The Routledge History of Loneliness 9781000839203, 1000839206

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“Loneliness is one of the most intriguing and relatively recent additions to the study of the history of emotion, with ramifcations both past and present. This ambitious collection signifcantly advances the subject, by examining intellectual, social and geographical contexts with a number of imaginative chapters, from the early modern period until recent times. The result captures important current fndings while encouraging further analysis, including comparative work—just what a compendium of this sort should do.” Peter N. Stearns, George Mason University, USA

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF LONELINESS

The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present. Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives. With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance. Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Head of Historical and Classical Studies, University of Adelaide. She writes widely on the history of emotions, gender and family life. Elaine Chalus is Professor of British History at the University of Liverpool. She writes widely on 18th-century women, gender and social and political culture. Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Southern Denmark, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, author of A History of European Women’s Work, Women in European Culture and Society A Sourcebook, and general editor of Routledge History Handbook on Gender and the Urban Experience and Gender in the European Town.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. The Routledge History of American Sexuality Edited by Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz and David Serlin The Routledge History of Death since 1800 Edited by Peter N. Stearns The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe Edited by Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 Edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure The Routledge History of the Second World War Edited by Paul R. Bartrop The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations Edited by Tyson Reeder The Routledge Global History of Feminism Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Nova Robinson The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World Edited by Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration Edited by Andreas E. Feldmann, Xóchitl Bada, Jorge Durand and Stephanie Schütze The Routledge History of Loneliness Edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories/ book-series/RHISTS

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF LONELINESS

Edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

Designed cover image: John Atkinson Grimshaw artwork entitled Refections on the Thames, Westminster. Iconic painting of the River Thames with the Houses of Parliament © steeve-x-art/ Alamy Stock Photo First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-35508-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43757-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-33184-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To all those who suffered loneliness and loss as a result of the pandemic

CONTENTS

xiii xv xvi

List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors A History of Loneliness: An Introduction Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

1

PART 1

Representing Loneliness

15

1 The Origins of ‘Loneliness’, the Oxford English Dictionary and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590) Amelia Worsley

17

2 Polite Loneliness: The Problem Sociability of Spinsters in the Long Eighteenth Century Alison Duncan

35

3 Gender and Loneliness in Business: A Milliner and Her Agent in Eighteenth-Century Southern Europe Anne Montenach

48

4 ‘My Solitary and Retired Life’: Queen Charlotte’s Solitude(s) Mascha Hansen 5 ‘I Feel as if Part of [My] Self Was Torn From Me’: Entrepreneurship, Absence and Loneliness in Nineteenth-Century England Andrew Popp ix

61

75

Contents

6 David Hume and the Disease of the Learned: Melancholy, Loneliness and Philosophy Charlie Huenemann

88

7 Falling In and Out of Place: The Errant Status of Solitude in Early Modern Europe Giovanni Tarantino

102

8 ‘Here in My Loneliness, I Suffer’: Illness, Isolation and Loneliness in the Diaries of Kirsti Teräsvuori (1899–1988) Karoliina Sjö

118

9 Time, Space and Loneliness in Bengali and Marathi Poetry Ananya Chakravarti 10 In Solitary Pursuit: Loneliness and the Quest for Love in Modern Britain Zoe Strimpel 11 Loneliness as Crisis in Britain after 1950: Temporality, Modernity and the Historical Gaze Fred Cooper

131 149

162

PART 2

Household and Communities

175

12 Loneliness and Food in Early Modern England Lisa Wynne Smith

177

13 ‘Disengagement From All Creatures’: Exploring Loneliness in Early Modern English Cloisters Claire Walker 14 Ageing and Loneliness in England, 1500–1800 Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster 15 Loneliness, Love and the Longing for Health: Mary Graham’s Consumption Carolyn A. Day 16 Loneliness and Contested Communities in Mary Prince’s Slave Narrative, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) Jennifer Leetsch x

193 207

225

238

Contents

17 Solitude in Early Nineteenth-Century German-Speaking Europe Heidi Hakkarainen 18 ‘As an Only Child I Must Have Been Lonely Though I Was Not Aware of It at the Time’: Only Children’s Refections on the Experience of Loneliness in Britain, 1850–1950 Alice Violett

253

267

19 Lonely in a Crowd: The Transformative Effect of School Culture in Schoolgirl and College Fiction Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer

280

20 ‘A Purer Form of Loneliness’: Loneliness and the Search for Community Among Gay and Bisexual Men in Scotland, 1940–1980 Jeff Meek

295

21 Loneliness as Social Critique: Disregard and the Limits of Care in 21st-Century Japan Iza Kavedž ija

311

PART 3

Distance, Place and Displacement

325

22 Loneliness and Sociability in Maritime and Colonial Space: A Comparative Intersectional Analysis of the Journals of Lt Ralph Clark and Dr Joseph Arnold Rosalind Carr

327

23 The Loneliness of Leadership: Royal Naval Offcers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Elaine Chalus

343

24 ‘Small Uneasinesses and Petty Fears’: Life Cycle, Masculinity and Loneliness Joanne Begiato

359

25 Lonely Places in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Scottish Balladry Katie Barclay

374

26 Navigating ‘Loneliness’ in the Reformed Lunatic Asylum: Britain, 1800–1860 Mark Neuendorf

387

xi

Contents

27 ‘There Is a Trace of You in the Air of That Room’: Practices of Coping With Separation From Friends in Late-Nineteenth-Century Finland Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta

404

28 ‘One of My Own Kind’: Jessie Currie’s Experience of Loneliness in British Central Africa, 1891–1894 Julia M. Wells

418

29 Loneliness, the Love Letter and the Performance of Romance During Wartime Separation, 1939–1945 Emma Carson

434

30 Voices From Lost Homelands: Loss, Longing and Loneliness Deborah Simonton

452

31 ‘We Are Still Alive’: Refugees and Loneliness Joy Damousi

471

Index

484

xii

FIGURES

  2.1  The Old Maid (J. Walker, 1777).    3.1  Étienne Dupheis’ itinerary (March–August 1778).    3.2a, 2b, 2c: Letters received by Mlle Mandier.    4.1  Benjamin West (1777), Queen Charlotte.    4.2  Charles Wild, A View of the Queen’s Library at Frogmore House.    6.1  David Hume.    6.2  Title Page, A Treatise on Human Nature, Vol. 1: Of the Understanding.    7.1  Vault of the Room of Solitude in the Palazzo Farnese in  Caprarola, detail of   Jesus Christ.    7.2  Vault of the Room of Solitude in the Palazzo Farnese in  Caprarola, detail of   Philosophers turning their backs.    7.3  Eijgentlijkke afbeeldinge van de Maniere van Dansen der  Naturale In   woonderen ofte Hottontotten, aen de  Caep de Bona Esperanca, early-to-mid   17th century (Contemporary depiction of the manner of dancing of   the Hottentots native to the  Cape of Good Hope).    8.1  Teräsvuori’s second diary cover.    8.2  Writing the diaries.  12.1  Image of an 18th-century English funeral, with food and drink being served to   guests.  12.2  Michael Burghers (c. 1700), Mrs  John Webb being nursed when ill in bed.  12.3  Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), ‘A man in pain receiving medicines from a  housemaid.’  13.1  Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, Nuns at Work.  13.2  John Faber the Younger, after Gabriel Mathias, The Lady Howard Abbess of the English Nuns at Antwerp.  14.1  Margaret Patten.  14.2  Margaret Finch, Queen of the  Norwood Gypsies.  17.1  Caspar David Friedrich (1744–1840), Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer   (1817/1818).  17.2  The fowers of the forest.  21.1  By the riverside.  xiii

37 50 57 63 67 89 94 104 105

108 119 125 183 184 186 197 203 210 217 257 261 315

Figures

21.2 23.1 23.2 23.3 25.1 26.1 26.2 27.1 27.2 27.3 28.1 28.2 28.3 29.1 29.2 29.3 29.5 29.6 30.1 30.2 30.3 30.4 30.5 30.6 30.7

A view from afar. The Right Honourable Lord Collingwood. Vice Admiral Sir Edward Codrington. Captain Sir William Hoste. ‘Tam Lin’, from the 1853 edition of the Scots Musical Museum. Colney Hatch, lunatic asylum. The Hospital of Bethlem (Bedlam), St George’s Fields, Lambeth: the men’s ward of the infrmary. Vera Hejlt (1857–1947). Cely (Cecilia) Mechelin (1866–1950). Jenny Nordgren née Jusélius (1853–1933), 1894, carte de visit. Revd Currie and local children, Mulanje, Malawi, c. 1893. Jessie Currie, watercolour sketch of Mt Chiradzulo: The Hill of Good-Bye, facing 87. Jessie Currie’s sketch of Namonde’s village, c. 1891–1894: The Hill of Good-Bye, facing 40. Corporal Katharine McCall and Offcer Robert Cowper on their wedding day, 1943. Lieutenant Frank Sherral Bissaker and Norma Sherrie Bissell, and their wedding party, undated. and 29.4 William Dodsworth before and after he received Frances’ letter, 1941. William Dodsworth and Frances Tregoining on their wedding day, 16 January 1941. Staff Sergeant William Wiseman, Florence Wiseman, and their son Bill. Map showing key deportation sites for Helgi-Alice, Milja and Minna. Helgi-Alice Pats with husband Viktor, son Matti, Konstantin Päts, his son Leo and his sister-in law Johanna Peedi, 1934. Map of Republic of Estonia. Milja Post Tamm. Minna Tshudesnova at the launch of Carrying Linda’s Stones, 2006, at the Occupation Museum. The launch of Carrying Linda’s Stones, 2006. Portrait of Helgi Päts in her youth, n.d.

xiv

317 347 349 351 379 392 394 407 408 412 419 421 427 437 438 441 442 446 457 458 458 460 463 466 468

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project began as an idea from Elaine, but as we were all engaged in another large project at the time, it ‘rested’ until autumn of 2018. Once we received the contract and began commissioning chapters, it was winter 2019–20 and the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to rear its ugly head. Thus, the volume took shape at a time when concerns about the social impact of loneliness were coming to the fore in the news. As a result, it took on a different shape, expanded and became far more personal with the outbreak of the pandemic and the personal and professional/academic challenges it posed. We praise and acknowledge the resilience and adaptability of our authors as they contended with the combined challenges of closure of archives and libraries, repeated lockdowns, remote teaching, homeschooling, increased childcare commitments, isolation and loss of our ‘normality’ and the diffculties (indeed, impossibilities) of travel. We are grateful for the willing responses of archives and copyright holders to the authors, providing assistance and permissions with remarkable speed and effciency. Most of the images in this volume have been obtained due to the increasing availability of museums and galleries to release images in public domain and in other cases to waive fees, which has been much appreciated. Some chapters have relied on personal connections in shaping and illustrating their texts, and we thank these friends and families for their willing and generous help. We are also grateful for the support of our ‘lads’, Steven Barclay, Jon Ryan and David Hastie, who keep loneliness at bay, and the comfort and companionship of our cats, dogs and turtles.

xv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of the Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in Historical and Classical Studies, University of Adelaide. She writes widely on family life, gender and the history of emotions. With Kate De Luna and Giovanni Tarantino, she is editor of Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Joanne Begiato is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. She has published in several areas of historical scholarship: emotions, material culture, masculinities, families, marriage, domestic violence, the church courts and sexuality across the seventeenth to twentieth centuries Helen Berry is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests and many publications explore the social history of gender and the eighteenth-century family through alternative family structures, from castrati and queer marriage to the experiences of orphaned and abandoned children raised at the London Foundling Hospital. Rosalind Carr is a historian of the eighteenth-century British world. They are the author of Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh UP, 2014), have written numerous articles and book chapters on masculinities and are currently working on whiteness, Enlightenment and violence in colonial space. They are a lecturer in early modern Scottish history at Edinburgh University and an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Emma Carson is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of Adelaide. She holds a frst-class honours degree from the University of Adelaide, for which she was awarded both the Lynda Tapp Honours Prize and the Tinline Prize in 2018. She was also the 2020 recipient of the Hugh Martin Weir Prize and an Australian Historical Association/Copyright Agency Writing Bursary. Her PhD research uses letters to analyse the emotional impact of separation and military service on married couples during the Second World War. She is interested in twentiethcentury confict, gender and the history of emotions. Ananya Chakravarti is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her frst book, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil xvi

Notes on Contributors

and India (Oxford University Press, 2018), received an honourable mention for the Association of Asian Studies’ Bernard S. Cohn Prize, awarded to the best frst book on South Asia. She is currently completing her second monograph, on the Konkan coast, and a textbook on modern South Asian history, forthcoming from Routledge. Elaine Chalus (FRHistS) is Professor of British History at the University of Liverpool. An expert on gender and political culture, Elaine has numerous publications that recover women’s political activities at a period long before suffrage and pay serious attention to the social and the local dynamics of politics in eighteenth-century England. Her current research interests are in sociability and politics, eighteenth-century British cosmopolitanism and the history of loneliness. Fred Cooper is a contemporary historian of health, medicine and the psychological and social sciences. His research interests include shame as a political emotion during COVID-19; arts, creativity, the humanities and health; co-production; relational health in young people; and loneliness as an object of medical, social and cultural anxiety in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. He is a research fellow at the University of Exeter. Joy Damousi is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She has published widely on memory and aftermaths of war, history of emotions and history of humanitarianism, refugee and migration history. Her recent publications include Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and she is a co-editor Humanitarianism, Empire and Transnationalism, 1760–1995: Selective Humanity in the Anglophone World (Manchester 2022) and of A Cultural History of Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age:Volume 6 (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her forthcoming book, The Humanitarians: Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919–1975 (Cambridge University Press) is due for publication in 2022. Carolyn A. Day is Associate Professor of History at Furman University and is the author of Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017). Alison Duncan is a freelance historian. Her interests lie in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; her research focuses on the lives of never-married gentlewomen, with particular attention to self-representation in response to the normative narratives of popular culture. She is especially interested in the gendered hierarchies and dynamics of family life, both at home and in the wider social world. Elizabeth Foyster is a fellow and lecturer in History at Clare College, Cambridge, UK. She has published widely on themes in social history and has particular interests in the history of the family, crime, mental health and disability. She has previously worked with Helen Berry on men’s experiences of childlessness, for their jointly edited book, The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Heidi Hakkarainen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in Finland. Her main research interests include history of the press, popular culture studies, nineteenth-century studies and history of emotions in German-language Europe. She authored Comical Modernity. Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (Berghahn Books, 2019). Her new project is on children’s literature in early-19th-century Finland. xvii

