Читать книгу A History of Solitude - David Vincent, Дэвид Винсент - Страница 8

The long debate over solitude was given new urgency by the Enlightenment commitment to sociability. Personal exchange drove innovation but left insufficient space for intellectual exploration and self-discovery. Social interaction promoted creativity but might also distract and trivialize if there was no opportunity for retreat and reflection. A new balance had to be struck between engagement and seclusion in the pursuit of progress. At the same time, historical forms of withdrawal retained a dangerous attraction amidst the noise and materialism of an urbanizing society. The walled cloister or unpeopled nature had long been a cleansing alternative to the corrupting pressures of the contemporary world. Both threatened an irreversible rejection of vital structures of discourse and debate. Amidst these pressures there were evident casualties of social living. There was a growing apprehension, driven by the emerging medical profession, that the mental resilience of those charged with achieving change could not withstand the maelstrom of personal interactions. The more intense the demands of society, the larger the number of participants, the greater the risk of a descent into a potentially lethal melancholy.

The question of how to be alone has remained a lightning conductor in the response to modernity.⁸⁵ As European populations expanded and relocated from the country to the city after 1800, so new questions were asked in a host of contexts about the appropriate role of solitude. What James Vernon has characterized as ‘a new society of strangers’⁸⁶ was faced with the task of redefining and remaking practices which could variously be seen as compounding the dangers or exploiting the strengths of more fragmented interpersonal relations. Over time, three distinct functions of solitude emerged, each of them a response to the opportunities and threats of increasingly crowded populations.

The first of these had a lineage stretching back to the Romantic Movement and thence to oppositional practices with which Zimmermann was concerned. In this discourse, solitude was a recurring, endlessly remodelled critique of whatever was conceived as modernity. The locus of unwelcome change was the expanding urban centres which corrupted human relations and threatened physical health. The principal arena of spiritual and bodily recovery was nature in as unspoilt a form as the British Isles could supply. With the growth of international transport systems from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it became possible to engage in person or through travel literature with truly wild landscapes. What was required above all was an unmediated relationship not between one individual and another, but between the lone walker or explorer and some manifestation of God’s original creation. This withdrawal from urban sociability is considered in Chapter 2, which is principally concerned with walking in the nineteenth century, Chapter 5, which discusses recreational encounters with the countryside in the twentieth century, and Chapter 6, which examines the increasingly exhausted practice of battling with extreme nature.

The second function of solitary behaviour was as a pathology of modernity. The licentious pursuit of material pleasure and individual satisfaction increasingly threatened healthy forms of sociability. Severe forms of physical or psychological morbidity were a direct, quantifiable measure of unmanageable contradictions in interpersonal relations. Over the period covered by this study, concerns coalesced around the emerging notion of loneliness. Before the modern era, the term was rarely deployed in isolation from emotional solitude more generally. Milton’s 1643 tract on divorce argued that marriage was primarily ‘a remedy against loneliness’, and existed to provide ‘the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of a solitary life’.⁸⁷ In the eighteenth century, lonely meant a state or more often a place of solitude. It began to appear more widely as a distinct negative emotion in the writings of the Romantic poets.⁸⁸ The disaffected wandering of Byron’s Childe Harold takes him to the Alps, ‘The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls, / Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, /And throned Eternity in icy halls / of cold sublimity.’⁸⁹ There was, however, ‘too much of man’ in Lac Leman and he renewed his quest for a form of bitter solitude: ‘soon in me shall Loneliness renew / Thoughts hid, but not less cherish’d than of old.’⁹⁰

The term ‘loneliness’ entered popular discourse during the nineteenth century, although initially the concept was subsumed within the pathologies of solitude discussed by successive medical authorities and other writers.⁹¹ In Charles Dickens’s 1840 Christmas story, a deaf, elderly man is befriended on the festive day by the narrator, who seeks to draw him out of his melancholic isolation, described in the story not as loneliness but as a state of ‘solitude’.⁹² Gradually it became a separate condition, carrying with it a specific set of symptoms. Writing in 1930, G. K. Chesterton satirized the emergence of what appeared to be a particularly local phenomenon:

One of the finer manifestations of an indefatigable patriotism has taken the form of an appeal to the nation on the subject of Loneliness. This complains that the individual is isolated in England, in a sense unknown in most other countries, and demands that something should be done at once to link up all these lonely individuals in a chain of sociability.⁹³

Loneliness was embraced by the emerging discipline of psychology.⁹⁴ At its most intense it could cause outbreaks of psychotic illness. The diffuse concept of melancholy was reborn as a condition with interacting mental and physical symptoms. Chapter 7 will examine the post-1945 emergence of a public crisis of loneliness, culminating in the appointment of the world’s first government minister for the phenomenon, and the publication of an official strategy to combat it.

