to a period outside of the remit for this research. It was concentrated upon late 19th and 21st century examples where the evidence is ostensibly more available and open to scrutiny.

The centenarian issue was only part of the much wider subject of population studies of aging in various countries in respect of there being valid evidence for people living longer than in previous generations. They refer heavily to the work of William J. Thoms in 1873, which was Longevity: Its facts and fiction who demanded evidential proof for these claims.²

They went on to say that Thoms was the first to propose criteria for validation. Jeune and Vaupel then devote pages 18–20 to quoting directly from Thoms in respect of his criteria framework, without further comment, and then proceed to deploy it in their subsequent analyses of claims to exceptional great age.

Laslett’s article and its concern with popular culture and a possible cult that grew up through various, scholarly endorsements, later publications and prints is the main signpost for this research to follow. The research of Petersen, Jeune, Vaupel and Laslett is important because it engaged with the wider historical context in which this research is located, even if it is not their main focus.

There is a genre of work involving many scholarly contributors including those mentioned above, on centenarians (aged over 100) and supercentenarians (aged over 110), which is concerned with proving or disproving individual cases from the more well documented late 19th and 20th centuries as well as analysing demographic trends internationally towards longevity.

This work is published by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, based in Odense University, Denmark and Rostock University, Germany, and is concerned with evidence related to population trends including possible life expectancy. This research is not directly concerned with demographic trends, or the proving and disproving of individual claims in this later period, although the research is informative.

The study of old age in general is a growing field of historical research. Since the 1970s, the category of age has emerged as a distinct area for study, and intersects with the more established field of class, and the later emerging field of gender research, which began to develop.

There is also a body of research into old age in general, but this is mainly medical research, which established gerontology as a distinct area of practice and study. The medical research is in terms of looking at the illnesses associated with old age, and treatments for these conditions. Medical research is outside of the remit for this research.

There is also a body of research, which investigated the validity of these claims to old age with the intention of proving and disproving them. The latter is of more interest for this research because it has to deal with historical evidence and commentary upon it, although much of it is confined to where record keeping may be more reliable. The matter of age validation and the later periods it is concerned with, is again outside of this research.

Peter Laslett (1999) in an article, The Bewildering History of the History of Longevity, first introduced the term centenarian cult to explain how an interest in these extraordinary people developed and sustained itself³. The notion of a cult was not about a conscious establishment of a system or group with rules and membership, it was a way to explain the interest in centenarians, which became like a cult, as it was divided into believers and sceptics.

As a definition, the term cult helped to explain the proliferation of supposed evidence of centenarians and the increasing questioning of these claims by the late 19th century. Laslett only said that that a possible cult of centenarians built up around the endorsements given by respected scholars, which was his main interest, and does not argue for a freestanding cult, but almost one by accident because of the involvement of influential scholars. Laslett says only that the cult may have started, ‘among the informed and critical people.’⁴

According to Petersen and Jeune in 2003, with their article, Age Validation of Centenarians in the Luxdorph Gallery, coined the phrase cult of centenarians. They argued that Laslett, in his article in this series of short essays concerned with the matter of old age and great age, in 1999 was referring to the fascination with the duration of human life throughout the ages, and suggested that Laslett calls this phenomenon the cult of centenarians.

They argued that the term aptly explained the apparently widespread tendency to accept wildly exaggerated age-claims at face value.⁵ They clearly felt that Laslett had provided a useful template for interrogating the substantial evidence they were considering.

Petersen and Jeune’s article in Jeune, B & Vaupel. J.W. Validation of Exceptional Age. Petersen and Jeune were critically examining the extraordinary collection of the retired Danish civil servant, Bolle Willum Luxdorph (1716–1788), which was a collection of some 700 portraits and information on people who lived to a great age, often known as long-livers.

Petersen and Jeune were mainly interested in validating or disproving these claims to great age, which they called age validation, rather than whether there was a cult or how it developed, manifested, and disseminated itself into popular culture. Jeune and Vaupel drew on Laslett’s idea of a cult to explain the evidence on centenarians in the collection of published essays in this series, which they saw as further evidence of the cult of supercentenarians.

Laslett in his article considered the cases of notable centenarians in the 17th century, such as Thomas Parr, Henry Jenkins and Katherine, Countess of Desmond as foundation stones for the possible cult of centenarians⁶. What he had to say about these alleged cases was that the same factors he identified for them applied to later cases of centenarianism. He attributed the cult to three factors.

First was the prestige attached to people of alleged great age, by people who knew of them, or had met them. This attributed prestige was because their alleged lives and recollections were beyond most people’s experience of life, and surpassed the biblical allocation of man’s lifespan. It was therefore held to be remarkable.

