“People have achieved all kinds of crazy things at the age of 18” | Alice Loxton on the teens who've changed British history

Danny Bird talks to historian and presenter Alice Loxton about her new book on 18 individuals who left an indelible mark on British history – before they were out of their teens

Published: August 8, 2024 at 9:58 AM

Save

Danny Bird: Your book explores the lives of 18 figures from across more than 1,000 years of British history, viewing each of them as an 18-year-old. Where did you find the inspiration for this book? And did it prompt you to reflect on your own life at the age of 18?

Alice Loxton: The idea for Eighteen came when I was walking around the National Portrait Gallery in London. Typically, images there show figures from history depicted in later life or in the years of their success. While looking at these portraits of grown-ups, I loved pondering the idea that, once upon a time, they were teenagers, with all the hopes, fears, passions and dreams that adolescents have.

Ad

So I wanted to shine a light on younger people throughout history. We are living in this wonderful moment at which different groups of people from history are being highlighted, but I don’t know if the 18-year-old age group has ever really been discussed in this way.

When I was 18, my life was straightforward. I finished school, then I was applying to university. That’s probably quite familiar to lots of people today. It’s interesting that, during the 20th century, most people’s lives generally became much more similar, with 18 coming to mark the beginning of adulthood. By contrast, some of the experiences people had at that age further back in history were pretty extreme. I suppose that my 18-year-old self feels quite distant from them.

How did you choose these 18 historical figures?

It was difficult – like that question: “Which famous people would you invite to your dream dinner party?” Ultimately, I chose figures to whom I am personally drawn. These are the people who, if I were watching the Great British Bake Off on TV, I would invite over to watch with me.

They are also reflective of lots of different aspects of Britain’s story, with geographical diversity and a mix of experiences and backgrounds. Some of my characters are royals who go off and do incredible things. Some come from very ordinary backgrounds and undergo rags-to-riches transformations.

Others have fame thrust upon them – such as Fionnghal nic Dhòmhnaill [Flora MacDonald], who had this crazy event happen to her [helping Bonnie Prince Charlie flee Scotland after the battle of Culloden]. Other figures are much more instrumental in forging their own path.

Today, the age of 18 is widely perceived as the end of childhood and the ‘switching on’ of responsibility. Has that always been the case?

It’s interesting, because today at the age of 18 you become an adult according to the law. It’s this thing when you instantly change overnight and you’re perceived as a completely different person, both by society and in an official way. But of course that wasn’t always the case.

Looking back at history, it’s clear that 18 is a totally random age. I wanted to examine what it means to be 18 today by looking back at more than a thousand years of experiences of people of that age group. Studying that cross section, you realise that people have achieved all kinds of crazy things at that age over the course of history.

Individuals in the past tended to have had much greater responsibility by their 18th birthday. In some cases, they also endured immense hardships. The experiences are just very different and, I think, can also reveal one’s potential. Those who are given an enormous amount of responsibility at that young age tend to shine. So it’s interesting to look at 18-year-olds today, and to ask whether we underestimate them.

Do you have a favourite historical personality among the individuals championed in your book?

The one I really liked writing about was Mary Anning. There’s something quite strange about her: she’s really cool, and her story is unbelievable. She was born on the south coast, in Dorset, and she became incredibly famous for collecting fossils: by the time she was 18, she was known as an authority on them.

She’d come from a very poor background and had no formal education. But she walked along the coast and studied the natural world around her: she took time to look and look and look, to turn over the stones and to be considerate.

I find that inspiring in itself, but Anning’s ‘origin story’ is exciting, too. Before she was born, her parents had lost a young daughter in tragic circumstances. That little girl was near the stove in the kitchen in their house on the seafront in Lyme Regis; she caught fire and was burned to death. It’s a horrific story, but that kind of accident appears to have been surprisingly common at that time. When I was researching Anning in the British Newspaper Archive, accounts of this type of incident numbered in the thousands.

Anning was born not long after that tragedy, in 1799. And there’s another remarkable story. On a really hot day in August 1800, the townsfolk gathered to watch a travelling band of horsemen; the infant Mary was there with a family friend. Suddenly, a terrible storm broke out; accounts record it as the most dramatic thing people present had ever seen.