The third change was the most pervasive yet the least recognized by contemporary commentators. The replacement of literary doctors by professional social scientists from the late Victorian period onwards did little to alter the marginal status of solitary behaviours. The first major study to place solitude as a normal and necessary aspect of living was written by the psychologist Anthony Storr as late as 1989. He mounted a case against the prevailing orthodoxy. ‘It is widely believed,’ he wrote in his Preface, ‘that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness.’⁹⁵ His book stimulated greater interest in the topic amongst social scientists, but as recently as 2016, Ira Cohen could still observe that ‘while my fellow sociologists have made extraordinary progress in the study of how individuals engage in social interaction, they have seldom acknowledged that there is an entire realm of behaviors in which people engage when they are not involved in interpersonal encounters’.⁹⁶ Such activities, it will be argued in this history, were more than residual pastimes that have been obscured by the noise and energy of commercial progress. Rather, they were at once a product of modernity and a necessary condition of its success. From the early nineteenth century onwards, multiform improvements in material prosperity, consumer markets and communication networks made possible a wider range of solitary practices across the population. Solitude in its basic form as a site of fleeting leisure amidst hard-pressed lives became more available, especially for women and the labouring poor. It will be argued, particularly in Chapters 3 and 5, that at all stages of the life-course, and for all but the most dispossessed of society, these forms of solitary endeavour made a sustainable sociability possible.

The dynamics of change across these three functions have been obscured by a static conception of solitude as an activity. In Zimmermann’s treatise, as more widely in his own time and subsequently, solitude was seen as a simple antonym of physical company. He insisted, as we have seen, that the motives for withdrawal were critical, but nonetheless assumed that in all circumstances he was dealing with the absence of another in a particular space. The modern debate about loneliness is still largely predicated on a binary opposition between face-to-face contact and non-communicative isolation. Whether in an unpeopled landscape or an empty room, the withdrawn figure is a key component of the experience and understanding of solitude throughout our period. Two further forms of solitude have, however, become increasingly significant. The first may be termed networked solitude, the engagement with others through print, correspondence or other media whilst otherwise alone.

In the late eighteenth century, particularly at the level of education and society that a medical practitioner occupied, there was already an intervening structure of virtual representation, whereby an individual could be both by himself or herself and in communication with another. In Britain, men and women of the gentry class had been using letters to conduct their affairs with distant relatives and business partners since the later middle ages.⁹⁷ By 1800, what Susan Whyman terms ‘epistolary literacy’ had reached as far down as the many literate members of the artisan community.⁹⁸ For a manual worker, the composition or receipt of a letter was a rare event, but leading scientists had long been accustomed to maintaining a network of correspondents across Europe and latterly with the New World. Zimmermann conducted not only his research on this basis but also his literary endeavours. ‘His work upon Solitude,’ recorded Tissot, ‘was received with great éclat, not only in Germany, but wherever German is read, and procured him a correspondence which gratified him greatly.’⁹⁹ The subsequent expansion of European and global postal networks, founded on the flat-rate, pre-paid model of Britain’s 1840 Penny Post, was designed to maintain connections between family members dispersed by the economic and demographic upheavals of the period.¹⁰⁰ The later inventions of the telephone and the internet, which will be discussed in the final chapter, supplied further means of managing physical isolation. Networked solitude both reduced the stress and enriched the experience of being alone. Through correspondence and the proliferating forms of printed media, it enabled solitary individuals to enjoy their own company and at the same time feel that they were in some sense part of a wider community.