Secondly, he argued that people wanted to believe these phenomenal people’s claims, out of a fear for their own extinction, and the wild hope that at least someone, perhaps even they themselves, could escape death for long or very long stretches of time. There was a hope that there was some secret to long life, which could be emulated for one’s own benefit.

Thirdly, he argued that there was a thirst for the marvellous, the out-of-this-world and the virtually universal desire rather optimistically supposed to be reducible by education, by which he meant that it was to be understood and learned from.

The third facet flows from the second, and created a demand for information on the long-lived centenarians to discover those secrets to long life. The interest, and the possible cult surrounding it, can also be understood as simple sensationalism, a topic of interest among many others, which Laslett does not dismiss.

Having proposed a model for understanding centenarianism, Laslett used it to dismiss the claims of centenarians, many of whom he referred to as frauds, including the well-established examples like the Countess of Desmond, Thomas Parr and Henry Jenkins.

Laslett made the point that the acceptance of these great ages by influential scholars had serious consequences for establishing and sustaining the centenarian cult and that the cult may have begun its career among informed and critical people, before becoming a matter of popular interest.

This is an important point because the interest and involvement of authoritative figures lent weight to these claims or assertions of great age. Laslett discussed the influence of John Locke (1632–1704), and Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in commenting on and being understood to endorse such claims to great age. Laslett reserved his strongest criticism for William Harvey (1578–1657) who conducted the autopsy on Thomas Parr in 1635, and has subsequently come to be understood to have endorsed Parr’s alleged great age.

Laslett contended that the works of Bacon, Locke and Harvey explained why less eminent followers in the movement towards scientific rationalism accepted prevalent dogma on the subject (of centenarianism).

Laslett argued that this intellectual dominance explained why it took until the mid to late 19th century before validation and evidence for these claims began to be insisted upon, and therefore to question the veracity of the claims and the evidence accepted at the time. Petersen and Jeune argued that Luxdorph himself had contributed to the development of the cult with his extensive collection and research, in the way that Laslett suggested other scholars had done.

It is not clear how he achieved this however, as they say that on Luxdorph’s death, the collection was sold to an unknown purchaser and disappeared into a private collection for two hundred years, and that Luxdorph never actually published anything on centenarians based on his collection and research. The collection is an obvious example of the fascination with centenarians, and in itself is an example of the cult in practise.

Laslett did not engage in detail with how the cult actually manifested itself in popular culture. He does however, suggest that without any effort at authentication, the whole genre was, ‘open to the marvels thought up by the unscrupulous to satisfy the thirst for sensationalism and wonderful stories of long life,’ which was the second facet of his model for understanding the cult.

He referred to the 18th century as an era of virtually uncontrolled fantasy, often led by learned and medical men who published works listing the names of centenarians without apparently giving any thought to their validation. Laslett said that the reporting was often very brief, with the emphasis on proving the truth of extraordinary old age by the proliferation of the names of the aged in various publications.

The proliferation of engraved, printed portraits is important because it offered an image of people who would not otherwise have bequeathed one to posterity, due to their low status, but do so because of their celebrity status, drawn solely from their alleged great age. The popularity of portraits and print collecting in general is similarly relevant to the penetration of centenarians in the popular mind through the sale of prints and their publication in magazines and books.

Various monuments and memorials are relevant as an expression of how centenarians acquired traction in the popular mind, promoting a need to memorialise and remember them. These range from Thomas Parr’s famous memorial in Westminster Abbey, to the later 18th century erection of memorials to Henry Jenkins, and various more modest tombstones to others believed to be of great age.

In Thomas Parr’s case, it is significant that several public houses were named after him in London and Kent, which show the extent of his fame, as he was an ordinary man from Shropshire. It also demonstrates the longevity of his notoriety or fame in the popular consciousness; to name a pub after him suggests that his reputation was established in the popular mind.

The following chapters will encompass aspects of lifestyle, diet and temperance, functionality, sexual activity, and the idea that longevity could be heredity, which were an abiding thematic interest for readers. Important is the emerging popular literature in this period, which is where knowledge of centenarians and the possibility of longevity was disseminated to the public.

This research will be organised in the following chapters:

Chapter 1 Methuselahs: Chronology. The first chapter will consider the way old age was perceived, in the sense that there was no defined retirement age (or indeed any concept of retirement) at this time. People were considered old depending on a variety of factors, physical health, appearance and mental health.

One factor was gender, being old was gender differentiated; women could be considered old at 40 (due to the onset of the menopause), men could continue to 60 or 70 before they were considered to be old. How old people were depended heavily on what people believed or perceived. There were no reliable records to testify to age.

Chapter 1 will explore the fascination with old age, the arguments around the need for research and even proof of these claims, the influence of authoritative scholars, and writers in popular literature in promoting, and sustaining the cult, by being seen to endorse claims of great age.