Notes on Contributors

Mascha Hansen is a lecturer in British Literature at Greifswald University, Germany. Her research interests range from eighteenth-century women’s novels and letters to their involvement in science and education, their medical history and their visions of the future; recent publications include essays on the bluestockings and Queen Charlotte. She has edited a collection of essays on British Sociability and the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters (2021) and is currently preparing a digital edition of the German letters of Queen Charlotte. Charlie Huenemann is Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. His specialisation is modern philosophy and has published extensively on Spinoza and Nietzsche. He is the author of Understanding Rationalism and Spinoza’s Radical Theology, as well as numerous articles and essays. Marjo Kaartinen is currently Vice Rector at the University of Arts, Helsinki. Her research interests have ranged from early modern cultural history, especially early Tudor history, to women’s history and the histories of religion, otherness and bodyliness. Her English monographs are Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation (2002) and Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (2013), and she has co-edited volumes, among others, on female agency and luxury. Iza Kavedž ija is a lecturer in medical anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in the anthropology of Japan, particularly meaning in later life, well-being and creativity. Her recent books include Meaning in Life: Tales from Aging Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Values of Happiness: Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life (University of Chicago Press, 2016, co-edited with Harry Walker) and The Process of Wellbeing: Creativity, Conviviality, Care (University of Cambridge Press, in press). She is currently leading an AHRC-funded project entitled The Work of Art in Contemporary Japan: Inner and Outer Worlds of Creativity. Jennifer Leetsch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (University of Bonn, Germany), where she researches and teaches on slavery’s global entanglements in the Atlantic world and beyond. She is currently working on a second book project, which intertwines forms and media of Black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies. She has published work in Interventions, The European Journal of English Studies, the Journal of the African Literature Association and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and is currently co-editing a volume on migration imaginaries across visual and textual spheres. Jeff Meek is a social and cultural historian based at the University of Glasgow who has published widely on the intersections of sexuality, emotions, religion and the law in Scotland and the United Kingdom, as well as the economic and social experiences of working-class communities in Scotland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meek’s second monograph, Queer Trades, Society and the Law: Male Prostitution in Interwar Scotland will be published by Routledge in 2022. Anne Montenach is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Aix-Marseille (France). She has co-edited with Deborah Simonton Gender in the European Town: Female Agency in the Urban Economy, 1640–1830 (Routledge, 2013). She is also the general editor, with Deborah Simonton, of The Cultural History of Work (Bloomsbury, 2018, six volumes). Mark Neuendorf is a medical historian at the University of Adelaide. He has published on the intersection of emotions, print culture and psychiatry in modern Britain, including the monograph Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, 1770–1820 (2021). xviii

Notes on Contributors

Andrew Popp is Professor of History in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. He is a historian of Britain in the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on business history. He is the editor-in-chief of Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History. Nancy G. Rosoff is a Fellow of the Centre for the History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester, whose research interests include women’s history focused on sport, popular culture and the history of women’s education. Together, Rosoff and Spencer (later) have written British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship, which won the 2020 Anne Bloomfeld Prize for the best book written in English on the History of Education. Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor Emerita of British History at the University of Southern Denmark, Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published widely on women’s work, gender and towns and girlhood and her newest book, Gender in the European Town, will be published by Routledge in 2023. With Anne Montenach, she was the Association of American Publishers Prose Award winner for The Cultural History of Work (six volumes, 2018). Karoliina Sjö is a PhD student in cultural history at the University of Turku, Finland, focusing on autobiographical sources (such as diaries), biographical research, cultural history of writing, relations between life and narration, experiences, girlhood and history of (mental) illness of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also interested in creative and participatory research methods to discover new ethical dimensions in the ways to remember and tell. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation on Kirsti Teräsvuori’s diaries. Lisa Wynne Smith is a senior lecturer in history (Essex). Besides publishing widely on gender, health and the household in early modern England and France, she recently edited A Cultural History of Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2021). She was a founding co-editor of The Recipes Project blog, a founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and developed The Sloane Letters Project. Her current project is a collaboration on ‘European Cuisine and British Identity in the Age of Nationalism, 1760–1837.’ Stephanie Spencer is Professor Emerita at the University of Winchester whose research interests and publications focus on 20th-century girls’ formal and informal education. Together, Spencer and Rosoff (earlier) have written British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship, which won the 2020 Anne Bloomfeld Prize for the best book written in English on the History of Education. Zoe Strimpel is a historian of gender and intimacy in modern Britain. She did her PhD at the University of Sussex on the British matchmaking industry. Her monograph, Seeking Love in Modern Britain, was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. She is currently a British Academy early career postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick. Giovanni Tarantino is an early modern intellectual historian at the University of Florence, an honorary research associate at the UWA Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Perth, Australia) and the CNR Institute of Mediterranean Europe History (Rome, Italy), and Chair of the PIMo COST Action (CA18140). His most recent publications include The Sky in Place of the xix

Notes on Contributors

Nile: Climate, Religious Unrest and Scapegoating in Post-Tridentine Apulia (Environment and History, 2022) and (with Paola von Wyss-Giacosa) Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination (Brill, 2021). Alice Violett received her PhD in history from the University of Essex in 2018. Her research concerns the public perceptions and personal experiences of only children growing up in Britain between around 1850 and 1950. Miira Vuoksenranta is a doctoral student in cultural history at the University of Turku. She is currently fnalising her PhD dissertation, which focuses on female friendship in late-nineteenthcentury Finland. Claire Walker is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of the frst modern analysis of the post-Reformation English religious houses for women, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Palgrave, 2003), and she has published many articles on the nuns’ intellectual, political and spiritual practices. Her current research explores emotions and the materiality of exile and religious practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Julia M. Wells graduated with an MA (history) and a BSc (chemistry) from Victoria University of Wellington in 2016. Her research interests include tropical medical history, amateur/ home medical practices and settler experiences in colonial Africa. She has published a number of articles on these subjects and now works in the New Zealand public service, as a visitor and engagement adviser at Department of Conservation in Wellington, New Zealand. Amelia Worsley is Assistant Professor at Amherst College, whose current book project is entitled When ‘Loneliness’ was New: Solitary Women in British Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century. She has published several articles on this topic, including an article on ‘Ophelia’s loneliness’ (ELH, 2015). She has also published articles on Charlotte Smith (Placing Charlotte Smith, 2021), on Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Romantic Circles, 2021) and on Wordsworth and Lucretius (Wordsworth Circle, 2022).

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A HISTORY OF LONELINESS An Introduction Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

Edward Hopper’s 1927 oil painting Automat depicts a lone woman, sitting at night in a café with a cup of coffee.1 The American automat was a fashionable dining experience where people helped themselves to food from a vending machine, reducing contact with service or kitchen staff. They were associated with the modern, urban and anonymous, a symbolism reinforced by Hopper through the city streetlights refected in the large dark window, as well as the subject’s fashionable clothes. The woman’s emotions are ambiguous, but she appears cold, wearing a glove and coat, despite having fnished her meal. Her oversized hat and petite frame, set against the darkness, suggest a vulnerability, a loneliness. Automat contributes, like many of Hopper’s other works, to a conversation about the modern condition and its isolating effects. From noir cinema and literature to the famous Chicago School sociologies, midtwentieth-century artists and thinkers turned their attention to loneliness as a critical emotion that spoke not only to the individual but to larger social processes and new ways of living. In doing so, they acknowledged the historicity of an emotion that emerged from a particular set of temporal conditions and which was given form and meaning in relation to culture, society, politics and economy. The twenty-frst century has seen loneliness re-emerge as a key cultural issue. The psychological and medical implications of loneliness have recently returned this emotion to signifcant press and political attention.2 The Chicago Centre for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience has been exploring various aspects of loneliness and health for over a decade, with John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick’s Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (2008) attracting substantial attention in the popular press. Their work is indicative of the medical, psychological and sociological focus that the subject has thus far attracted. The results of a recent study of 47,000 adults across 25 European countries, however, have underlined the need for a historicized understanding of loneliness, suggesting that there is a clear pattern of groups of countries with high or low rates of loneliness. The groups have certain circumstances in common such as a recent history of social transformation or dramatic political changes, or at the other end of the scale, community cohesion and political stability.3

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-1

1

Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

Loneliness is consequently a lived experience with a history. It is in this context that The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary, multistranded approach to explore feelings of loneliness and associated feelings of aloneness and loss. While this history is occasionally referred to by policymakers, often with reference to stereotypes and cultural clichés infused with a poorly defned nostalgia for a simpler, more communal past, historical studies of how loneliness was experienced, expressed and engaged within the past are only now coming to fruition.4 This project provides a wide-ranging history of loneliness, exploring its emergence and meaning, particularly at times and places of disjuncture and change; thus, it highlights the signifcance of the concept to the development of modernity more broadly. As the theologian Paul Tillich famously wrote in The Eternal Now (1963), Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament. This volume intends to do just that. Thus, for instance, it asks important questions. When and in what contexts does ‘alone’ become ‘lonely’? What is the relationship between loneliness and the development of privacy, individualism and modernity? What does a study of loneliness tell us about emotional practice and lived experience over time? How was it recognized and responded to personally, socially, culturally and politically? What difference did loneliness make to people’s engagement with their friends, families, communities and neighbours? And how was loneliness constructed over distance and place? Beginning in the seventeenth century, roughly with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the resettlement of Europe post-Reformation—which begins the process towards the formation of the modern world as a multi-faith, multi-denominational entity with differing forms of political structure and different responses to personal welfare—the volume takes a longue durée approach to the subject, ending in the present with the rise of our current ‘crises’ of loneliness. While the history of emotions will be central to development of the volume, contributors explore the subject in the round, examining it from the perspectives of history, literature and philosophy and paying particular attention to questions raised by gender, class, household, economies, politics, urbanity, migration, exile and material culture. In contemporary culture and scholarship, loneliness is often tied to modernity and increasingly pathologized as an illness to be prevented and cured. Discussions of loneliness are often situated against a vision of changing social structures: the anonymity of large urban populations, declining family size and the rise of single households, the anomie and alienation of the modern workplace, the disembodied and so less effective connectivity of life lived online and in digital forms, or the failure of neighbourly values or community interest when set against a romanticized past.5 Refecting the close relationship between emotion, psychology and well-being in the contemporary world, loneliness might arise in the context of new social and economic conditions but is nonetheless fgured through ideas about health and mental illness. The wrongs of loneliness are often situated as much in its detriment to life expectancy as in the general happiness of individuals and the population.6 Yet what loneliness consists of and what its impacts are remain a topic of considerable discussion. Contributions from philosophy, theology, sociology and psychology have sought to codify and defne this emotion.7 It is now commonplace to note that ‘loneliness’ is a new word, coming to prominence in English from the nineteenth century, albeit preceded by words like ‘alone’ 2

A History of Loneliness

and ‘lonely’ and their affective dimensions.8 Here its ties to the modern are made manifest and many theories of loneliness grapple with it as a feeling associated with contemporary life. The loneliness of the crowd, articulated by an important early sociological study, refected the desire for love by the modern subject, taught to defne themselves in relation to others and necessary for the functioning of the industrial economy.9 Others have suggested that loneliness is a more fundamental condition. Existential loneliness was a term coined to acknowledge the fundamental separation or edge of the human, the impossibility of ever truly being one with another, and the insecurity and despair that resulted from this knowledge. If this was thought to be a universal experience, nonetheless loneliness only tended to become overwhelming at moments of crisis or for those who were situated at the extreme edge of society.10 Here sociologists and psychologists distinguished between situational loneliness, feelings that arose for a short period, in relation to a particular context and that were considered a normative human experience, and pathological loneliness, which became a long-term illness that infuenced health and well-being.11 Loneliness within much modern psychological and sociological scholarship attends closely to the relationship between the individual and their community. Common defnitions describe loneliness as the feeling that arises from a want of company or when one experiences their relationships to others as lacking or defcient.12 Psychological questionnaires designed to measure loneliness typically assess the quantity and quality of social interactions with others and whether a person feels as if they have a support network.13 Loneliness is therefore relational to people and largely fgured as a lack. In contrast, historians who have turned to thinking about loneliness have opened up alternative fgurations of this feeling. This not least refects the absence of the term for earlier periods and in many languages, requiring scholars to actively explore the possibilities of a history of loneliness for other times and places. Instead, historians have sought to engage with the experience of being alone, where histories of solitude often fgure strongly, and the social and psychological dimensions of experiences such as banishment, estrangement or loss.14 Such histories complicate defnitions of loneliness by unlocking its meanings, possibilities and historical trajectories. An important contribution to this conversation has been Fay Bound Alberti’s proposal to consider loneliness not as a single feeling but a cluster of emotions.15 Here loneliness intersects with melancholy, nostalgia, loss, love, grief, homesickness, joy and ecstasy, as well as cultural experiences, such as creativity, genius, faith, social exclusion, trauma and violence. Historians of emotion have also brought a distinctive methodological lens to a history of loneliness. Not only is loneliness given meaning through specifc temporal conditions, distinct languages and cultural beliefs, but it also arises as phenomenological experience. Thus, historians of emotion attend to how loneliness is experienced by individuals, by groups and in relation to culture, space and environment. They highlight feelings as something we do with others and so requires not just an attention to personal feeling and psychology but to the contexts in which emotions emerge.16 Loneliness is a socially produced experience, and this plays a prominent role in giving it a history. This volume explores loneliness through three different lenses. The frst part, about representing loneliness, considers how loneliness has been imagined and articulated by writers, theologians, philosophers and artists, as well as considering how individuals have expressed their own loneliness. Contributors to this part draw attention to loneliness as found in art and literature, newspapers and popular culture, and personal letters and diaries. Poetry is notably signifcant here, as elsewhere in this volume, emerging as a medium through which many fgure their relationship to the other while alone. The second part considers loneliness in relation to households, families and communities, recognizing that loneliness has been so strongly articulated in relation to other people, sociability and relationships. The signifcance of gender, age, race, health, sexuality, as well as social positioning, 3

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emerges as central to the experience of loneliness. Alongside narratives of selves, essayists here deploy a wide range of sources from medical texts and recipes to novels to religious chronicles and television to open up the social dimensions of loneliness. The fnal part considers loneliness in relation to space, place and distance. Articulations of loneliness are often found in the writings of those separated from those whom they love, whether that was through choice, in the case of travellers, explorers or (for some) those on military service, or due to force, as in the case of refugees, the banished or the exiled. Distance is therefore a critical dimension to lonely experiences. But space also emerges as signifcant in histories of lonely places, where specifc environmental contexts—whether the cell of a religious person or the lonely forest of a romantic poet—come to shape personal feeling. Scholars in this part explore these issues particularly through the letter, as that key mechanism for emotional exchange, but also in memoirs and political writings where accounts of loneliness act as a signifcant social critique. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present and bringing together a strong European core with a selection of global perspectives, this volume is designed to develop new directions and insights for the feld and to bring a historical perspective on a modern concern.

