Professor Amanda Vickery is giving the first British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Patron’s Lecture (link is external) at Newcastle University, on Mutton Dressed as Lamb. In the eighteenth century, as today, perceptions of age bore unevenly on women and men. A misogynist attack on dressy older women was pungent, but mature women still had to clothe themselves. Accusations of frolicking in a lamb fashion were mortifying, but keeping up appearances was vital too. This lecture will examine the interplay of age and fashion, re-creating the distinctive way women negotiated the pitfalls of dressing past their prime, charting a perilous course between indignity and scorn on the one hand and invisibility on the other.