1. See Susan Walsh, ‘Bodies of capital: Great Expectations and the climacteric economy’, Victorian Studies, 37 (1993), 73–98, for a persuasive account of the cultural lampooning of the elderly female body which enabled it to represent so effectively the afflicted economic body in Punch cartoons.
2. For a much fuller account of the lives of old people of both sexes in the Victorian period, see Karen Chase, The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
3. In 1866, a petition containing 1,499 names, demanding that votes for woman be added to the suffrage reform currently under consideration, was presented to Parliament by John Stuart Mill, an MP sympathetic to the cause of universal suffrage. The following year the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS) was formed. For a useful introduction to early feminism in Britain, see Olive Banks, Becoming a Feminist: The Social Origins of ‘First Wave’ Feminism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1987).
4. ‘Growing old’, in Christina Rossetti, ‘Maude’, and Dinah Mulock Craik, ‘On Sisterhoods, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women’, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 202–16.
5. See Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 93–132.