Representing Loneliness Emotions are given form by culture and society; the expression of feeling acts to discipline personal feelings by giving them recognized form, while depictions of emotion offer a resource and socialization in how emotion should be performed by individuals.17 Representations of loneliness were especially prominent in the twentieth century as artists and writers considered the anomie of the contemporary world, but the relationship between self and society has been a central theme of art and literature across time. To be alone has long been fgured as an opportunity, whether that was the wilderness sites where one could commune with God or the creativity and genius that separation allowed the artists and writers of the early modern.18 If Virginia Woolf dreamed of a ‘room of one’s own’ to enable her writerly passions, she may have been inspired by nineteenth-century novels where loneliness was the fate of women who lacked agency and control over their own destinies.19 The possibilities of solitude and the risk of loneliness offered a fruitful paradox that inspired considerable creative refection. If loneliness is, as Bound Alberti has argued, a complex and multistranded emotional cluster and not a single monolithic sentiment, then constructing a genealogy of loneliness requires us to recognize that components of what comprises modern understandings of loneliness have far longer histories than the common use of the term itself. For Giovanni Tarantino, exploring the ambivalence with which early modern European intellectuals conceptualized and experienced solitude, considerations of solitude as both a positive and a negative state can be traced back to both classical and Renaissance Christian texts—that is, long before the pathologization of loneliness which Bound Alberti locates as occurring in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Ananya Chakravarti similarly locates, in her study of pre-modern Bengali and Marathi poetry dating back as far as the vernacular poetry of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the existence of non-Western tropes of estrangement and the grief of separation, as well as depictions of the social isolation caused by caste and gender that speak to conceptualizations of loneliness that can still be found in contemporary Bengali poetry. Language itself offers a guide to this journey, where the terms and metaphors used to express emotion help shape what can be imagined. Amelia Worsley focuses on a study of early modern word usage and dictionary defnitions to highlight the part played by Sir Philip Sidney and other sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers in developing a discourse of loneliness. As Sidney was an early author to use ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ in more than one text, Worsley looks specifcally at his usage 4

A History of Loneliness

in The Old Arcadia (c. 1580) and the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (c. 1590). She argues that the ‘emotional colouring’ he gave to experiences of loneliness in ‘lonely’ places laid the foundation for the link between loneliness and dejection, which is part of the word’s current defnition. Furthermore, she suggests that the association between loneliness and melancholy extant in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts challenges the centrality accorded to the Romantic poets in the history of loneliness and may have infuenced the development of ‘the language of the emotions’. Personal accounts of lonely experience deployed such ideas, reframing them within contemporary social life. The relationship between the individual and their community or between loved ones emerges as being of vital importance in understanding the perception and experience of loneliness, as well as how it might be combatted. For David Hume, writing in the frst half of the eighteenth century, loneliness was a medical condition akin to depression, a ‘disease of the learned’, brought on by too much solitary study. As Charlie Huenemann argues, Hume quickly came to realise that his loneliness could be countered by balancing study with exercise and sociability: going for a ride, having a good dinner with friends, or playing a convivial game of backgammon were all effective remedies. Of course, as a young single man, Hume had the beneft of his gender. He had freedom of movement, personal and economic independence and various opportunities for polite sociability that were not equally available to his unmarried female contemporaries. Alison Duncan’s exploration of the loneliness of genteel spinsters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries identifes the importance of being able to participate in polite sociability. Being alone was being denied ‘the pleasures of society . . . the ritual interactions of an educated elite, and consequent erosion of the social skills which signalled rank’. Maintaining kin and social connections was therefore crucial, as was preserving respectability. Being alone became problematic for these women when it meant being isolated from their social peers, but at the same time, it could also be desirable, if it ensured that they remained distinct from their social inferiors. This kind of socially created loneliness was perhaps most marked among the most elite. Mascha Hansen’s examination of Queen Charlotte’s letters to her brother reveals previously unexplored depths of loneliness created in part by her separation from her German home and family but exacerbated by the formalities and social isolation of the English court. The queen was both lonely and seldom alone. Ever pragmatic, she sought remedy for loneliness in her correspondence with her brother and in using her solitude for self-improvement. Frogmore Cottage, which she purchased when the king’s mental health put a strain on her marriage, provided her with another outlet, as it gave her own space, somewhere that socializing could take place more informally than at court, or where she could be alone if she wished. Writing offered an opportunity to articulate the experience of loneliness and its social contexts and to seek succour from a supportive recipient. The importance of letter-writing and correspondence networks in expressing and alleviating loneliness are central to the experiences of the businessmen in the essays by Anne Montenach and Andrew Popp. For Montenach’s late-eighteenth-century milliner’s agent struggling to complete an ill-fated sales trip in 1778, loneliness is characterized by feelings of anxiety, abandonment and isolation as he repeatedly pleaded with his employer for letters, goods and fnancial support. Popp also considers the lived experience of a businessman who was frequently away from home. His study of the mid-nineteenth-century entrepreneur John Shaw, as revealed through his correspondence with his wife, Elizabeth, focuses on the loneliness of absence. In order to build his business, John frequently had to be away from home for extended periods of time; however, his professional commitment was in direct tension with his personal longing for home, domesticity and family. The fgure of the entrepreneur that emerges is one of ‘a frail and sometimes lonely self ’, an account that reaffrmed the period’s emphasis on sociability as central to health and well-being. 5

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Frailty, both physical and mental, was at the root of the lifelong loneliness suffered by the early-twentieth-century Finnish diarist Kirsti Teräsvuori. Increasingly alienated from her family, isolated from friends and unable to develop a meaningful career, Teräsvuori was often physically and, at times, mentally ill. As Karoliina Sjö argues, Teräsvuori’s loneliness was existential and alleviated only by her diary-keeping. Even this, however, was double-edged: while it provided her with a means of recording her loneliness and of making meaning in her life, it may also have prevented her from reaching out to others to make the kinds of social connections she needed. The absence of social connections—specifcally in the quest for intimacy and love in an increasingly anonymous urban environment—forms the focus of Zoe Strimpel’s chapter on the emergence of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century matchmaking industry in Britain. As the state of single men and women in the modern city became an issue of interest to sociologists and psychologists, it was also addressed by the popular press, in the form of magazines such as Singles and in the emergence of lonely hearts clubs. Being single in the city in the twentieth century was portrayed as liberating but also potentially isolating and lonely, particularly for those who had not achieved the romantic ideal of a monogamous, long-term relationship. Fred Cooper brings this part to a close by considering the representation of modern loneliness more broadly. He argues that the modern tendency to see loneliness through a crisis model obscures its long-term existence and limits our understanding of its depth and complexity. What is needed, he suggests, is more attention to the historical experience of loneliness: ‘they excavate the deep and long historical roots of the problem, at the same time as demonstrating that they are neither inevitable nor immutable’. Across the centuries, a variety of cultural forms provided a space to explore, defne and negotiate the experience of being alone and its relationship to social life; not least signifcant here was the development of a new vocabulary that both articulated such feelings but also hardened the boundaries of what loneliness incorporated. Within such accounts, different communities negotiated the signifcance placed on love and romantic connections, the relationships between emotion and mental and physical health, and the priority that should be placed on such experiences to articulating the nature of our society and the well-being of individuals. Individuals in turn drew on these ideas as they recounted their own emotional lives and used such articulations to promote resources, care or sympathy, or to affrm the value of the other despite distance.

Households, Families and Communities The counterpoint to loneliness might be fgured as love, if we consider love as the affective connections, resources and support that family and community offer the individual and that take a multitude of cultural forms.20 Those placed beyond such connections, whether such distance is chosen or not, are often considered to experience a form of suffering or as disadvantaged by an absence of care, whether practical or emotional.21 Such beliefs allow separation from the community to operate as a form of punishment or discipline to encourage conformity to social norms, as can be seen in solitary confnement.22 For some, loneliness arises as a counterpoint to the human need for community to survive and yet not all cultures recognize the possibility of such an emotional dislocation.23 One result of situating loneliness in relationship to the group is that a number of cultures have associated such feeling with the absence of a romantic partner, whether that is framed through the medieval ‘jolly wife’, whose value as likely lay in her capacity to produce a cheerful household as intimate companionship, or the touch and sexual congress that is considered central to health and well-being for modern psychologists.24 Many discussions of loneliness then revolve around the complex relationship between individuals, families, communities, society and other 6

A History of Loneliness

groupings, where feelings of dislocation can arise from social exclusion, a lack of social recognition or an absence of agency or where otherwise the individual fails to thrive or fnd place in relation to others. What contributes to such feelings or alleviates them has been subject to considerable discussion for different historic cultures. The appropriate balance between time spent alone or in company was a topic of debate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as several chapters in this volume explore. Solitude offered individuals the opportunity to read, pray, refect, write and grow closer to God, but too much time spent alone could be dangerous to health and dull the social skills that were so valuable to everyday interactions. As Claire Walker explores in her discussion of early modern convents, nuns sought to balance the desirability of solitude, so important to their vocations, with living in a community that required cooperation and communication to survive and thrive. Individuals, sometimes joining religious communities as children, might experience homesickness and a longing for family at the same time as they learned to live harmoniously with a new group. Loneliness competed then with desirable solitude, as well as an ideal of a limited sociability. These tensions continued and were at the forefront of Enlightenment debates, as Heidi Hakkarainen notes in her discussion of the early-nineteenth-century German press. A cult of sociability competed with one of solitude, and newspapers and magazines provided space to explore the benefts of both and the boundaries between them. The risk of melancholy that arose from isolation ensured that solitude had to be balanced with time in company, but company might also distract from the achievement of a higher purpose or access to God. If loneliness was not a current term in these contexts, nonetheless these communities imagined separation as a potential threat to the self and to an individual’s emotional and physical health. Illness could create its own lonelinesses. Carolyn A. Day highlights how in the eighteenth century the disease of consumption separated the Grahams from their family and, later, with Mary Graham’s death, from each other. It refects on how the treatments and social practices associated with this disease enforced a separation from the community and sociability desired during the period. If balancing sociability and solitude was central to a successful and orderly life, disease here enforced an exclusion that was simultaneously a form of love and care and something detrimental to family well-being. Loneliness here emerged from distance, but not an absence of affection. Illness also provides an opportunity for the historian to access the material dimensions of lonely experiences, including its smells and tastes. As Lisa Wynne Smith suggests in her chapter that links emotion, place and the senses, a study of common remedies supplied to maintain health can open up the embodied dimension of emotions that were tied to disease. For early modern people, mental and physical illnesses associated with absence and loss were often treated with concoctions that include mace and nutmeg, offering insight into the smells and tastes that offered comfort or acted to counter distressing feelings. Like the isolation experienced by the Grahams, the comfort of such favours was intertwined with the disease contexts in which they were taken—practices of care and lonely experiences not only acted in tension to each other but could collapse and shape each other. Similarly, solitude and sociability were as often defned as much in relation to each other, as in their contrast. This was notably manifested in the uses of solitude as a form of social discipline and punishment. Gender, race, class, sexuality and other characteristics used to differentiate between groups are often implicated in inclusion and exclusion from community and so infuence ideas of belonging or separation. Jennifer Leetsch highlights how the condition of slavery, with its violent refusal of the Black self, forced enslaved people into a form of existential loneliness, one partially overcome through Black authorial networks that wrote individuals back into society. Jeff Meek highlights the profound loneliness of gay men in mid-twentieth-century Scotland, where homophobia and a lack of access to a like-feeling community could be isolating. For those fortunate to live 7

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in large urban areas, gay clubs and communities provided an opportunity to fnd not just love but a caring and supportive network that flled practical and emotional needs. As Iza Kavedž ija argues in her discussion of twenty-frst-century Japan, loneliness can be therefore understood as a moral sentiment—a feeling that marks a failure by society to be inclusive to all groups. Notably for older Japanese men, loneliness was not simply a product of a lack of social networks or personal connections but a failure of acknowledgement by society—loneliness was associated with the belief that one is no longer viewed as having anything to offer or a useful purpose. As in several other chapters, loneliness is situated as a feeling that arises when family, community or society fail to acknowledge or make place for particular individuals or groups. As this suggests, loneliness is closely tied to practices of social discipline and normative behaviours. This is explicit in Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer’s exploration of loneliness as a form of correction in twentieth-century children’s school stories. Through these tales, young readers were taught that loneliness was the emotion that would result for those who refused conformity to school cultures, whether that was because individuals chose to rebel and separate themselves or when they were shunned as a form of discipline. If solitude and sociability were to fnd productive balances within different cultures, nonetheless isolation and its associated emotions could be mobilized in the production of a community’s values and boundaries. Despite an association between loneliness and social exclusion, not all social groups experienced loneliness in the same ways over time. Not only could loneliness take varied forms, such as melancholy or a sense of exclusion, but some groups might also have less experience of these feelings as a result of their cultural context. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, for example, contrast the association between the elderly and loneliness in contemporary Western societies with the early modern old, who often had rich opportunity for connection and recognition in their families and societies. Loneliness is not an inevitable consequence of ageing. Similarly, Alice Violett attends to loneliness in the narratives of nineteenth-century only children. She notes their accounts rarely express loneliness, but a social expectation that they should have been lonely infuenced how they recounted and remembered their experiences. Here, cultural beliefs about the loneliness of only children infuenced how adults told their childhood histories. Loneliness was not a prominent feeling for the children themselves; it played out in relation to the wider positioning of individuals in society, as well as beliefs and ideas about their experiences. Across this part, loneliness emerges less as a product of individual psychologies and mental health than of social contexts, not least the possibility of inclusion, and normative beliefs about the appropriate level of engagement between individuals and their communities. Loneliness is fgured as the emotion of exclusion, distance, discipline and disrespect and countered by the willingness of community to offer love, care, connection, acknowledgement and practical resources. Yet such distinctions were never absolute with lonely places and people sometimes arising despite the love and care of communities. Loneliness becomes a critical tool in supporting the shape, boundaries and operation of communities, as well as infuencing the well-being of individuals.

Distance, Place and Displacement Distance—from family, friends, home, homelands and places and spaces of familiarity and ‘normality’—is a key factor in creating a feeling of loneliness. Space and place matter too; being ‘out of place’ is often correlated with feelings of disconnection and loneliness. From cells in prisons, asylums or religious houses to high-rise fats to the deserts and wildernesses of hermits and recluses to the spaces of detention, war zones, refugee camps and settler stations, loneliness is often articulated in relation to physical space and environment.25 Landscape and environment act as structures to support and obstacles to human affection and connection, while familiar spaces 8

A History of Loneliness

can encourage particular feelings, from security and safety to fear and excitement to sadness and melancholy.26 Physical structures and environments offer the contexts of loneliness. Mark Neuendorf refers to the ‘painful solitude’ of insane asylums, while Katie Barclay, in contrast, notes the potential of ‘lonely places’ for creativity and inspiration. Lonely places are typifed by being away from people, separated from sociability and community, but they can generate a range of emotions: fear, excitement and loneliness but also pleasure, joy and opportunity. Sublime landscape, at least for Romantic poets, could estrange and inspire.27 Drawing on Scottish balladry, Barclay highlights the lonely places, always beyond the community and often in forests or rural areas, where moral dilemmas, particularly around sexual chastity, could be explored. Moral decision-making allowed re-entry into the community, but sin acted as a permanent exclusion. Similar to Tarantino in part 1, the lonely place here is fgured as beyond civilization; solitude and sociability take on a moral dimension and lonely places could engender loneliness when they acted as space of exclusion and separation, so often associated with distress and suffering. A sense of ‘separateness’ was a frequent fellow traveller of loneliness. An attention to physical environment also highlights how lonely feeling came to be structurally enabled. Neuendorf shows how the tension between sociability and solitude was deployed as a deliberate strategy in creating wellness in modern asylums. Designed around heteronormative sociability, the asylums deliberately managed peoples’ social attachments in an emotional regime often challenged by patients. Rosalind Carr argues that sociability was effective in assuaging loneliness for Dr Joseph Arnold, both onboard ship and later in Australia; in contrast, the naval offcer Lieutenant Ralph Clark, although within a homosocial emotional community, nevertheless longed for the company of his wife and son, although this shifted once on land busy supervising convicts on Norfolk Island. Similarly, Joanne Begiato’s young doctors drew on sociability as an antidote to aloneness while travelling from home. Loneliness here was constructed in a deliberate juxtaposition with sociable engagements, and physical environment, including travel, offered different degrees of opportunity to manage lonely feelings. As a result, the shape of sociability mattered. Elaine Chalus argues that a specifc kind of professional loneliness fgured in the lives of Napoleonic British naval offcers. While they certainly were among other men, they suffered a lack of peer sociability due to the rigid hierarchies of the Royal Navy—the loneliness of command—something reinforced by the layout of ships and the opportunities for cross-class interaction. Julia M. Wells notes that British women in the colonial empires in Africa similarity suffered from a dearth of peer sociability, one not strictly dictated by the absence of people but of people ‘of their own kind’ both socially and racially. Racial distance/ difference is also a feature in the lives of Carr’s subjects as they violently settled Australia. Cultural distance and lack of intimate friendship were key factors in their loneliness. In a different context, and two centuries later, chapters by Joy Damousi and Deborah Simonton highlight how such distance, physical but also cultural, could come to create a perpetual detachment from host cultures for refugees. Separateness and difference often underpinned loneliness, experiences produced through global relocations and movement. Loneliness as a feeling is shaped in part by how it is experienced and by how it is expressed. It is not simply ‘being alone’ but is a state of mind drawn from perceptions of one’s situation, place and often distance from the safe and familiar. Cultural and linguistic differences play important roles in how displacement is expressed. A sense of loss and longing permeates the life stories of deported twentieth-century Estonian women studied by Deborah Simonton, while loneliness is rarely mentioned. She argues this is partly an artefact of cultural expectations as one’s emotions were meant to be kept private and partly due to the way the Estonian language expresses aloneness. Similarly, Joanne Begiato’s two young doctors rarely used the term ‘loneliness’, although 9