The second alternative form has only lately become the subject of scholarly discussion.¹⁰¹ Abstracted solitude was the capacity to be alone amidst company. It was the means by which individuals withdrew their attention and thoughts from those in close physical proximity. The long-standing concern with finding mental space within the press of people gained a new urgency in the rapidly expanding metropolitan civilization of the eighteenth century. In 1720, Daniel Defoe wrote a second sequel to his epochal novel of solitude.¹⁰² Robinson Crusoe was now back in London, and anxious to draw a distinction between absolute physical isolation, whether chosen or enforced, and a temporary withdrawal from surrounding company. The returned castaway had no nostalgia for his former life. The solitude he had enjoyed was necessary to the wellbeing of his moral self, but artificial and unsafe when disconnected from the moral structures and constraining perspectives of educated society. The most profound forms of spiritual reflection were better undertaken in the midst of everyday activity. ‘Divine Contemplations,’ Crusoe insists, ‘require a Composure of Soul, uninterrupted by any extraordinary Motions or Disorders of the Passions; and this, I say, is much easier to be obtained and enjoy’d in the ordinary Course of Life, than in Monkish Cells and forcible Retreats.’¹⁰³ The crowd, specifically that of the nation’s capital, was a condition of disciplined, productive meditation, not its negation:

It is evident then, that as I see nothing but what is far from being retir’d, in the forced Retreat of an Island, the Thoughts being in no Composure suitable to a retired Condition, no not for a great While; so I can affirm, that I enjoy much more Solitude in the Middle of the greatest Collection of Mankind in the World, I mean at London, while I am writing this, than ever I could say I enjoy’d in eight and twenty Years Confinement to a desolate Island.¹⁰⁴

It was an argument about what was necessary and also what was feasible. Crusoe’s creator had no doubt that abstracting himself at will from the complex networks in which he lived and worked was an entirely practical proposition. His hero insists that ‘all the Parts of a compleat Solitude are to be as effectually enjoy’d, if we please, and sufficient Grace assisting, even in the most populous Cities, among the Hurries of Conversation, and Gallantry of a Court, or the Noise and Business of a Camp, as in the Desarts of Arabia and Lybia, or in the desolate Life of an uninhabited Island’.¹⁰⁵

By its nature, abstracted solitude has left little record, but it may be argued that in the overcrowded domestic interiors in which most people lived for much of the time covered by this study, it was the principal means of achieving the benefits traditionally claimed for physical isolation. It required a degree of practised concentration, and could vary in time from a few snatched minutes of contemplation or day-dreaming to a prolonged immersion in a personal task or distraction. There was a frequent association with types of networked solitude, most obviously getting lost in a book whilst the noisy life of the household went on around the reader. In middle-class interiors it was visible in the ability of employing householders to consider themselves entirely alone whilst in the presence of toiling servants. Throughout the period it was influenced by technical change, and as Chapter 8 will argue, it reached its apotheosis with the arrival of the texting smartphone.

Common to the differing responses to modernity and the varying categories of solitude were questions of class and gender. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers on the subject, as on melancholy more generally, were in no doubt that their principal concern was with well-educated men.¹⁰⁶ ‘Close, and unremitted thinking’, as Thomas Arnold argued, was a leading cause of insanity.¹⁰⁷ Only those with a mature, balanced mind were capable of withstanding the perils of isolation and returning to productive intercourse with society. Conversely, those spending excessive hours in their studies were especially vulnerable to the pathologies of solitude, whereas the bulk of the population were shielded from them by their intellectual limitations. As William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine of 1769 put it, ‘The perpetual thinker seldom enjoys either health or spirits; while the person who can hardly be said to think at all, seldom fails to enjoy both.’¹⁰⁸ Men who worked with their hands were unlikely to suffer from disorders of the mind. Thomas Trotter’s View of the Nervous Temperament of 1812 noted that ‘I do not find that the pitmen in the coal-mines in this district are liable to any particular diseases; when temperate in drinking, they commonly live to a great age.’¹⁰⁹

