The Seven Ages of Man — Context and Discussion

A Landlord’s Domestic Court

The fifth essay, “On Being a Landlord,” reveals Bergengren’s fondness for cataloging and his eye for the mundane. He lists fourteen married women and one unmarried man—Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Charlie Wah Loo—whose names he knows but whose husbands he cannot keep straight. This roll call becomes a recurring motif: the landlord as a “Justice of the Domestic Peace,” adjudicating tenant annoyances short of murder. The essay imagines these tenants as feudal retainers, marching under his banner with pikes and halberds, paying rent in loyal service and eggs. But the modern reality is different: rent is paid vicariously through wives, and the landlord’s power is limited to eviction. Bergengren’s self-portrait as a reluctant collector—one who would rather leave a tenement to the tenant than ask for money—adds a layer of ironic self-deprecation.

Johnson in the Nursery

The first essay draws on a Boswell anecdote: Johnson, asked what he would do if shut in a castle with a newborn, insists on fresh air, warm water, and a cow. Bergengren uses this to pivot to modern baby care, noting Johnson’s ignorance of pasteurization and formula. The essay then imagines the baby with a copy of “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” a modern compendium of exercises. This movement between eighteenth-century wit and contemporary domestic advice is characteristic: Bergengren treats Johnson as a fellow commentator on child-rearing, not a distant authority. The essay’s structure—anecdote, reflection, modern contrast—recurs across the book, creating a rhythm of historical allusion and present-day observation.

Recurring Images of Domestic Peace

Throughout the excerpts, Bergengren returns to the idea of domestic peace as a fragile, comic equilibrium. In “On Being a Landlord,” he defines the landlord as a “Justice of the Domestic Peace,” a role that requires wisdom greater than Solomon’s. The image of tenants annoying each other—leading to “homicide more or less justifiable”—is treated with deadpan humor. Similarly, the baby essay frames infant behavior as a model of “dignified but friendly reticence.” These recurring images of peace, jurisdiction, and reticence give the essays a thematic coherence beyond the Shakespearean frame. Bergengren’s voice is consistently that of a mild, observant participant, not a moralist.

Movement Between Scenes

The book’s structure is episodic, each essay a self-contained scene that jumps in time and setting: from a nursery to a landlord’s ledger, from a castle with Johnson to a modern apartment building. Bergengren uses transitional phrases like “In meeting a baby” or “In an informal, but practical way” to establish a conversational, almost essayistic flow. The movement is not linear but associative: the landlord essay begins with a legal definition, then lists tenants, then imagines feudal service, then returns to rent collection. This associative structure mirrors the narrator’s mind, which digresses freely into history, anecdote, and speculation. The result is a series of vignettes that feel like spoken reflections rather than formal arguments.

Bergengren’s essays reward attention to their small, precise details: the list of tenants, the Johnsonian aside, the imagined feudal army. The book’s humor depends on the reader’s willingness to follow these digressions. Reading sequentially, one notices how each essay recycles motifs—domestic peace, reluctant authority, the absurdity of modern life—in new contexts. The Shakespearean ages provide a loose framework, but the real pleasure lies in Bergengren’s voice: dry, self-aware, and quietly observant.

Reading The Seven Ages of Man, I remembered evenings in my grandfather’s study, where he’d read aloud from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 23 — A Reader’s Guide, pausing at a sentence just to smile. Both books feel like patient company—one that notices the ordinary smallness of living, then lets it sit quietly beside you.