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they felt alone though surrounded by others. She argues that their situations produced emotions and states that align with the modern term ‘loneliness’ but emphasizes the social, cultural and gender structures within which they operated. In their cases, as well as several others in this part, uncertainty played a part, and insecurity itself came to generate states of loneliness. She argues that normative masculinity which valorized confdence, risk-taking, individualism and daring entrepreneurship was less tolerant of the man given to introspection. For those forced into the world, whether by the pursuit of a career or forced dislocation, distance from home heightened a sense of the unfamiliar. Homesickness and nostalgia, which when they frst emerged in the seventeenth century were closely tied to a homeland, are often linked to loneliness where separation from a place of origin comes to wear on the self.28 Histories of exile and exclusion are fgured through their emotional and psychological dimensions, shaping experiences of migration and refuge.29 Not least histories of privacy consider both the benefts of separation for society and its potential risks in separating the individual from their community. For some, like Chalus’ navy offcers, it was a choice made because they believed in the cause they were fghting for; military couples in the Second World War, as Emma Carson notes, similarly saw distance and separation as a necessary evil. In both cases, they recognized it was temporary. As career choices, men discussed by Chalus, Carr and Begiato saw ‘working away’ as a means towards fulflment of occupational and professional goals. Jessie Currie, discussed by Wells, acknowledged that separation from Scotland was essentially for a greater good. Conversely force, not choice, was an essential element of the distance experiences by Simonton’s Estonian deportees or Damousi’s refugees. This sense of being out of place, trauma and forced displacement aggravated the impact of distance, sharpening the sense of loss and longing. For them, loss involved not only family, friends and the familiar but also homelands and a sense of their personal identities. Nostalgia played a role in their stories, and for some, it was imagined places rather than current experiences that shaped their emotional registers. Memory plays a twofold role in understanding loneliness. On the one hand, it is a way to recover one’s sense of self, to explain actions, to act as a reminder of what and who was lost. It can act as a means of overcoming loneliness. Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta argue that memory practices are means to alleviate the pain of separation, refected in their case studies of absent friends. They point to the importance of artefacts that trigger remembrances, that bring the absent friend closer. Receiving and sending letters, echoed by the Estonian women and a feature of Carson’s chapter, was an essential element in maintaining emotional and physical connections. By creating a sense of closeness to missing people and places, refecting on fond memories helped bridge the gaps. Memory, of course, is also fckle, and in journals and accounts written after the event, the reliability of memory becomes an issue, or as a result of political displacement, the agenda of recovery and expiation can come to the fore. The political context of reminiscence has to be judged carefully as Simonton and Damousi’s chapters show but as cultural texts such accounts offer not only insight into lonely feelings but how separation and distance was managed across the life course and in new lands. So often defned in relation to separation or distance, the physical places and spaces of loneliness have been central to offering an account of this experience. At times, the ‘lonely place’ might be at a distance for community, even ‘civilization’, but nonetheless a site of opportunity and potential. For others, physical environments, including architectural decisions or the ordering of space, could reinforce isolation or distance between individuals and groups. Within this context, travel and movement, whether chosen or forced, offered a liminal space where individuals encountered new people and environments and attempted to fnd the place and belonging that could counter the emotions of distance and dispossession. Loneliness emerges as an emotion that 10

A History of Loneliness

responded to the insecurities and instabilities of having to rebuild in new places or amongst new peoples.

Conclusion and Future Directions This history of loneliness highlights how current defnitions were given shape by past articulations and practices, but so too is the scope of the history of loneliness framed by contemporary understandings of what this emotion should encompass. That loneliness is a social problem, perhaps a crisis of modern life, and detrimental to health, lends itself more to histories of negative emotions, purposeful exclusions and mental and physical ill-health. These histories are important in highlighting how feelings of separation and distance from community have functioned in a variety of social contexts. For early modern Europeans, the lonely place could function to enforce particular social orders and imaginings of the world—loneliness arose in sites of moral and social contest or amongst communities that were ‘uncivilized’ and not suited to accepted ways of living. Yet as an emotion of exploration and ambiguity, lonely places and their associated feelings could encourage creativity and reimaginings of the world. In the eighteenth century, and not least for those who sought global encounters, loneliness emerged in a debate between the correct balance between sociability and solitude; if the ideal might incorporate both, solitude and sociability must also conform to normative rules about what made good company and what was appropriate behaviour for those who situated themselves outside of the community. By the twentieth century, social isolation had moved frmly into a more negative register, where strong social connections and conformity to normative disciplines rendered the feelings of isolation as a potential punishment and, when sustained, contributor to ill health. By the twenty-frst century, isolation and exclusion became situated as a political problem, both due to the pressure it placed on health and welfare services and as an issue of social justice for groups that found themselves in lonely places. None of what loneliness now encompasses is entirely novel to this period, but shifting environments and varying pressure points foregrounded particular features of lonely experiences in the cultural imagination. Other ideas could be lost or located beyond the boundaries of loneliness; a frm insistence that solitude is a different state of life from loneliness is just one example of the fracturing of concepts as defnitions evolved and hardened. For many scholars of loneliness, the modern condition has been central to explanatory narratives of why this emotion emerged. The histories in this volume trouble that assumption by offering similar experiences in contexts that align uneasily with anomie or urban expansiveness. It is clear, however, that loneliness is a product of social context and environment and that the rapid transformations of the twentieth century created conditions where loneliness resonated as people encountered new ways of living. Moving forward, there remains considerable potential for further research. The European experience is prominent in this volume, and the global contributions offer glimpses of the possibilities for study beyond its boundaries. Mapping experiences of loneliness and lonely places over time and in relation to different social groups across the globe would no doubt enable a broader range of comparisons and a greater diversity of experience to emerge. Deeper temporal histories—as suggested in chapters by Tarantino and Chakravarti—could provide new insights and enable longer histories of current ideas. Further explorations of the language of loneliness would be fruitful; the translation of lonely emotions into English risks fatten some of the complexity of this experience in non-English contexts. Contributors to this volume offer some sense of variation in their respective chapters. But there are no accounts of how the language of loneliness evolved for other national contexts or whether their environments also saw the development of a new term for the modern. As loneliness moves into the medical domain and so into universalizing frameworks for the mind and body, how these linguistic variations shape 11

Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

knowledge could offer fruitful insights. As importantly, a history of loneliness that was driven by the defnitions and boundaries of another language might take these histories into areas or ideas that fall beyond the English-language experience; a global history of loneliness might incorporate some very different feelings within its emotional cluster. Chapters in this volume are particularly focused on loneliness as a social and cultural experience, and the voice of the individual in narrating their embodied experience is especially prominent. There is, however, a potential for other types of histories of loneliness—the political histories of how governments or civic associations have responded, the economic histories of its impacts and the medical histories that consider evolving health and psychological frameworks. Smith’s chapter suggests the possibilities of a sensate history of loneliness and her insights could be expanded into a wide range of contexts to offer a fuller account of embodied experiences. Media histories are important to this volume, but attending to other technological processes and developments, too, might offer insight into how loneliness emerges and is imagined. Despite the potential for creativity that solitude offers, the possibilities of loneliness have been given less consideration and histories of that potential are still to be told. That loneliness has inspired the many rich histories in this volume is evidence itself of that possibility, and they provide an important state of the feld of current research and a foundation for further work.

Notes 1 To view this image, visit ‘Automat painting’, Wikipedia, accessed 8 May 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Automat_(painting). 2 Loneliness has recently been described in the United Kingdom as an epidemic: ‘Chronic Loneliness Afficting Elder a National Shame’, ITV News, 18 Oct. 2013, www.itv.com/news/2013-10-18/chronicloneliness-afficting-elderly-a-national-shame/, and a ‘national shame’,‘Jeremey Hunt Highlights Plight of “Chronically Lonely”’, BBC News, 18 Oct. 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24572231. Concern about the impact of loneliness on populations is by no means specifc to England or to Europe. A brief trawl through the press reveals similar concerns emerging globally, such as the following: Keming Yang and Christina Victor, ‘Age and Loneliness in 25 European Nations’, Ageing and Society 31, no. 8 (2011): 1368–88; ‘All the Lonely People’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Sept. 2013, www.smh.com.au/life style/life/all-the-lonely-people-20130826-2skkz.html; ‘How Is Ireland Feeling? Europe-Wide Survey Looks at Loneliness, Health, and Chores’, The Journal, 2 Feb. 2014, www.thejournal.ie/eurofoundeu-survey-ireland-quality-of-life-1290750-Feb2014/; ‘Feeling Lonely? It May Increase Risk of Early Death’, USA Today, 17 Feb. 2014, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/17/lonelinessseniors-early-death/5534323/;‘All by Myself: Is Loneliness Bad for You?’, The Guardian, 15 Mar. 2014, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/15/all-by-myself-is-loneliness-bad-for-you. 3 ‘Eastern Europeans Are Loneliest in Europe’, Durham University News, 10 May 2011, www.dur.ac.uk/ news/newsitem/?itemno=12024. 4 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity, 2020); K.D.M. Snell,‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42, no. 1 (2017): 2–28; Stephen Bending, ‘ “Miserable Refections on the Sorrows of My Life”: Letters, Loneliness, and Gardening in the 1760s’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 25, no. 1 (2006): 31–48; Julia Wells, ‘The “Terrible Loneliness”: Loneliness and Worry in Settler Women’s Memoirs from East and South-Central Africa, 1810–1939’, African Quarterly Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 47–64; Joachim C. Häberlen,‘Feeling at Home in Lonely Cities: An Emotional History of the West German Urban Commune Movement during the Long 1970s’, Urban History 48 (2021): 143–61; Nikolaos Papadogiannis, ‘Confronting “Imperialism” and “Loneliness”: Sexual and Gender Relations among Young Communists in Greece, 1974–1981’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 29, no. 2 (2011): 219–50; Peter McQuillan,‘Loneliness versus Delight in the Eighteenth-Century Aisling’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 25 (2010): 11–32; Keith Snell, Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Barbara Taylor,‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal 89 (2020): 1–21.

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A History of Loneliness 5 Keming Yang, Loneliness: A Social Problem (London: Routledge, 2019); Richard Stivers, Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefeld, 2004); Michael O’Sullivan, Cloneliness: On the Reproduction of Loneliness (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Vivek Murthy,‘Connecting at Work’, Harvard Business Review (October 2017): 1–24; Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Robert C. Hauhart, The Lonely Quest: Constructing the Self in the Twenty-First Century United States (London: Routledge, 2019); Roger A. Salerno, Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915–1935 (London: McFarland, 2007); Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being in Alone (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016); Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson, Living Alone: Globalization, Identity and Belonging (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 6 Yang, Loneliness; Olivia Sagan and Eric D. Miller, eds, Narratives of Loneliness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2018); Christina Victor, Sasha Scambler and John Bond, The Social World of Older People: Understanding Loneliness and Social Isolation in Later Life (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009); Ami Sha’ked and Ami Rokach, eds, Addressing Loneliness: Coping, Prevention and Clinical Interventions (London: Routledge, 2015); Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker, eds, The Handbook of Solitude: Psychological Perspectives on Social Isolation, Social Withdrawal, and Being Alone (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2014); Sarah J. Bevinn, ed., Psychology of Loneliness (New York: Nova Science, 2011). 7 Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jennifer Gaggney, Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding (London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2020); Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (Chichester: Colombia University Press, 2015); Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Ronald Rolheiser, The Loneliness Factor: Its Religious and Spiritual Meaning (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1979); Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, trans. Kerri Pierce (London: Reaktion Books, 2017); R.S. Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973). 8 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness. 9 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1969). 10 Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness (London: Prentice Hall, 1961); Richard Booth,‘Existential Loneliness: The Other Side of the Void’, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 16, no. 1 (1997): 23–32; Nobert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Continuum, 2001). 11 John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008), 82. 12 Yang, Loneliness, 2–3. 13 Cacioppo and Patrick, Loneliness, 25. 14 Douglas Burton-Christie,‘The Work of Loneliness: Solitude, Emptiness, Compassion’, Anglican Theological Review 88, no. 1 (2006): 32–4; Karl A.E. Enenkel and Christine Göttler, eds, Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler, eds, Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness, Limitation, Liberation (New York: Peter Lang, 2017); Emma Barlow,‘Emotional Minds and Bodies in the Suicide Narratives of Dante’s Inferno’, Cerae 7 (2020): 23–45; Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 15 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 242–54. 16 Katie Barclay, The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 17 Ibid. 18 Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Amelia Worsley,‘Ophelia’s Loneliness’, ELH 82, no. 2 (2015): 521–51; Enenkel and Göttler, eds, Solitudo. 19 Marie Hendry, Agency, Loneliness and the Female Protagonist in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). 20 Barclay, Caritas. 21 James J. Lynch, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017); Neta Yodovich, ‘ “I Don’t Think This Woman Had Anyone in Her Life”: Loneliness and Singlehood in Six Feet Under’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 4 (2017): 440–54; Montserrat Guibernau, Belonging: Solidarity and Division in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

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Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton 22 Ian O’Donnell, Prisoners Solitude and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Bill Forsythe,‘Loneliness and Cellular Confnement in English Prisons’, British Journal of Criminology 44 (2004): 759–70; Elizabeth Ewan,‘Crossing Borders and Boundaries: The Use of Banishment in Sixteenth-Century Scottish Towns’, in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain, ed. Sara Butler and K.J. Kesselring (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 237–57. 23 Chikako Ozawa de Silva and Michelle Parsons, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 613–22. 24 Barclay, Caritas; Marcelo J. Borges,‘What’s Love Got to Do With It? Language of Transnational Affect in the Letters of Portuguese Migrants’, in Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender and Migration, ed. Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian and Linda Reeder (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 19–38; Ira Tanner, Loneliness: The Fear of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 25 O’Donnell,Prisoners Solitude;Enenkel and Göttler,eds, Solitudo;Lynn Abrams et al.,‘Isolated and Dependent: Women and Children in High-Rise Social Housing in Post-War Glasgow’, Women’s History Review 28 (2019): 794–813. 26 Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle, Urban Emotions and the Making of the City (London: Routledge, 2021). 27 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992). 28 Susan Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Joanne Begiato, ‘Selfhood and “Nostalgia”: Sensory and Material Memories of the Childhood Home in Late Georgian Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 229–46; Thomas Dodson, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018); Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lisa O’Sullivan,‘The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-Situating a French Disease’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67 (2012): 636–49; Xinyue Zhou et al., ‘Counteracting Loneliness: On the Restorative Function of Nostalgia’, Psychological Science 19, no. 10 (2008): 1023–9; Kristine Johanson, ‘On the Possibility of Early Modern Nostalgias’, Parergon 33, no. 2 (2016): 1–16. 29 Guibernau, Belonging; Edward W. Said, Refections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2013); Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika, eds, Feeling Exclusion: Religious Confict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2019); Katie Barclay,‘Family, Mobility and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement, 1450–1850, ed. Heather Dalton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 127–48.