In most of the contemporary commentary, women were excluded from the benefits of the solitary state. The early eighteenth-century poet Mary Chudleigh regarded it as a ‘masculine pleasure’ for which reason ‘Solitude ought never to be our Choice, an active Life including in it much greater Perfection.’¹¹⁰ There was a possibility of withdrawal ‘in our Studies, in our Gardens, and in the silent lonely Retirement of a shady Grove’, but ‘none can be thus happy in Solitude, unless they have an inward Purity of Mind, their Desires contracted, and their Passions absolutely under the Government of their Reason’.¹¹¹ Zimmermann thought this display of virtues highly unlikely amongst women. Either they were simply too busy managing the affairs of the family ever to have the opportunity to enjoy their own company, or their particular exposure to the imaginative faculty rendered them incapable of withstanding its destructive effects. ‘Solitude is still more prolific of visionary insanity in the minds of women,’ he observed, ‘than in those of men; since the imaginations of the latter are in general less governed by an irritable sensibility and more restrained by stability of judgment.’¹¹²

People with time to spare were held to require a certain level of education to make use of their leisure. The seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley observed in his essay ‘Of Solitude’ that he ‘cannot much recommend Solitude to a man totally illiterate’.¹¹³ Those encountering what he termed ‘the little intervals of accidental Solitude, which frequently occurr in almost all conditions (except the very meanest of the people, who have business enough in the necessary provisions of life)’, needed access to books or some form of ‘Ingenious Art’ to fill the empty hours.¹¹⁴ It is possible to argue, however, that solitude has both an upper-case and a lower-case existence. There is an intertextual literary tradition, reviewed in Zimmermann’s treatise and revisited in prose and poetry throughout the modern period. And there is a tradition of commonplace practices which have been and remain of critical importance to men and women of every level of society and education as they seek to balance their lives and find space for themselves amidst the demands of company.

Cowley’s ‘little intervals of accidental Solitude’ were not the exclusive preserve of the privileged, whether male or female. For most of the population at the turn of the nineteenth century, even in urbanizing England, many of such opportunities as existed were to be found in the rural economy. In 1800, the labourer poet Robert Bloomfield wrote in The Farmer’s Boy of the young lad tending a field of growing wheat and in the course of his daily labour enjoying ‘his frequent intervals of lonely ease. … Whence solitude derives peculiar charms’.¹¹⁵ As Chapters 3 and 5 will explore, there were times in the working day when the demands of labour could be suspended, the more so before the imposition of factory-based time discipline. In the home there were again moments of escape, their incidence varying according to the numbers and ages of children. The density of company varied over the course of the day as men went out to labour and increasingly children left for school. And always, particularly but not only in rural areas, there were the gardens, lanes, and fields beyond the front door where it was possible for fleeting periods to be alone with yourself.¹¹⁶

Upper- and lower-case categories of solitude have to be seen in relation to each other. There needs to be a focus on the exchange between the literary discourse and everyday attitudes and practices. In his classic study of the related subject of the pastoral ideal in American life, Leo Marx argues that ‘to appreciate the significance and power of our American fables it is necessary to understand the interplay between the literary imagination and what happens outside literature, in the general culture’.¹¹⁷ Over the period from 1800, there were a series of fierce debates on topics, for instance, such as solitary confinement, which will be examined in Chapter 4, where there was complex movement between high-level theoretical arguments, some of which went back to the monastic tradition with which Zimmermann was so preoccupied, and the actual and perceived experiences of common criminals. By the same measure, as Chapter 7 argues, it is impossible to understand the emergence of the pathology of loneliness in a range of sociological, psychiatric and medical studies unless a clear view is kept of the basic features of demography, household structure and standards of living from the nineteenth century onwards. More generally, successive information revolutions, from the Penny Post to the internet, profoundly altered the sense of what solitude was and might be as a communicative experience.