It will consider the proliferation of reporting of living and deceased centenarians in the media, which kept the issue in the popular mind. In the case of the deceased, it often simply reported age and location at death, either in obituaries, or in lists of people who were said to be examples of these great ages, without any information to verify or question the claim.

The reporting on alleged centenarians’ decease can be understood as an argument in favour of such ages being true by the weight or quantity of supposed exemplars of alleged great age over the quality of the evidence, in terms of verification to support it.

The issue focussed on the quality of evidence will explore the later 19th century arguments requiring proof of age, which could become acrimonious between those who accepted these claims and who questioned it.

William Thoms, in the late 19th century, was active in questioning these claims to great age and emphasised the lack of proof to substantiate them. It will be argued that this debate often divided along the lines of believers and non-believers. Non-believers were often referred to as Thomsian because they questioned what were considered long established, and proven cases of longevity, as Thoms did, and required more evidence.

To be fair to the believers, the documentary proofs required by Thoms and others often did not exist. Thomas Parr, whom Thoms investigated, is an example; his alleged birth year of 1483 was too early to be recorded in parish records, which only commenced in 1537 and were not well kept.

Chapter 2 The Devil Makes Work For Idle Hands: Work, Independence and Functionality⁷. There was no set retirement age, or organised provision for retirement due to old age, illness or injury. There was a societal expectation that people would make provision for their old age, or continue working to provide for themselves.

This expectation led to the interest in how physically well aged people were, in terms of their general health, ability to walk, to see clearly to be able to work, and, of course, whether they continued to work to maintain their independence from the wider family, and the community, in respect of parish poor law support.

Chapter 2 will explore the understanding of old age as it developed and the expectations of society and the elderly themselves with regard to maintaining independence in old age. This led to an interest in the physical and mental health of centenarians in terms of whether they were still able to work, and had retained their essential faculties.

A particular interest was exercised in how many children and grandchildren these centenarians had, and indeed whether, in the case of men, they were still able to sire further children; fecundity was an admired feature of the potency of the life force, which was believed to distinguish these people.

It will also consider the fascination with the alleged extensive memories these extremely elderly people had. The extent of their claimed memory was of interest because it was outside of the experience of those living at the time, and unable to be easily questioned; memory was often understood as proof of their great age.

Chapter 3 Pythagoras: Diet and Lifestyle⁸. There were many reports in the media variously about the diets of such extremely elderly people, as a subject of interest, where information was available. This chapter will examine this popular interest in diet in terms of the aphorism, ‘you are what you eat,’ which led to considerations of whether rich food, and complex dishes, including meat, was a problem in achieving long life. William Harvey’s autopsy of Thomas Parr attributed part of his rapid decline to the changed and rich diet he enjoyed during his brief stay in London.

There was an interest in secrets to long life in respect of lifestyle, diet, and temperance; the latter in the sense of temperance in terms of the food eaten, as well as the issue of abstention from alcohol, which was a popular movement in the late 18th and 19th centuries. There was an interest in what extremely elderly people ate, which was often a very poor and meagre diet.

It is possible that people assumed they ate like this all their lives, and it gave them long life. It is also possible that these meagre diets were the consequence of both poverty and the diminishing appetite experienced by the elderly. There was interest in terms of both not eating meat and not taking alcohol; abstention, in the sense advocated by the Temperance Movement.

The idea of a vegetarian diet for health and long life began to gain traction in this period, with centenarians hailed as exemplars of its alleged benefits. Flowing from this, there was an interest in suggested regimes and diets for living to achieve long life, not unlike various diet regimes of today. Some of these were more detailed, and tended to be founded on sound notions of all things in moderation, to extreme abstention, which was fuelled by the reporting of the poor diets actually eaten by people of great age.

Chapter 4 The Cult of Centenarians in Popular Literature. This will review evidence from various primary sources, including the publication of magazines, such as the long-running Wonderfuls, and their later published books on centenarians.

It will encompass newspapers, which at this time were all regionally based, reported on the deaths of centenarians in their obituary columns and sometimes an accompanying thumbnail outline biography. This copy was frequently shared between newspapers elsewhere in the country, which would not have the local interest, but did fulfil the general interest of the readers to be informed of these facts.

The newspapers provided a source of information for the magazines and for other published works as general interest magazines and books specifically about centenarians.

The chapter will demonstrate how firmly embedded some centenarians were in popular culture. It will show that other, lesser well-known subsequent, alleged centenarians were increasingly reported upon, to substantiate both their own claim to great age and those of the more established centenarians in the popular mind.

It almost became a strength in numbers exercise, in the sense that reporting the great ages of so many people could implicitly be understood to justify all claims to extraordinary great age.