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PART 1

Representing Loneliness

1 THE ORIGINS OF ‘LONELINESS’, THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY’S THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA (1590) Amelia Worsley

‘The cure for loneliness is solitude.’ —Marianne Moore1

‘The rhetoric of solitude’, Barbara Taylor notes, is ‘crammed with paradoxes’.2 Today, for instance, whereas solitude can be said to cure loneliness, loneliness would never be considered a cure for solitude. Yet Marianne Moore’s aphorism would not always have been possible, since the term ‘loneliness’ is a relatively new invention in English, and its meaning has shifted over time. Scholars disagree about the chronology of when ‘loneliness’ came to be opposed to ‘solitude’ in this way. In recent years, a debate has emerged in solitude studies regarding the question of whether a distinctly new or modern form of emotional loneliness associated with dejection emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. Several historians of both loneliness and solitude have argued that loneliness was not ‘in its modern sense’ a ‘recognizable experience’ or a ‘distinct negative emotion’ until the early nineteenth century.3 From this perspective, a revolution in usage roughly contemporaneous with the Romantic movement meant that loneliness suddenly came to signal a dejected, emotional version of solitude; an experience which neither the terms ‘solitude’,‘solitariness’,‘isolation’ nor ‘loneliness’ itself had previously conveyed. Scholars of earlier periods, however, have argued that there has always been something like the experience that is today called loneliness, even if it has not always been denoted by this particular term. Historians of Renaissance British literature, Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, who in 2021 hosted a conference called the Experience of Loneliness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, have argued that people in the seventeenth century understood what it means to be what we today call ‘lonely’, although the term itself was not widespread.4 As these scholars see it, the evolution of the term ‘loneliness’ should be disambiguated from the development of the concept. Scholars of medieval literature have argued something similar: Rebecca Krug, for instance, suggests that The Book of Margery Kempe ‘wrestles with the human experience of loneliness’ and is ‘ultimately . . . represented as a solution to the problem of loneliness’.5 Katie Barclay notes that DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-3

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Middle English words such as elengenesse and ō̆nnesse functioned as equivalents to loneliness.6 Other obsolete synonyms, such as ‘ellinge’,‘deafely’ and ‘solitaneous’, also prefgure the advent of the rise of ‘loneliness’, as the end of this essay explores. Classical references to solitude must also have infuenced the way that educated English speakers in the medieval and Renaissance periods understood its associations. Diana Webb argues that medieval descriptions of different varieties of solitariness build on classical precedents:‘In classical usage the related adjective solitarius [i.e., related to solitudo], like the simpler solus, was often used pejoratively to mean “lonely” or “isolated”.’7 In a recent book on Being Alone in Antiquity: Greco-Roman Ideas and Experiences of Misanthropy, Isolation and Solitude (2022), Bernadette Descharmes asserts that the English word ‘loneliness’ can be used to translate experiences described in Latin texts.8 Similarly, descriptions of solitude in the Christian tradition also infect the meaning of ‘loneliness’ in English: historians of religion have often documented examples of what they see as loneliness in both the Bible and the ascetic tradition.9 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has tacitly been given a central role in the history of loneliness as it stands since its defnitions for the words ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ have often been used as evidence for the argument that modern loneliness was invented in the nineteenth century. Yet even aside from the broader conceptual questions outlined above, the OED’s defnitions themselves have not been adequately contextualized or interrogated, even in genealogies of loneliness that have relied on the evidence contained within them. It is therefore useful to consider some of the nineteenth-century examples of loneliness that have been deemed crucial in this history, and to question how they might compare with some of the earliest records of the terms ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ from the late sixteenth century.10 At the outset of this exploration, it is important to emphasize that the earliest experiments with ‘loneliness’ in literary texts cannot be considered a straightforward measure of how or why the terms began to circulate more widely in the vernacular. To suggest that earliest records of loneliness would have been universally understood to mean the same thing by all readers would be to engage in a genealogical fallacy:early modern loneliness must also differ from both contemporary loneliness and nineteenth-century loneliness since the term had gathered fewer cultural associations at these earlier stages in its history. Because ‘loneliness’ is a term onto which so many other concerns are projected— including the history of individualism, interiority, privacy, religious devotion, alienation and the city crowd—the term’s meaning has been subject to continual evolution and could not have always signifed what it does today. Nonetheless, the complexity of early references to loneliness has been overlooked, and it is therefore necessary to reevaluate what the literary record communicates about the use of the term ‘loneliness’. Working in accordance with the premise of the project of the OED itself—that it is possible to construct chronologies based on the earliest examples that can be found in literature—this chapter aims to clarify what the term ‘loneliness’signifed in some of its earliest records.

The Oxford English Dictionary In ‘Loneliness and Poetry’ (2002), Christopher Ricks uses the OED as evidence to argue that the emotional register of ‘loneliness’ was frst developed in nineteenth-century literature, roughly two centuries after the term was frst recorded. Even if something like the feeling of loneliness is older than its name, Ricks suggests, Romantic poets codifed the concept in such a way that it was more likely to be described and therefore more likely to be felt: Loneliness is in crucial respects a Romantic phenomenon. In Dr. Johnson’s day, and in his dictionary, loneliness is ‘solitude; want of company; disposition to avoid company’ and lonely is ‘solitary, addicted to solitude.’ These are not wide of the modern mark, but they are importantly not quite it, either. What the Oxford English Dictionary brings home 18

The Origins of ‘Loneliness’

is the strong emotional coloring of the words, and no less markedly of their cousin ‘lonesome’, is a later development—it is a Romantic development . . . for, though there must always have been loneliness in our modern English sense, there was not always the word—and when there is not a word, the thing itself can never be quite the same.11 The dictionary does indeed suggest that for many centuries both the terms ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ were used simply to describe the physical condition of being alone or places that were ‘isolated’ or ‘unfrequented’ and, only in the early 1800s, became recognizable as terms that described a ‘feeling’ of being alone or a ‘sense’ of solitude allied with dejection. Compare the chronology of both defnitions, together with the earliest quotation for each defnition, for ease of reference:

Loneliness, n. 1.

The quality of condition of being lonely. Want of society or company; the condition of being alone or solitary; solitariness, loneness. a1586 Sir P. Sidney Arcadia (1590) i. xii. sig. H1v That huge and sportfull assemblie grewe to him a tedious lonelinesse, esteeming no bodie founde, since Daiphantus was lost. 2a. Uninhabited or unfrequented condition or character (of a place); desolateness. 1748 J. Hervey Medit. among Tombs in Medit. & Contempl. (ed. 4) I. 3 The deep Silence added to the gloomy Aspect, and both heightened by the Loneliness of the Place; greatly increased the Solemnity of the Scene. 3. The feeling of being alone; the sense of solitude; dejection arising from want of companionship or society. 1814 W. Wordsworth Excursion vii. 328 He grew up From year to year in loneliness of soul.12

Lonely, adj. 1.a. Of persons, etc., their actions, condition, etc.: Having no companionship or society; unaccompanied, solitary, lone. a1616 W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) iv. i. 31 I go alone Like to a lonely Dragon, that his Fenne Makes fear’d, and talk’d of more then seene. 2. poetic. Of things: Isolated, standing apart; = lone adj. 3. 1645 J. Milton Il Penseroso in Poems 40 Or let my Lamp at midnight hour, Be seen in som high lonely Towr. 3. Of localities: Unfrequented by men; desolate. 1645 J. Milton On Christ’s Nativity: Hymn xx, in Poems 9 The lonely mountains o’er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard. 4a. Dejected because of want of company or society; sad at the thought that one is alone; having a feeling of solitariness. 1811 Ld. Byron One Struggle More iii Though pleasure fres the maddening soul, The heart— the heart is lonely still!13 As Ricks suggests, the OED defnitions for both the terms ‘loneliness’ and ‘lonely’ centre the importance of Wordsworth and Byron in the shift towards loneliness as ‘feeling’. In the defnition of ‘loneliness’, for instance, Wordsworth’s phrase ‘loneliness of soul’ marks a threshold in the term’s development.14 When the OED lexicographers gloss this phrase with the defnition ‘the feeling of being alone’,they suggest that his equation of the Dalesman’s spatial distance from other people in the Yorkshire hills with a feeling of inward isolation is emblematic of a broader conceptual innovation in this period. Wordsworth’s reference to the ‘soul’seems to deepen this sense of solitude or a feeling of being alone:it is as if the loneliness that has always surrounded this lonely soul has somehow become 19

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lodged inside it. Not just the loneliness of the place but ‘a sense of solitude’ will travel with him. In the extended passage, Wordsworth also calls him an ‘introverted spirit’.15 Similarly, the OED’s defnition for the adjective ‘lonely’ also intimates that loneliness obtained a ‘strong emotional colouring’ in the Romantic period. This defnition relies on a quotation from Byron to make the argument that the terms started to signal a ‘sense of solitude’ that was no longer contingent on the condition of being physically alone in the early nineteenth century. In ‘To Thyrza’ (1811) (given the alternative title of its frst line,‘One Struggle More’, in the OED’s defnition 4a), Byron depicts a bereaved Grecian lover whose ‘heart’ remains ‘lonely’ despite being surrounded by friends at a banquet. His grief for his departed love Thyrza prevents him from sharing in the lightness of sociability. In this extended passage from the poem, Byron emphasizes that someone who is lonely (as opposed to merely solitary) can paradoxically continue to feel the sadness of isolation even when in company: Then bring me wine, the banquet bring; Man was not form’d to live alone: I’ll be that light unmeaning thing That smiles with all, and weeps with none. It was not thus in days more dear, It never would have been, but thou Hast fed, and left me lonely here; Thou’rt nothing, all are nothing now. . . . Though gay companions o’er the bowl Dispel awhile the sense of ill; Though pleasure fres the madd’ning soul, The heart—the heart is lonely still! (Byron,‘To Thyrza’, 9–16, 21–24)16 Although this mourning protagonist begins by assuring himself that ‘busy life’ (4) will put an end to his ‘struggle’ (1), his resolution quickly crumbles when he pictures himself feeling alone even when surrounded by friends at the banquet. The ‘lonely heart’ he depicts seems suggestive of an involuntary feeling of dejection, with no easy cure. Only Thyrza would offer an answer to the problem of loneliness in this poem, and Thyrza is no more. The substance of Byron’s innovation seems to be his description of a dejected feeling of longing that not only persists in company but also is exaggerated by it. If Wordsworth describes a loneliness of soul, Byron describes a loneliness of heart. Questions about the status of Wordsworth’s and Byron’s innovations arise, however, when these examples are compared with the very earliest example of ‘loneliness’listed in the OED—a quotation from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590), by Sir Philip Sidney. This sentence—‘That huge and sportfull assemblie grewe to him a tedious lonelinesse, esteeming no bodie founde, since Daiphantus was lost’—is another description of loneliness in a crowd. It is possible to gather from this brief excerpt that a character looking for his friend ‘Daiphantus’ in an ‘assemblie’ experiences that assembly as a ‘tedious loneliness’ precisely because his friend is not there. When this character realizes that his longed-for Daiphantus is absent, it is as if the busy ‘assemblie’ of people disappears, and the busy space he is looking at transmogrifes before his eyes into a desolate space, empty of people. The question, therefore, arises: how different is Sidney’s understanding of loneliness from Byron’s? Sidney’s use of the term ‘loneliness’ in this context is by no means a straightforward example of the mere ‘condition of being alone’ and foregrounds the importance of the history of place in 20

The Origins of ‘Loneliness’

the history of loneliness. The word ‘solitude’ comes from the Latin word solitudo, which, as Christine Göttler explains, is semantically related to the Latin words for wastelands and deserts such as ‘desertum, vastitas, vasta solitudo, terra inculta, and heremus’.17 Even today, people still sometimes call spaces like deserts ‘solitudes’. The concept of elengeness, too, as Barclay describes it, seems rooted in a sense of feeling ‘out of place’. Sidney perhaps draws on these traditions when he uses the word ‘loneliness’ to suggest that the site on which the Olympic Games is being held may as well be a kind of wasteland for Palladius because Daiphantus is not there. As a result of this focus on the relation between loneliness, wilderness spaces, and the feelings that these spaces were thought to produce, other questions start to arise, regarding the way the OED’s defnition works. Most of the OED’s attestations for the terms ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ are located in pastoral or wilderness spaces. Several of the early attestations in the dictionary describe lonely places that seem to encourage feelings of dejection: not only is there is there a ‘gloomy’ aspect to the scene of loneliness Hervey describes (‘loneliness’, defnition 2), for instance; there is also ‘voice of weeping’ in Milton’s description of the ‘lonely mountains’ (‘lonely’, defnition 3). This prompts a question about whether the loneliness of places was seen to produce a feeling of loneliness in the people who inhabited them before the term was readily understandable as a stand-alone emotion. This chapter aims to expose the relationship between the ‘want of society or company’ that early loneliness describes and the ‘dejection’ the dictionary associates with later loneliness by focusing in detail on Sir Philip Sidney’s experiments with the term. Sidney’s reference to ‘loneliness’ in the crowd at the Olympic Games, reads differently in light of his many other references to the term in the various versions of the Arcadia. Although Sidney was not the very frst writer to record the terms ‘lonely’ or ‘loneliness’, digital word-searches in the Early English Books Online database suggest he was the frst writer to use both the terms ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’ more than once in a single text. In the earliest version of the Arcadia, now titled The Old Arcadia, which circulated in manuscript from 1580 onwards, Sidney repeats both the term ‘lonely’ and the term ‘loneliness’ several times. Because this text was lost until 1907, and not published until the 20th century, the original compilers of the OED did not have access to this version.18 Yet since Sidney composed the reference to loneliness that is cited in the OED with the earlier manuscript experiments from the 1580s in mind,it is useful to proceed chronologically, using the earlier experiments with loneliness as a lens through which to understand the 1590 reference recorded in the dictionary. ‘Loneliness’, in the Old Arcadia, not only describes a sensation of ‘tediousness’ that can result from being far away from a particular person, but also tends to summon the feelings of melancholy, which were thought to result from being located in spaces far from society. In this way, Sidney often gives an ‘emotional colouring’ to experiences of ‘loneliness’ in ‘lonely’ places, paving the way for the association between ‘loneliness’ and ‘dejection’ that is now part of the term’s defnition. Lexicographers at the OED have also recently signalled their intent to continue to revise its defnitions of ‘loneliness’ and ‘lonely’, ‘frst published 1903’.19 It may be the case that a more detailed understanding of Sidneyan ‘loneliness’ will produce a new defnition. Sidney played a crucial role in the emerging discourse of loneliness in the late sixteenth century, since the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was ‘one of the most successful English literary works of its time’ and ‘went through three printings in the 1590s and many more in the seventeenth century’.20 Even when examples of terms are rare, they can still be well-known among writers, each with their own power to gradually effect change in the language. So, too, can literary modes create atmospheres that travel between literary texts and across time. Rosenmeyer has argued that Sidney’s new emphasis on melancholy in the Arcadia ‘set the mood for much British pastoral’; a similar claim could be made of his emphasis on loneliness and solitude.21 Considering the central role that Romantic poets have been granted in the history of loneliness, it is possible to entertain 21

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the idea that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers’ emphasis on the relationship between loneliness and melancholy may also have been infuential in the story of how the language of the emotions developed.