During the storm, lightning struck a tree under which three women were sheltering – one of whom was holding little baby Mary. All three women were killed. Believing Mary dead, the Annings bathed her in warm water – and she revived. Somehow, against the odds, she had survived.

Later, people said that she had a sixth sense – that she could look around her and see this ancient world, gleaning insights into how the Earth was formed. Maybe there was something in that flash of lightning, but in any case I found her life to be poetic.

You’ve dedicated the book to “every 18-year-old out there”. Do you think that any of the experiences of your historical personalities will resonate with 18-year-olds today?

Yes, definitely! But I also want the book to be for readers of all ages. I hope it helps people, even those who are much older, to reconnect with their 18-year-old selves. There’s this optimistic spirit you have when you’re 18 that I’ve identified in the book. It’s this moment of uncertainty – even insecurity – but also an age at which everything’s to play for: the world’s your oyster in some ways.

Consider Sarah Biffen, who was born in Somerset in the Georgian period, without arms and with only vestigial legs. We might assume that, growing up with that condition in a very poor family, her life would have been quite difficult. Yet Biffen was so determined.

Hers is an amazingly inspiring story: she became an incredible artist, producing some of the greatest miniature paintings of the age. Her artwork was collected by royalty and admired by the rich and famous. An exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery in London recently celebrated her work, which is enjoying a bit of a revival today.

But what were the chances that a poor girl from Somerset who was born with that condition would go on to become one of the greatest artists of the period? It’s the kind of story that I hope will resonate with young people who endure and endeavour in lots of different ways.

Life expectancy was, for most people, much lower throughout history. Would it be fair to say that the past was a more youthful place than the Britain of 2024?

Obviously, people tended to die at a much younger age than they do today – but did that mean they perceived themselves as middle-aged when they were in their twenties, say? Geoffrey Chaucer said that a woman approaching her thirties was “winter forage”. So I look forward to that!

In the past, there were a lot more young people around, in positions of responsibility. There were old people too, of course, but they weren’t such a large chunk of the population as they are today. Therefore, lots of individuals in positions of power as well as people with responsibility – those leading families, even parents – were much younger.

A medieval prince leading an army into battle would be respected even though he might have been just 15 years old. Indeed, older people would have respected someone who was a teenager in a position of authority. The association of maturity with power and deserving respect is a very recent thing.

In the late 18th century, one of Britain’s most successful prime ministers, William Pitt the Younger, became prime minister at the age of just 24. Although he was mocked at the time, many of his contemporaries also achieved a great deal in their youth. Some of Britain’s most beloved poets died young, too – John Keats in his twenties and Lord Byron in his thirties, for example.

Our perception of young people has transformed in the past 120 years or so. Until the late Victorian period, children were essentially treated as adults as soon as they could walk, and would contribute to their family’s income – a situation that started to change only in the late 19th century when schooling began to become the norm for most people. Gradually, the age at which compulsory formal education ended rose.

Nowadays, we have ‘young adults’ who are in school and not working full-time, but who might have some money to spend. That phenomenon really emerged in the 1950s, along with a commercial strategy marketing products to this new demographic, ‘the teenager’. Although I often talk about ‘teenage history’ and teenagers in the past, the idea of the teenager is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Were there any dubious 18-year-olds from Britain’s past who didn’t make the cut?

I really wanted this to be a very inspiring book – whether you’re almost 18, you are currently 18, or you’re much older. Of course, there are some people I thought would be interesting to look at but wouldn’t wish to encourage people to emulate. For instance, it would have been fascinating to look at Guy Fawkes as a young boy from York. How did he end up becoming a terrorist of sorts?

You could say that this book presents a rose-tinted view of Britain’s past. These are my favourites, so it doesn’t focus on the ‘baddies’, as it were. Although some – such as Elizabeth I and Empress Matilda – were extremely wealthy people and may be unrepresentative of wider society, you get a sense that even those at the very top had the same fears, anxieties, passions and drive as everybody else.

The constant in history is that the human condition doesn’t change very much. We all share doubts to varying degrees, and we all long for love and comfort and belonging. That’s true wherever you are and whichever century you’re living in.

Would you say that those moments of vulnerability and naivety have had an impact on the way history has panned out, or even in the way we view the past by interpreting those traits?

