Aging and the novel

When was the first novel written in which a character ages? A novel, that is, that carefully focusses on a character who moves through youth to middle age and then into old age and finally death? This is not the Bildungsroman narrative which stops at maturity. An aging story dwells on the diminuation of power and imagination, the closing down of a personal future, the strange mix of reconciliation to, and hatred of, the world which typically comes in old age.
King Lear tells such a story perhaps. But no 18thc novel does I think. Very few, if any, 19thc novels either.
Does aging somehow fall out of the literary imagination in the epoch of realism?

Culture

In his essay, "Does culture matter?", E.M. Forster makes an important suggestion, more or less in passing. It is that to enjoy "culture" is to feel the will to transmit it. Culture is essentially a chain of communicability. Or to put this in slightly different terms: a serious engagement in culture involves a disposition to bequeath and to develop it. Without that disposition, culture is not being fully engaged.  

This need not mean that to engage culture requires participation in the formal institutions designed to pass it on. Not at all.  The disposition to develop and bequeath may take the form of performing work on oneself: reading, looking at art, listening to music in order to attune oneself imaginatively to the world in ways that will to make a difference on others (even if they may not.) 

Engaging culture is to help imagination grow in what is, for Forster, its essential impersonality.

Forster's essay worries about what happens to culture thought like this in a society which tends to marginalize and disrespect the creative imagination and culture. His answer seems to be: if you do care about culture, hang in there and don't worry too much about the others, not even the State which is structurally anti-culture.

In this light, it is worth remembering Forster's advise that one of the best things you can do for culture is just to spend money on it.