Sidney’s Old Arcadia and the Loneliness of the Romance Forest Sidney’s earliest reference to ‘loneliness’ in The Old Arcadia occurs in the opening pages of the text, immediately focusing attention on his interest in this new term. A brief summary of the plot of the opening of The Old Arcadia will help to frame his experiment with ‘loneliness’. The story revolves around Duke Basilius’ decision to withdraw into the solitude of pastoral life, leading many other characters to follow him. Essentially, the duke decides to take his family to live in a ‘solitary place’ in the Arcadian woods (6), in order to try to avoid a prophecy he has received from the oracle at Delphi, which warns that his youngest daughter will couple with an ‘uncouth love’ which will put his family—as well as his dukedom—in danger.22 He tries to avoid the foretold tragedy by guarding his daughters from suitors. In effect, he imprisons them in the space outside the court. Basilius builds two lodges: one for his daughter Pamela (guarded by the shepherd Dametas and his wife, Mopsa) and one for himself, his own wife, and his youngest daughter, Philoclea. The sacrifces Basilius makes by withdrawing into the pastoral landscape prove to be futile, however, since he cannot protect his daughters in the way he thinks he can: the duke will unwittingly become host to Pyrocles, suitor to his daughter Philoclea. Nevertheless, his belief in the importance of this move into the woods is the confict that drives the plot. Basilius frst uses the term ‘loneliness’ to describe his withdrawal to a place ‘out of the way’ rather than a wholesale retreat from all forms of company. As he imagines his family’s new home in the woods, he tries to put a positive spin on his decision to leave his court, comforting himself that the ‘loneliness’ he will share with the shepherds will at least allow him access to pursuits of pastoral recreation. This reference to ‘loneliness’ at frst seems to function as a simple synonym for Basilius’ own ‘solitariness’, yet it could also be listed under the OED’s second defnition of the ‘uninhabited or unfrequented condition or character (of a place)’: And so for himself, being so cruelly menaced by fortune, he would draw himself out of the way by this loneliness, which he thought was the surest way to avoid her blows, where for his pleasure he would be recreated with all these sports and eclogues wherein the shepherds of that country did much excel.(6) To experience the ‘want of society or company’ in the Arcadia, one need not be entirely alone. For Basilius,‘loneliness’ summons the distance from society at large since he will still be accompanied by his family and the shepherds who live there. The pastoral space Basilius imagines retreating to is only ‘uninhabited’ to the extent that it is uninhabited by a certain class of people. ‘Lonely’ places in Sidney’s work are often populated, though remote. Even as he depicts Basilius reassuring himself, however, Sidney also betrays a sense that Basilius’ retreat will also produce a sense of longing and lack. Although Basilius tries to persuade himself that his pastoral pastimes will make his experience in the woods pleasurable, he seems keenly aware of all he is giving up to be there.

The Debate About Solitude Once Sidney has established Basilius’ reasons for retreating into the woods, he sets the scene for his further references to ‘loneliness’ by staging a prolonged debate between Pyrocles and his friend Musidorus, the romance’s main protagonists, about the advantages and disadvantages of 22

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solitude. This debate draws on the well-known classical debate about the relative merits of the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa.23 Even as solitude was associated with the more productive conditions of leisure and idealized retreat in texts such as Theocritus’ Idylls or Virgil’s Eclogues, which Sidney’s Arcadia models itself on, as well as with prayer, contemplation and devotion in the Christian tradition, isolated places were usually considered dangerous spaces to inhabit in this period. Many characters in The Old Arcadia are more sceptical of solitude than Basilius is, and this scepticism becomes a central feature of the opening sequence of the text. After Sidney has described Basilius’ position in the woods, he switches his attention to Kerxenus’ house, located ‘near to the solitary dwelling of the duke’ Basilius, in order to introduce the protagonist of the plot, Pyrocles.24 When Pyrocles catches sight of a portrait of Basilius’ daughter Philoclea that happens to be in the house, Kerxenus tells him about Basilius’ decision to withdraw into his ‘strange solitariness’ (10) and Philoclea’s resulting ‘strange kind of captivity’ (11) in the woods. Pyrocles then ventures into the adjoining forest, observes Philoclea in person from afar and immediately falls in love. He resolves to retreat into the forest in order to get closer to her. Since Basilius will not brook any marriage proposals, however, or even suffer any men to be in his daughter’s presence, the romance plot sees Pyrocles hatching a plan to dress himself as an ‘Amazonian lady’ in order to trick himself into Basilius’ house. Pyrocles decides to rename himself ‘Cleophilia’, in a reversal of Philoclea’s name that also puns on the Greek word for ‘love’, philia. ‘Love’, Sidney coyly argues, is ‘the refner of invention’ (11). Katherine Duncan-Jones takes a more critical view, when she notes, ‘Pyrocles has much to be ashamed of, and only the Old version makes this clear’ (xvi). Sidney depicts Musidorus vehemently objecting to Pyrocles’ plan to retreat into the solitude of the forest, not because he is concerned for Philoclea but because he thinks it will cause his friend to become melancholic.25 Although he does not directly mention the term ‘loneliness’ in this debate, Sidney’s focus on the benefts and dangers of solitude echoes in his later references to the new term. Musidorus begins the debate by telling Pyrocles that this sojourn in the woods has already made him idle. He makes sure to emphasize that he thinks Pyrocles’ judgment is ordinarily sound, and that his morality is virtuous before observing the ill effects that his isolation is having. He notes that he has recently marked in Pyrocles a ‘slacking of the main career you had so notably begun and almost performed . . . in such a sort as I cannot fnd suffcient reasons in my great love to allow it’ (12). Pyrocles’ location in the forests of Arcadia, Musidorus argues, is affecting him more than he knows: Whereas you were wont, in all the places you came, to give yourself vehemently to knowledge of those things which might better your mind; to seek the familiarity of excellent men in learning and soldiery; and lastly, to put all these things in practice both by continual wise proceeding and worthy enterprises, as occasions fell for them; you now leave all these things undone; you let your mind fall asleep, besides your countenance troubled . . . and lastly, which seemeth the strangest unto me, you haunt greatly this place, wherein, beside the disgrace that might fall of it . . . you subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing.(12–13) Musidorus’ argument here is framed around the well-worn philosophical discussion about the relative merits and morality of the via activa versus the via contemplativa. As Sidney notes in his Defence of Poesy, ‘wrangling’ about ‘whether the contemplative or the active life do excel’ was common amongst classical philosophers.26 This debate was also present in Christian doctrine. While St Basil argued against hermitage, for instance, St Jerome praised the solitary life. ‘The preference for the solitary life was evidently regarded as a necessary corollary of the superiority 23

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of the state of contemplation to action’, Jacob Zeitlin explains.27 Many of the perspectives that Sidney references in this dialogue prefgure the more famous seventeenth-century pamphlet debate about the virtues of solitude between John Evelyn and George Mackenzie.28 Pyrocles is insulted by Musidorus’ insinuation that he is becoming idle and seeks to defend his interest in solitude. He insists that his mind needs breaks from mental contortions; otherwise, like a bow that has been bent too long, it may snap:29 The mind itself must, like other things, sometimes be unbent, or else it will be either weakened or broken, and these knowledges, though they are of good use, so are not all the mind may stretch itself unto. Who knows whether I feed not my mind with higher thoughts? (13) Pyrocles convincingly echoes Seneca here, who recommended periods of retreat from the crowd. Seneca had written in his treatise ‘On the Tranquility of the Mind’ that ‘the mind must be given to relaxation’ and will ‘arise better and keener after resting’. ‘Constant labor’, Seneca continues, ‘will break the vigor of the mind, but if it is released and relaxed a little while, it will recover its powers; continuous mental toil breeds in the mind a certain dullness and languor’.30 Yet something proftable may happen to the mind in periods of solitude, Pyrocles insists. He refutes Musidorus’ claim that solitariness is a ‘sly enemy’ with the claim that it actually supports (or ‘nurses’) contemplation in an unparalleled way: The workings of the mind, I fnd, much more infnite than can be led unto by the eye or imagined by any that distract their thoughts without themselves. And in such contemplations, or, as I think, more excellent, I enjoy my solitariness; and my solitariness, perchance, is the nurse of these contemplations. Eagles, we see, fy alone, and they are but sheep which always herd together. Condemn not, therefore, my mind sometimes to enjoy itself, nor blame not the taking of such times as serve most ft for it! (14) Having made this claim that contemplation requires solitude and with his preference for emulating the solitary eagle above a herd of sheep, Pyrocles implores Musidorus to notice what he sees around him, striking a pastoral note when he exhorts him to observe ‘the pleasantness of this place’, which carries in itself ‘suffcient reward for any time lost in it, or any such danger that might ensue’ (14).31 In a long description of Arcadia as a locus amoenus, or an idealized place of comfort and pleasure, he describes how the landscape supports health and peace, with the birds and echoes making a ‘perfect music’ to accompany them (14).32 And yet the more Pyrocles rhapsodizes, the more Musidorus can observe signs of melancholy encroaching. From the outset of the Old Arcadia, Sidney sets up both solitude and loneliness in wilderness spaces as experiences associated with melancholy. As Pyrocles tries to defend his interest in solitude, his eyes fll with tears, his face changes colour, and his words are ‘interrupted continually with sighs which served as a burden to each sentence’ (15). Feeling sorry for his friend, Musidorus tries to give him some comfort,‘embracing’ him (15). Yet he also frmly cautions that Pyrocles has begun to sound too much like a poet: But I think you will make me see that the vigour of your with can show itself in any subject; or else you feed sometimes your solitariness with the conceits of poets whose liberal pens can as easily travel over mountains as molehills, and so (like well disposed men) set up everything to the highest note—especially when they put such words in

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the mouth of one of those fantastical mind-infected people that children and musicians call lovers.(15–16) Musidorus’ argument makes it possible see why Judy Z. Kronenfeld argues that Sidney follows Seneca, Cicero and Augustine in being ‘distrustful of introspection and self-involvement in solitude, or of solitude itself, when measured against either the public life of the true contemplative life.’33 Yet Sidney’s own position—as poet and author of several Eclogues in the Arcadia (as well as of the sonnet sequence about melancholy love, Astrophil to Stella)—also complicates Musidorus’ critique of poets’ solitariness. Philisides, the character Sidney uses to metafctionally introduce himself into the Arcadia, is a melancholy, solitary shepherd-poet.34 Later, even Musidorus himself, in the guise of the shepherd Dorus, will sing an eclogue in praise of the way solitariness acts as a host to ‘contemplation’—‘O sweet woods, delight of solitariness!’ he sings (145–47), suggesting that he believes there to be a difference between the value of depictions of the ‘lonely life’ (147) for poets in the literary sphere and the value of solitariness outside of that mode. Poets, Sidney coyly suggests, are unusually well-suited to solitude. There is, Mattison argues, a ‘consistently apparent’ association between ‘solitude and the work and disposition of a poet’ in the Renaissance.35 Ficino had popularized the Aristotelian argument that a proclivity for melancholy could sometimes be a sign of genius, which offers another reason why poets were able to present themselves as solitaries more easily than other people.36 The exceptional status of the loneliness of poets offers another reason why the literary history of loneliness has been seen as so central in the broader culture of solitude in Britain.

Basilius’ Warning to Cleophilia Nonetheless, solitude comes with many risks in the seventeenth century, and this is especially the case for ‘lonely’ female characters in Sidney’s Arcadia. The debate he stages about solitariness in The Old Arcadia sets the stage for a series of innovative experiments with the new terms ‘lonely’ and ‘loneliness’, each of which directly associate the terms with women’s vulnerability to assault and to melancholia when they are alone. Directly after the debate between Pyrocles and Musidorus, Sidney turns his attention back to Basilius, who emphasizes that solitude is not safe for women in the forest when he comes face to face with Pyrocles, disguised as Cleophilia. Although Basilius had previously tried to persuade himself that loneliness can be made proftable with pastoral pastimes, he suddenly acknowledges its harmful effects when he sees the lonely Cleophilia. Almost as soon as he greets Cleophilia in the forest, he begins scold her for daring to walk in a ‘solitary place’ alone: ‘Fair Lady’, said he ‘it is nothing strange that such a solitary place as this should receive solitary persons; but much do I marvel how such a beauty as yours is could be suffered to be thus alone.’ She, looking with a grave majesty upon him, as if she found in herself cause why she should be reverenced,‘They are never alone’, said she,‘that are accompanied with noble thoughts.’ ‘But those thoughts’, said the duke (replying for the delight he had to speak further with her), ‘cannot in this your loneliness neither warrant you from suspicion in others nor defend you from melancholy in your self.’37 Because Pyrocles has come to Basilius’ house to woo Philoclea, Cleophilia is not in fact in the kind of danger Basilius thinks she is. Yet this dialogue is not only a joke at the expense of Basilius;

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it also links back to Musidorus’ warnings about how solitude causes melancholy, subtly reminding readers of the debate. When Basilius counsels that wilderness is an especially dangerous place for women, not because of the absence of people per se but because of the absence of the protection from other people that society affords, he introduces a gendered dimension into the previous considerations about the effects of solitude. Basilius not only suggests that a woman alone in a ‘solitary place’ is in danger of assault but also that she must learn to accept the blame for the threat of that violence. When he counsels Cleophilia, he misogynistically defects his suspicion of how others may behave towards her onto Cleophilia herself. To venture into the space of loneliness is not only to confront the danger that other people might present, however; it is also to confront the danger of one’s own capacity for melancholy, and this is true for characters of both genders. ‘Loneliness’ appears in Sidney’s work against the backdrop of a long tradition of representations of people experiencing melancholy in isolated wilderness spaces. Although Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) had not yet been published when Sidney was writing, Galenic discourses of melancholy, such as Timothie Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), were newly fashionable in the English Renaissance.38 As Jennifer Radden explains, following Hippocratic humoral theory, the Greek physician Galen had argued that melancholy was an illness caused by an imbalance of the humours, or too much black bile, which led to illness, idleness and withdrawal from other people.39 The infuence of this theory also permeated the culture beyond medical texts. Take, for instance, this advice about avoiding solitariness in The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, a 1581 dialogue on conversation:40 For thinking to receive solace by means of a solitarie life, you fll yourself full of ill humours, which take roote in you, and there lie in waite readie to search out secrete and solitarie places conformable to their nature, and to fie all mirth and companie: and as hidden fames by force kept downe are most ardent, so these corrupt humours, covertly lurking, with more force consume, and destroy the faire pallace of your minde. And therefore I would wish that, leaving that wrong opinion, wherby hitherunto you went about, cleane contrarie, to redresse your evil, you should change your order of proceeding, and to account solitarinesse for poyson, and companie, for an Antidote, and the foundation of life.41 Sidney draws on the well-worn association between solitude and melancholy when he, like Civile, presents solitariness as something which is hard to control once the melancholic humour has taken hold. When Pyrocles dutifully replies to Basilius’ shock that Cleophilia is alone in the forest with the aphorism that ‘they are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts’, he not only implies that he agrees with Basilius that women should ideally be accompanied at all times; he also reinforces the logic that such company protects the mind from melancholy. ‘Noble thoughts’ are a substitute for actual company, which would usually protect the ‘Faire Lady’ both from other people and from herself. It is ironic that Pyrocles’ phrase has become one of the most often quoted aphorisms from the Arcadia, when one considers that he utters it so dishonestly, as part of a ruse. More importantly, Basilius understands the loneliness of place to be easily transmuted into the loneliness of persons. When Basilius speaks of Cleophilia’s ‘loneliness’, he at frst simply seems to be describing her embodied solitariness, but it soon becomes clear that he is also envisioning her loneliness in relation to the melancholy within her own ‘self ’.