At the same time, lower-case solitude remains a neglected topic in its own right. From Robert Bloomfield to our own era, opportunities for casual withdrawal from company have been sought and enjoyed. In his Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter, Philip Koch writes that, ‘One of the most fervently celebrated virtues of solitude is its ability to provide a place of refuge from the beleaguered toils of social life.’¹¹⁸ These may take the form of extended leaves of absence from daily rituals, but more often they are borrowed moments from pressured lives. For most of the population most of the time, solitude has been a snatched experience found in contexts where company and its absence are equal and overlapping possibilities. This will be the central concern of Chapter 3 on the nineteenth century, and Chapter 5 on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whilst the latter-day advocates of monasticism and long-term retreats who will be discussed in Chapter 6 sometimes presented the practices as a form of spiritual base-jumping, risking sanity in a high-risk encounter with prolonged silence and self-examination, the more general pattern has been to embrace solitude simply as a form of relaxation from work and family. In the words of Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise, ‘Solitude contains great leisure. To be in solitude is to rest, even momentarily, from meeting the demands of others.’¹¹⁹

There is a need for what might be termed a quiet history of British society. Too little attention has been paid to the intermittently organized, often silent, re-creative practices that have been and remain a vital presence in the lives of most men and women in the modern world. Ira Cohen’s Solitary Action: Acting on Our Own in Everyday Life catalogues the ‘numerous … public sites where we find people engaged in solitary activities’, together with ‘our homes, where at various times of the day individuals find themselves alone or claim zones of solitude in order to do some housework or homework or recreate by themselves’, and observes that ‘this hitherto half-hidden realm of human behaviour’ is ‘a suitable subject for sociological enquiry’.¹²⁰ What is true of the present applies also to the past. Social historians, like social scientists more generally, have tended to focus on communal, noisy forms of activity. This is partly from a desire to emphasize the complexity of interactions at all levels of society and not just amongst the educated and privileged. It is partly from a sense that collective practices have been the locus of historical change. And it is also a matter of evidence. Bloomfield’s farm boy enjoying his ‘frequent intervals of lonely ease’ left no mark on the public record, neither did the weary housewife stepping outside the house for a few moments of private peace. Even where historians have stooped to consider the pastimes of the common people, the tendency has been to concentrate on rough sports and commercialized mass entertainment which one way or another generated a trail of commentary and paperwork.¹²¹

There are, however, a number of historical sources which between them permit the creation of at least a patchwork quiet history. A fertile archive was generated by the continual expansion of networked solitude. As we shall see in the next two chapters, from the beginning of the period covered by this study, solitary pastimes called forth a literature of periodicals and monographs which serviced isolated practices. A year after Zimmermann’s treatise first appeared in English, The Sporting Magazine began publication, carrying, amongst much else, information on long-distance solo walking against the clock, a popular constituent of the vibrant gambling culture of the era.¹²² From the late eighteenth century through to the present day, the energetic and responsive publishing industry produced material on a proliferating range of private pastimes. Alongside these there were monographs on the most salient quiet recreations, such as fishing and gardening, although these infrequently addressed the breadth of popular participation. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, practitioners of all kinds of unseen hobbies, from embroidery to stamp collecting, began to form themselves into associations which created their own archives and publications. During the more recent past, oral histories and social surveys have extended their scope to examine the quotidian lives of the mass of the population. Finally there are the commentators from within the everyday world in the form of memoirs and imaginative literature. A champion of Robert Bloomfield was John Clare, one of the very few writers of his own or any subsequent period capable of engaging with both upper- and lower-case solitude, and his poetry and prose will form the point of departure for the next chapter.

In Zimmermann’s critical universe, solitude, for good or ill, was consciously practised by only a small minority of the population. The most striking change over the modern period was the expansion of the numbers of men and women who deliberately set aside time for themselves in the absence of company. Their behaviour was testament both to the growing demand for restorative withdrawal and the sustaining influence of material and communicative resources. As Chapters 7 and 8 will argue, persisting and in some cases deepening domestic poverty in the era of late modernity, together with growing disinvestment in public services, threatened to reverse these changes, generating a sense of crisis about the pathology of failed solitude in the form of loneliness. At the same time, the digital revolution in the last few years of this study seems likely to cause a significant disruption of the established patterns of networked solitude. Critical solitude, the search for alternative forms of spiritual truth in the face of corrupting social relations, had a fierce energy throughout this period, driven by the accelerating movement of the population from the countryside to the towns. But as will be discussed in Chapter 6, there were growing difficulties in maintaining the authority of the Christian retreat and the sanctity of nature as a refuge from urban civilization. The demand persisted, but in an increasingly diffuse and personalized form.