The publication of books on the issue of centenarianism was perhaps intended to persuade the reader of the truth of these claims, because of the number of ostensibly substantiated claims. The primary aim was to argue that the term of human life was not fixed, and could be prolonged, because the examples given were understood to prove the case.

The secondary aim was to provide guidance derived from these examples for good living to achieve long life, which was derived from the usually reported and limited information available on centenarians. It was not unlike the contemporary fashion today for diets and lifestyle guidance.

While magazine publications did not devote their entire attention to centenarians, centenarians were part of the publishing formula. Publishers presented articles and portraits of the notable famous for other reasons, such as some deformity, which made them remarkable and hence subjects of interest. In that context, centenarians were remarkable simply for their great age, and thus worthy of inclusion for the readers’ delectation and information.

These magazines were eclectic in their coverage of topics and published accounts of natural events; wars, executions, royal births, deaths and marriages, and famous or notorious persons. Much of the copy from these magazines was reprinted in books that provided bound copies for the library shelf.

This chapter will also consider the abiding influence of the main centenarians, like Thomas Parr, whose continuity into literature across the period, and importantly into the 19th and 20th centuries, provided alleged proof of people living to a great age and which thereby endorsed the more local, recent and less well-known examples of great age that were being reported.

It is relevant that Parr was mentioned by literary figures, including William Blake, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain and others, without the need to explain who he was, because the authors could safely assume that their readers knew and did not need reminding.

Chapter 5 The Cult of Centenarians in Portraits will be informed by the proliferation of print workshops and booksellers during the 18th century, who produced portraits of remarkable and notable persons for various reasons and made them readily available in publications or for single purchases. Portraits of centenarians who were remarkable simply for their great age were published to fill a market need for illustrations.

It will consider the numerous portraits made of these centenarians by print makers, which were also copied into cheap prints, in response to the enthusiasm for collecting them. Centenarians were a part of a popular passion for collecting prints of notable people from antiquity to the then present day.

These portraits of ordinary, if remarkable, people were collected by people for various reasons. Many of these cheap prints were purchased as souvenirs of a remarkable centenarian, from booksellers or the actual person concerned. Others were published and purchased to fulfil the needs of the popular pursuit of collecting portraits to amass a collection, and to add to exiting publications of books by way of extra illustration or grangerisation as the practice came to be known.

Great artists because of their great age also painted some centenarians. These were commissions paid for by people of wealth, as they were not the normal subject for artists of renown, such as Rubens and Van Dyke; in both cases, it is likely that Charles I paid for these works. John Constable’s painting of Sarah Lyon is different because Constable was not an artist of reputation at the time, although it is not clear who paid him to produce her portrait.

These were copied as prints for sale and publication in magazines and books. Another artist also reproduced them as oil paintings because there was a market and demand for these pictures; Thomas Parr in particular was copied both in prints and in reproduction paintings.

Chapter 6 Memento Mori: The Cult of Centenarians in Souvenirs and Monuments. Monuments and tourism are two facets of the same issue, because there is no purpose to memorialising someone whom no one wants to visit, or knows of, or to remember, and visit the memorial. The existence of monuments, and the fashion for tourism, are important to consider because of the long afterlife it demonstrates after the death of a celebrated centenarian like Parr in 1635.

It is a compelling reason for why monuments were erected to Henry Jenkins in his home village of Bolton-le-Swale, Yorkshire in 1743, some 73 years after his death. This could be seen to be fuelled by competition in the media between counties about which could put forward the most centenarians or the oldest person ever.

Yorkshire, Cornwall and Devon were active claimants due to their clean air, and clean living variously, and having a monument for visitors to view was the next best thing to meeting an actual centenarian. It was perhaps, a way of reaching out to the past and seeing the proof of the possibility of longevity.

This chapter will consider the over-lapping interest of a range of these believed extraordinary people, and how it was manifested in popular culture. Antiquarian interest and the desire to visit, actually see, and speak to these aged people is relevant to the reach of their reputation, and to the development of tourism among those with the leisure and wealth to pursue such a pursuit.

Souvenirs were available for purchase, often an engraved portrait as a memento of the visit. In respect of deceased centenarians, the existence of a monument was important, as a marker, as proof that they existed and as a way of touching the past. An engraved portrait perhaps served a similar purpose.

Thomas Parr, with his memorial in Westminster Abbey, several public houses named after him, and the many copies of his portrait, reproduced into the 19th century, is the most prominent memorialised centenarian. Mark Twain, on visiting Westminster Abbey and seeing Parr’s memorial, was moved to research Parr for a biography (which he never did), but he was moved by the connection to the legend of Old Parr by the memorial.

Parr is also remembered in other memorabilia ephemera such as a Staffordshire mantelpiece statuette in the 19th century, and in the 20th century, by a brand