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Philoclea’s Melancholy Sidney emphasizes the dangers of melancholy in lonely places once again when he later depicts Philoclea wrestling with the same threat of melancholy that Musidorus warns Pyrocles about. By this point in the plot, Philoclea has fallen in love with Cleophilia and is tormented by thoughts of what she understands to be a forbidden desire for a woman. Philoclea seeks ‘some lonely place’ within the already-solitary woods to withdraw into and lament what she sees as her impossible desire. There, Sidney depicts her falling prey to the ‘humour’ of melancholy, without fully understanding what is happening to her: The amiable Philoclea . . . was suddenly (poor soul) surprised before she was aware that any matter laid hold of her . . . Finding a mountain of burning desire to have overwhelmed her heart, and that the fruits thereof, having new won the place, began to manifest themselves with horrible terrors of danger, dishonor and despair, she did suffer her sweet spirits to languish under the heavy weight, thinking it impossible to resist, as she found it deadly to yield. Thus ignorant of her own disease, although (full well) she found herself diseased, her greatest pleasure was to put herself into some lonely place where she might freely feed the humour that did tyrannize within her.42 Even if Sidney’s contemporaries did not immediately understand the term ‘lonely’ to be an obvious reference to dejection, the way that he frames his reference to the ‘lonely place’ with several references to the discourse of melancholy suggests that he expected readers to connect the loneliness of the space Philoclea inhabits with the melancholy she experiences there. Desire soon turns to terror and despair in the forest. Radden explains that fear was considered part of the experience of melancholy: From the earliest Hippocratic writing, melancholy is seen to involve states of fear and sadness, and this account of melancholic subjectivity varies little throughout the centuries. Galen affrms that although ‘each [melancholic] patient acts quite differently from the others, all of them exhibit fear and despondency’. Bright, in 1586, states that for the most part the perturbations of melancholy ‘are sadde and fearefull, and such as rise of them as distrust, diffdence, or dispaire.’43 In effect, Philoclea succumbs to the vulnerability to melancholy that her father has pushed onto her by forcing her into isolation. She is a victim of both Pyrocles and Basilius in this scene since her melancholy makes her more susceptible to Pyrocles’ plot. Sidney’s depiction of the pleasure Philoclea takes in seeking out a ‘lonely place’ in which to indulge her feeling (‘her greatest pleasure’; see the previous quotation) perhaps responds more to the Petrarchan tradition of representing solitude than to ancient pastoral models of solitude as a place of lament. T.G. Rosenmeyer argues that ‘melancholy in the ancient pastoral has nothing to do with concentrating upon one’s private needs, or with bemoaning the loss or absence of a beloved’: and suggests that this is a Renaissance addition to the discourse.44 Judy Kronenfeld (who cites Rosenmeyer) further explains: The pastoral melancholy that is associated with solitude enters Renaissance pastoral melancholy mainly via Petrarch. It is related to a new sensibility which, in Christian and

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Stoic contexts, is most likely to be interpreted as unhealthy egotism. This new mood involves explicitly cultivated introspection, an introspection unrelated to medieval contemplation which is justifed by its God-directedness. It involves a self-nourishing grief as well, which is, paradoxically, a source of joy.45 Yet where Petrarch balances ‘the rich possibilities of imagination in solitude against the pains of deprivation and desire’, as David Kalstone puts it, Sidney instead ‘chooses to emphasize the dark melancholic vein in the pastoral lament’.46 Philoclea’s grief itself becomes a paradoxical source of pleasure in the “lonely place” she inhabits, just as Musidorus had feared it would be for Pyrocles.

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590) The infuence of the idea that the encroachment of melancholy leads to a strange enjoyment of solitude which is ultimately damaging is also on display in the version of the Arcadia, the OED cites, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590). In this longer version of the text, Sidney adds what might be called a prequel to the romance plot of the Old Arcadia: Basilius does not appear until Pyrocles and Musidorus have been on many adventures, in a plot too complex to recount here. Amid his description of these travels, Sidney calls his characters by the names they agree to take on in order to preserve their anonymity during their adventures: Pyrocles is Daiphantus, and Musidorus is Palladius.47 Despite these changes, however, Sidney is still very much interested in centring the theme of the effects of solitude. In this version, he emphasizes Daiphantus’ (or Pyrocles’) proclivity for melancholy solitariness in the pages directly before the debate about solitude:48 But such a chaunge was growen in Daiphantus, that (as if cheerefulnesse had bene tediousnesse, and good entertainement were turnd to discourtesie) he would ever get him selfe alone, though almost when he was in companie he was alone, so little attention he gave to any that spake vnto him: even the colour and fgure of his face began to receaue some alteration; which he shewed little to heede: but everie morning earlie going abroad, either to the garden, or to some woods towards the desert, it seemed his only comfort was to be without a co[m]forter. But long it could not be hid from Palladius, whom true love made redy to marke, & long knowledge able to marke.49 In this passage, Daiphantus is melancholy personifed, and withdraws to increasingly remote spaces—frst to gardens, then to woods and other deserts—so that the landscape might answer his desire to be without people. He continually seeks solitude in order to indulge his melancholy and begins to fnd cheerfulness equivalent to tediousness. Thus, Sidney once again stresses that isolation can be a cause of melancholy, as well as a symptom of it.50 Although Sidney does not directly call Daiphantus ‘lonely’ in this passage, he does describe the paradox that ‘loneliness’ will later come to describe when he argues that Daiphantus seems to be ‘alone’ even when he is ‘in companie’. Daiphantus’ position echoes that of Sidney’s melancholy lover Astrophil in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (c. 1581): in Sonnet XXVII, Astrophil seems ‘most alone in greatest company’.51 This phrase could function as a pithy defnition of the way the word ‘loneliness’ is often used today. The reference to Sidneyan loneliness which the OED cites—another instance of feeling ‘most alone in greatest company’—is rendered more understandable by the association between solitude and melancholy that precedes it. Sidney describes Palladius (or Musidorus) experiencing the huge crowd of people at the Olympic Games as a ‘loneliness’ directly he has described Daiphantus’ melancholy. He subtly emphasizes that Palladius’ position has come to mirror that 28

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of his friend when he uses the word ‘tedious’ to describe his experience since he has just used to describe Daiphantus’ melancholy. Palladius’ experience is therefore subtly infected with the discourse of melancholy, despite the way he has always tried to guard himself against it: So directed he his course to Laconia, as well among the Helots as Spartans. There indeed he found his fame fourishing, his monument engraved in Marble, and yet more durable in mens memories; but the vniuersall lamenting his absented presence, assured him of his present absence. Thence into the Elean prouince, to see whether at the Olympian games (there celebrated) he might in such concourse blesse his eyes with so desired an encounter: but that huge and sportfull assemblie grewe to him a tedious lonelinesse, esteeming no bodie founde, since Daiphantus was lost.52 Even before Palladius (or Musidorus) sets off to look for Daiphantus (or Pyrocles), he notes that his decision to make this kind of journey into foreign lands alone is already a decision to begin a ‘melancholy course’.53 While searching for his wandering friend, Palladius does indeed end up feeling himself to be alone, despite being surrounded by people. Palladius’ argument that solitude (whether embodied or abstract) induces a slackening of self is therefore borne out in his own experience. His friend has drawn him into what is in effect a melancholy situation. The situation Sidney describes at the Olympic Games also asks readers to imagine how a crowded space can come to seem like a ‘lonelinesse’ when one is longing for a particular person’s company. In this way, Sidney uses the term ‘loneliness’ not only to describe an attribute of space but also to argue that Palladius’ frame of mind has the capacity to change both relationship to his environment and his reactions to the people within it. The suggestion that the absence of a friend can make a crowded space seem like an empty space implies that this kind of absence can change one’s perception. Lost in the crowd, Palladius seems to be experiencing a feeling of solitariness exacerbated by the presence of this new foreign multitude. From this description of how a crowd at the Olympic Games might seem like a wilderness, it is a short conceptual leap to understand how feelings frst felt in the wilderness could also infect experiences of loneliness in other places, too. For Palladius, loneliness is, to some degree, internal, because he is projecting the idea of it onto the busy space around him. Sidney’s use of the verb ‘grew’ also suggests an interiorized experience that takes place over an extended period of time. Once the complexity of this scene has been established, it becomes easier to understand how this particular form of loneliness once thought to be located in lonely spaces alone might later metaphorically move inward, to become an experience that can also occur in more unexpected places, far away from the forests of pastoral romance.

Early Dictionary Defnitions Word lists, glossaries and thesauruses published in the seventeenth century suggest that the term ‘loneliness’ not only continued to act as a noun to describe ‘lonelinesses’, such as wildernesses, forests, desert spaces and wastelands in the seventeenth century, but also carried with it a sense of the melancholy that such spaces produce. Fifty years after Sidney recorded the new word, for instance, the rhetorician Josua Poole’s proto-thesaurus The English Parnassus (1657) suggests that the adjective ‘lonely’ was associated with ‘melancholy’ spaces: Wildernesse. Unpeopled, uncouth, shaggy, desart, solitary, lonely, devious, savage, melancholy, silent, unfrequented, sandy, dreadfull, sullen, gloomie, rockie, hoary, pathlesse, shrubby, bushy, unfruitful, barren, inhospitable, wastful.54 29

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This association between unpeopled, lonely places and melancholy places suggests that the kinds of assumptions Sidney makes about loneliness in his pastoral romance also existed outside the literary sphere. Similarly, in The New World of Words (1658), glossary compiler Edward Philips suggests that ‘loneliness’ could be used as a noun to describe a kind of space, with undertones of a sense of the loss that might be experienced there, in his gloss of the word ‘desolation’:‘Desolation, (lat.) a lonelinesse or lying waste.’55 Although records of ‘loneliness’remain relatively uncommon in the seventeenth century,the way it tends to appear as a synonym rather than as an entry in various seventeenth-century lists of rare words suggests that it had some currency (at least, more than the words it was being used to gloss). In his An English Dictionary, Explaining the Diffcult Terms (1676), for instance, Elisha Coles glosses ‘solitude’ as ‘loneliness’, though he does not include an entry for ‘loneliness’.56 Thomas Blount, author of another of the most important word lists of the seventeenth century, includes an entry for the word ‘solitaneous’, and also suggests that the word ‘unison’, from the French, once functioned as a synonym to describe,‘loneliness’,‘singleness’, and ‘oneliness’ in his 1661 Glossographia:57 Vnison (Fr. unisson) an one; an oneliness, or loneliness, a single or singleness.58 Guy Miege also defnes ‘unison’ in a similar way: ‘Unisson, for unité, unity, singleness, loneliness, or being alone’.59 The naturalist John Ray’s glossary of infrequently used words (A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, 1674) not only reveals that some seventeenth-century writers were using a variant of the Middle English concept of elengeness but also that the word ‘lonely’ could be used to gloss it: Ellinge: Solitary, lonely, melancholy, farre from neighbours. q. elongatus. Suss. a Gallico Esloigner. Ellende in the Ancient Saxon signifes procul, farre off, farre from.60 Elisha Coles’ dictionary also includes the now obsolete word ‘ellinge’ in his 1676 dictionary and glosses it as ‘solitary, lonely’.61 Ray glosses another obsolete synonym,‘deafely’, in a similar way: Deafely: Lonely, solitary, far from neighbours. Since both Coles’ and Ray’s defnitions use ‘lonely’ as a synonym, they assume that it was ‘generally used’ in 1674 to describe remote places. When Ray suggests that being lonely was generally understood to be a melancholy situation ‘far from neighbours’, he also raises the question of whether all people count as neighbours, even when they are nearby.62 Palladius, for instance, would likely consider himself to be ‘far from neighbours’ when amid the crowd at the Olympic Games: being ‘far from neighbours’ may, in 1674, have been a phrase that garnered more of a sense of lack, or of a ‘sense of solitude’, than it does today. The rise of ‘loneliness’ as a pathologized term, associated with dejection, was the result of an intensifcation of a literary tradition that associated it with melancholy, an association present from the very beginning of the term’s history. Not all early loneliness is melancholic, and melancholy solitude is not straightforwardly equivalent with the feeling of ‘loneliness’ today, yet it is clear that the ‘want of society or company’ is sometimes so close to a ‘sense of solitude’ or a feeling of ‘dejection’ that arises because of a ‘feeling of being alone’ as to be equivalent with it. As word lists and glossaries published before Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary intimate, the connection between lonely spaces and melancholy was broadly understood in the seventeenth century. Although this chapter has focused on the excerpts that the OED does include in its defnitions, it would also be possible to make a similar argument using examples it overlooks. Notably absent 30

The Origins of ‘Loneliness’

from the OED are the many records of the word ‘loneliness’ in the work of female members of the Sidney circle, Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth. As scholars continue to consider the question of when ‘loneliness’ began to signify a stand-alone emotional experience, recognizably different from ‘solitude’ or ‘solitariness’, these texts provide rich resources for the history of loneliness, which have so far remained untouched.

Notes 1 Marianne Moore,‘If I Were Sixteen Today’, World Week 33 (7 Nov. 1958): 16–17. In The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking Penguin Inc 1986), 504. 2 Taylor’s article also includes a broad-ranging discussion of some of the contradictions involved in tracing the history of solitude in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Barbara Taylor, ‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal 89 (2020): 1–21 (2). 3 Fay Bound Alberti argues, ‘I suggest that loneliness in its modern sense emerged as both a term and a recognizable experience around 1800, soon after ideas about sociability and secularism became important to the social and political fabric. It was reinforced by the nineteenth-century emergence of an intense ideology of the individual: in the mind sciences, in economic structures, in rational philosophy and politics’. Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotions Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 242–54. See also Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 9–10, 18–19, 31. David Vincent echoes this chronology when he also positions Romantic poetry as pivotal:‘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’. David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 20–3. 4 ‘ “Loneliness” is often viewed as a modern emotion. Scholars working at the intersection between the history of science and the history of emotions in Britain have held that the concept of loneliness, as understood in modern terms, emerged in the late eighteenth century and was shaped by the ideology of the individual that began to establish itself in the nineteenth century. It is tempting to imagine that issues of loneliness were not relevant in a pre-modern society in which living alone was rare. Indeed, we are often presented with a rather nostalgic picture of these earlier times: an agrarian society in which generations would remain within their parish boundaries, with little opportunity or pressure for individuals to stray far from their region of birth. However, closer examination of the textual archive hardly sustains the view that loneliness is a modern emotion, despite the fact that it was not recognised universally in earlier times’. Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, ‘ “Thrust from the Society of Many Dear Friends”: Loneliness in Early Modern Britain and in the Humanities Today’, Lancet Psychiatry, 28 June 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00245-5. For other considerations of the culture of Renaissance solitude, see Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Solitary Man (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefeld, 1981), and Andrew Mattison, Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 5 Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 174. 6 Barclay notes that both the words elengenesse and ō̆nnesse could be glossed with the word ‘loneliness’, depending on the context they were uttered within: ‘Signifcant emphasis has been placed on the rarity of the word “loneliness” in English corpuses before the 1590s, but Middle English contains both elengenesse and ō̆nnesse, terms suggestive of the emotional dimensions of being alone. Elengenesse can be translated as melancholy and sadness, as well as loneliness and strangeness. It was contrasted with comfort and gladness, linked to being strange and out of place, and was a state countered by taking a jolly wife. ō̆nnesse meant oneness, unity and harmony, but also loneliness and solitude—an evocative, perhaps contradictory combination of meanings’: Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love & the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 165. 7 Diana Webb, Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space (Cornwall: Continuum International Pub., 2007), xv. 8 Descharmes is careful to delineate her understanding of the history of the English term ‘loneliness’ before arguing that ‘in exile we can equate Cicero’s condition with loneliness’. Bernadette Descharmes,‘ “Next to Yourself, Solitude Is My Best Friend” (Cic. ad Att. 12.15 [252]): Cicero’s Experience of Being Alone: A Case Study’, in Being Alone in Antiquity: Greco-Roman Ideas and Experiences of Misanthropy, Isolation and Solitude, ed. Rafał Matuszewski (Boston: De Gruyter 2022), 229–44 (242). However, Christine Göttler