Those teenage years aren’t the showreel of people’s lives – they’re the messy bits, the behind-the-scenes moments when we’re figuring things out. But they are also when character is forged. People who have had it all, and for whom everything’s been easy, don’t tend to come out quite as determined, driven or wise.

Vivienne Westwood is an excellent example. She grew up in the village of Tintwistle, in the Peak District. There was no reason to imagine that she would build a great career as a fashion designer. She had an amazing art teacher who encouraged her to go to art school, but her gnawing self-doubt – a result of her working-class background – compelled her to drop out.

She just felt it wasn’t realistic, and convinced herself that it was silly to follow this frivolous dream. So she went a different way: she got married and embarked on a steady career as a primary school teacher. It was only later that she fully embraced her creative side, though she always knew it was within her.

Her 18-year-old self was full of doubt; she wasn’t confident enough to follow her dreams when it didn’t seem plausible to do so. That’s not surprising when one considers the society and the situation in which she was raised. Nevertheless, it’s incredible that someone who became perhaps the greatest fashion designer in British history – indeed, one of the world’s greats – was so full of doubt at that young age.

I think that’s one of the stories that will resonate with lots of young people as well as older readers. It might seem so implausible that you could also become someone so successful – a household name. But try to imagine that, once upon a time, Vivienne Westwood was just a young girl, not knowing what would happen.

Despite her misgivings, though, she always had something about her. She was creative and driven from a young age, and all of the things that became her strengths in later life were present when she was a child. In hindsight, the clues were there; the question was whether she was going to get to a point where she could use her skills.

Looking at this idea from an alternative perspective, did any one of the 18 individuals have any inkling of their destiny – that they would play a major role in shaping Britain’s story?

Yes: some of them were completely on the other side of the coin. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is a prime example of someone whose greatness seemed assured. He was the son of an illustrious engineer, Marc Brunel, and even his name – Isambard – literally means ‘forged in iron’. In a sense, he really seemed destined to become a great engineer.

His father trained him up from a very young age to follow in his footsteps, and Isambard was incredibly clever and capable. In his twenties he worked on major projects such as the Thames Tunnel. Although perhaps it wasn’t inevitable, I think Brunel was always determined to achieve big engineering feats because he was so passionate.

There are anecdotes from his school days of him bemusing classmates with his ability to observe whether a building was structurally sound. When it collapsed, they would find it spooky – but for him it was simply apparent because he could ‘read’ structures so well.

Many of these individuals – such as Westwood reimagining antecedents in her fashion – themselves took inspiration from history. How conscious of the past were your 18 personalities?

That’s a great question. Take Horatio Nelson, who had an extraordinary childhood and adolescence. He was born in Norfolk; his father was a priest, and he had a pretty idyllic Famous Five-type upbringing. But his mother died young, which is a common theme among lots of these famous individuals: their parents die, or they lose family members while they’re still very young.

When he was just 12, Nelson joined the Royal Navy. By the time he was 18, he’d visited the West Indies and sailed to the Arctic and around the Indian Ocean. He’d also almost died of malaria and, while recuperating in the bowels of a ship, not knowing if he was going to make it home, Nelson fell into a deep depression. He just couldn’t see a way forward.

The thing that brought him out of that moment were visions of patriotism and future heroism. I think that is tied up with his view of history: Nelson’s uncle was a great naval man who had gained glory as a hero of Britain’s maritime exploits. Of course, Nelson later became a hero himself, but before then he was aware of famous figures from British history who were inspirational to him.

How much of history is shaped by young people?

You could argue that history has largely been shaped by people we would today consider to be young. Lots of great things, as well as lots of terrible things, have been done by people who would today be deemed ‘young’ – under the age of 30 or 40, say. The way to look at this is that people in the past grew up much more quickly. They were forced to become adults at an earlier age, through their own choice or otherwise. Compared with today, they had much more responsibility and were often pushed to do more. We could learn from that. Young people are capable of a lot – when they’re given the opportunity.

Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and author. Her previous book is UPROAR! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London (Icon Books, 2023)

Her book Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives out now

Ad

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Danny BirdContent producer

Danny Bird is a content producer at HistoryExtra

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...