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

argues, ‘The psychological and emotional state of being lonely, both in seclusion and in a crowd, even though experienced, was not verbally expressed in a simple and unambiguous way’. Christine Göttler, ‘Realms of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cultures: An Introduction’, Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 1–28 (7). For instance, Elie Wiesel calls Moses ‘the loneliest’ character in the Bible. Elie Wiesel, ‘The Loneliness of Moses’, in Loneliness, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 127–43 (128). Karl Enenkel argues that the church fathers were engaged in a ‘continuous search for increasingly extreme forms of solitude, loneliness, and asceticism’. Karl A.E. Enenkel, ‘Petrarch’s Constructions of the Sacred Solitary Place’, in Solitudo, ed. Enenkel and Göttler, 31–80 (57). See Amelia Worsley,‘Ophelia’s Loneliness’, ELH 82, no. 2 (2015): 521–51. Christopher Ricks,‘Loneliness and Poetry’, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 268. OED, s.v. ‘loneliness, n.’, accessed 22 Jan. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109969?redirectedFrom= loneliness#eid. OED, s.v. ‘lonely, adj.’, accessed 22 Jan. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109971?redirectedFrom =lonely#eid. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VII.420, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 241. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VII.463, 241. George Gordon Byron, ‘To Thyrza’, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 1, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 351. Göttler,‘Realms of Solitude’, 7. For a full account of the relationship between The Old Arcadia, the ‘revised but incomplete romance’ published in 1590, and the ‘New’ Arcadia, which ‘from 1593 onwards . . . was given a false completeness by being printed with Books 3–5 of the “old” version’, though it was admitted that this could provide only the ‘conclusion, and not the perfection of Arcadia’, see Katherine Duncan-Jones,‘Introduction’ to the Old Arcadia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), vii–viii. ‘This entry has not yet been fully updated (frst published 1903; most recently modifed version published online September 2021)’. OED, s.v. ‘loneliness, n.’, accessed 22 Jan. 2022, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/109969?redirectedFrom=loneliness#eid; ‘This entry has not yet been fully updated (frst published 1903; most recently modifed version published online June 2021’, OED, s.v. ‘lonely, adj.’, accessed 22 Jan. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109971?redirectedFrom=lonely#eid. Matthew Zarnowiecki, ‘Lyric Surrogacy: Reproducing the “I” in Sidney’s Arcadia’, Sidney Journal 27, no. 1 (2009): 31–53 (31). T.G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 227. All references to The Old Arcadia are taken from Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Angus Gowland, in a talk titled ‘The Solitary Melancholic in European Thought from Antiquity to 1651’, 4 Feb. 2020, organized by Barbara Taylor for the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project, furthered my understanding of this topic. Sidney later changes Kerxenus’ name to ‘Kalander’ in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. In the 1590 text, he also frames this scene by telling a complex story about how Strephon and Claius conduct Musidorus to Kalander’s house after Pyrocles is taken by pirates. This scene is also present in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, though it appears much later in the plot, directly after the description of Daiphantus’ melancholy, which I explore further (see 49–53, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia [1593]). Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227. See Jacob Zeitlin, The Life of Solitude by Francis Petrarch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1924), 40–1. See Brian Vickers, ed., Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Mackenzie-Evelyn Debate (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1986). See Katherine Duncan Jones’ note on Sidney’s use of this metaphor of the bow, The Old Arcadia, 369. See Seneca the Younger, De Tranquillitate Animi,‘On the Tranquility of the Mind’, in Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 2, with an English translation by John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 281.

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The Origins of ‘Loneliness’ 31 The idea that solitude is a ‘nurse’ to contemplation is one that Milton also invokes in Comus. See John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, vol. 2, 375–80, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Peter Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 77. 32 For a discussion of this scene in relation to Sidney’s letter to Hubert Languet ‘about the limits of contemplation in solitude’, see Judy Z. Kronenfeld,‘Shakespeare’s Jacques and the Pastoral Cult of Solitude’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 3 (1976): 451–73 (464). 33 Kronenfeld,‘Shakespeare’s Jacques’, 452. 34 See Edwin Greenlaw,‘Shakespeare’s Pastorals’, Studies in Philology 13, no. 2 (1916): 122–54 (128). 35 Andrew Mattison, Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 6. 36 Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 5. 37 Sidney, Old Arcadia, 31–2, my emphasis. In the 1590 version without modernized spelling, the term ‘loneliness’ appears as ‘lonelines’, with the variant spelling marks the term’s rarity. A version of this passage also appears in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), though Pyrocles names himself Zelmane there: see 81–2. 38 See Douglas Trevor,‘Introduction’, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 11–12. 39 See Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–8. 40 Jane Kingsley Smith introduced me to this passage, in a talk entitled ‘How Could/Should Shakespeare Be Lonely?’, at the online conference,‘The Experience of Loneliness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, 29–30 June 2021, https://earlymodernloneliness.blogspot.com/. 41 The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (1581), ed. Sir Edward Sullivan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 18. 42 Sidney, Old Arcadia, 95, my emphasis. 43 Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 10. 44 T.G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 229. 45 Kronenfeld,‘Shakespeare’s Jacques’, 451. 46 David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 83. 47 As the plot progresses, Sidney also decides to change the name that Pyrocles uses after he disguises himself as a woman: in the 1590 version, Pyrocles becomes ‘Zelmane’ rather than Cleophilia. For a full account of this renaming, see Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987), 13. 48 For ease of reference, compare the 1590 version of the passage with that printed with modernized spelling printed in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593):‘but such a change was grown in Daiphantus that (as if cheerfulness had been tediousness, and good entertainment were turned to discourtesy) he would ever get himself alone—though almost when he was in company he was alone, so little attention he gave to any that spake unto him. Even the colour and fgure of his face began to receive some alteration, which he shewed little to heed. But every morning early going abroad, either to the garden or to some woods towards the desert, it seemed his only comfort was to be without a comforter; but long it could not be hid from Palladius, whom true love made ready to mark, and long knowledge able to mark’ (1593, 109). 49 Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590), Renascence Editions, transcribed by Risa Bear, October 2003, from the Sommer facsimile of a British Museum copy of the Ponsonby edition of 1590, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/arcadia1.html (Image 54 of 142). 50 Cecropia similarly argues that melancholy can cause one’s resolution to slacken, when she notes ‘company confrmes resolutions, & lonelines breeds a werines of ones thoughts, and so a sooner consenting to reasonable profers’ (1590), accessed 12 Jan. 2022, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/arcadia3. html (image 12 of 136). 51 Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Duncan-Jones, 163. 52 1590 version, my emphasis, accessed 31 May 2022, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/arcadia1. html (image 74 of 142). Cf. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), 129–30. 53 Ibid., (73 of 142). See also The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), 67.

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Amelia Worsley 54 Josua Poole, The English Parnassus, or: A Helpe to English Poesie Containing a Collection of All Rhyming Monosyllables, the Choicest Epithets, and Phrases . . . (London: Tho. Johnson, 1657), 49, 69, 81, 150, 153, 215, 223. 55 Edward Philips, The New World of Words (1658). 56 Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary Explaining the Diffcult Terms That Are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick, Phylosophy, Law, Navigation, Mathematicks, and Other Arts and Sciences (1676). 57 See D.T. Starnes,‘English Dictionaries of the Seventeenth Century’, Studies in English 17 (1937): 15–51. 58 Thomas Blount, Glossographia, or: A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refned English Tongue with Etymologies, Defnitions and Historical Observations on the Same . . . (London: Thomas Newcombe for George Sawbridge, 1661). 59 Guy Miege, A Dictionary of Barbarous French, or: A Collection, by Way of Alphabet, of Obsolete, Provincial, Mis-Spelt, and Made Words in French Taken Out of Cotgrave’s Dictionary with Some Additions . . . (London: J.C. for Thomas Basset, 1679). 60 John Ray, A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, with Their Signifcations and Original in Two Alphabetical Catalogues, the One of Such as Are Proper to the Northern, the Other to the Southern Counties . . . (London: H. Bruges for Tho. Barrell, 1674), 14. 61 Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary Explaining the Diffcult Terms That Are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick, Phylosophy, Law, Navigation, Mathematicks, and Other Arts and Sciences (1676). 62 The Early English Books Online database also catalogues other examples of the word ‘lonely’ being used to describe the danger of places ‘far from neighbours’ in the seventeenth century. In 1671, one Samuel Morland uses the word ‘lonely’ to describe a house ‘far from neighbours’ when he describes the speaking trumpet he has invented in order to carry his voice over longer distances, explaining how his invention might help people during attacks(!): ‘In case a number of Thieves and Robbers attaque a House that is lonely, and far from Neighbours, by such an Instrument as this, may all the Dwellers round about, within the compass of a Mile or more, be immediately informed, upon whose House such an attaque is made, the number of Thieves or Robbers, how armed and equipped . . . No particular whereof can be performed by either Drum, Trumpet, Bell, or any other Engine or Instrument, hitherto in use’. Samuel Morland, Tuba Stentoro-Phonica an Instrument of Excellent Use as Well at Sea as at Land invented in the Year 1670 (London: W. Godbid for M. Pitt, 1671), 14.

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2 POLITE LONELINESS The Problem Sociability of Spinsters in the Long Eighteenth Century Alison Duncan

A particular kind of loneliness was thought to belong to spinster gentlewomen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain. This loneliness was culturally defned, embodied in the old maid caricature of popular culture, and held up before all gentlewomen as a warning of what to expect should they fail to marry. A woman who turned down suitable proposals when young would fnd herself all too soon an ageing spinster, ‘abandoned by the friends of her youth . . . the solitary tenant of an humble habitation. . . . Denied the pleasures of society’. Her ‘lacerated mind’ would fnd relief only in death. Even this fnal sting would be ‘sharpened by the refection, that her eyes will not be closed, nor her limbs decently laid, by the hand of friendship or consanguinity’.1 Being denied ‘the pleasures of society’ might seem the least of these woes, but it was in fact the thrust of the message and evidence that the caricature was directed at women of genteel rank. One of the key marks of a gentlewoman was her participation in polite sociability. This was not sociability as leisure; it was the constant effort of keeping social connections alive and active to maintain rank. A gentlewoman’s social activities were expected to uphold the public credit of her family names, both birth and marital. At a personal level, her claims to the recognition and respect of her peers depended considerably on her social confdence and poise. Polite sociability was public and performative, and demanded regular practice. Solitude was its negative face. Being alone, in this context, did not necessarily mean lack of companionship; rather, it meant lack of access to the ritual interactions of an educated elite, and consequent erosion of the social skills which signalled rank. Unmarried women, who lacked the support of wifely status, relied heavily on these interactions as a public demonstration and personal reassurance of belonging to genteel families and kin networks. Solitude threatened spinsters with loss of their identity as gentlewomen. This chapter looks at how genteel spinsters experienced loneliness as an aspect of the polite sociability which defned them. The frst section sets out the cultural context from which the old maid caricature emerged, with a brief review of why the fgure of an unmarried and isolated elderly woman was a stereotype and scapegoat particularly relevant to the times. The caricature functioned as both deterrent and punishment’ and as a portrait of lonely old age it was meant to be painful, in prospect and in retrospect. The old maid’s isolation was represented as the result of her own choices and behaviour. The second section looks at how spinsters responded to the cumulative weight of negative representations in print culture. In their personal letters especially, DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-4

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their expressions of solitude often communicated forebodings of social connection slipping away, but these articulations of what it was to be alone were also intended to be read as reminders that the letter’s writer and the recipient belonged to the same networks. The key points investigated can be highlighted here by reference to the journals of a clergyman’s daughter who became a governess to support herself after his death. As a paid employee living in homes where she had no kin connection, Agnes Porter was acutely conscious of her precarious hold on the status of a gentlewoman. Her life was physically bounded by the rural properties of the landed families whose daughters she taught, and her interactions with the household inmates demanded constant alertness to the hierarchical nuances of rank. As she wrote in the winter of 1790, when her widowed employer was absent from home, she joined his daughters for the evening, but when he returned, they joined their father, and she passed her time ‘alone’. She thought it worth recording an occasion when she ‘supt by invitation’ with her employer and his elder daughters; this was an invitation not just to dinner but to polite conversation. Most of the time her journal had to stand in for the ‘rational companion’ with whom she longed to exchange her observations on books, social conduct and the beauties of nature.2 She was acutely sensitive to the ‘unavoidable want of society in my situation’, once describing herself as ‘alone’ when there was ‘no-one in the house with me but an old woman’ who, by not naming, she kept at a safe social distance.3 In 1791, in her early 40s, Porter found herself ‘deeply refecting on the ills that single women are exposed to, even at the hour of death’. She was afraid that she would face the end of her life as ‘the property of no-one’.4 A successful move to teaching the daughters of a former pupil seemed to secure her a future home, but in the next decade ill-health forced her to give up her position and thus her place in her employer’s household. She failed to adapt into the households of either her married sister or a friend, and by November 1813, she had moved into paid lodgings. This was a step usually taken as evidence that a gentlewoman no longer had connections able or willing to support and acknowledge her. Yet when she died there a year later, she left £2,000, amassed mostly by her own saving and investment, and ‘the hand of friendship’ ensured her burial in a family plot, though the family was not her own. Porter’s achievement of fnancial independence and material comfort for her old age, and especially her ability to keep her social connections through changing circumstances, must be set against her lifelong insecurities in this regard. Throughout her adult life, she felt the threat which solitude posed to her status. These tensions raise for examination historical defnitions of sociability and loneliness which were culturally and socially specifc and which were understood to be so. What follows looks further into the fragility of genteel self-identities and how easily they could be undermined by the social spectre of the isolated old maid.

The Lonely Old Maid Caricature The old maid was one of many caricatures who populated the print culture of the period. The dress, mannerisms and speech of these caricatures held up for ridicule behaviour that was thought to undermine the stability of society. In the company of dandies, fops, and her counterpart the old bachelor, the old maid stood out by the frequency of her appearance and the extreme negativity of the language in which she was described. While the harshest portraits appeared in chapbook burlesques, she could be met with everywhere from the theatre to the drawing room, serving as both scapegoat and comic relief on stage and in fashionable novels. She had her genesis partly in the earlier fgure of the witch, and some of the physical violence which continued to be directed at supposed witches into the early part of the eighteenth century echoed linguistically into the start of the 19th century in the guise of humour. This note of physical punishment for social 36

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Figure 2.1

The Old Maid (J. Walker, 1777).

Source: British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress.

transgression was never alluded to in the writings of spinsters themselves, but older unmarried gentlewomen’s preoccupation with polite behaviour and genteel rank speaks of their constant efforts not to lose status to a level at which disrespect might become overt. Old maids were thought appropriate targets for ‘Banter’.5 Solitude was a defning attribute of the old maid stereotype, both textually and visually. A contradictory but related attribute was gadabout sociability. Although not examined here, this 37

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frivolous and even frantic pursuit of pleasure for its own sake was presented as further proof of the old maid’s selfsh detachment from familial roles and responsibilities. While this chapter focuses on linguistic usages, etchings and engravings also depicted the isolation in which the old maid could expect to live out her days. A cat at (or on) her table in place of husband and children emphasized her separation from natural human ties. Social exclusion was represented as both the inevitable result of—and ftting punishment for—a gentlewoman’s failure to expand her family’s social networks by a well-considered marriage. She was presumed to have been too proud, prudish or otherwise self-concerned to accept a suitable offer. This was defned as an alliance which would beneft her kin through connection to individuals who could forward the family interest, or at least as one that would not diminish their collective standing. The stereotype took little account of societal constraints on women’s agency in courtship or the likelihood of an acceptable offer being made to them. Evidence that the caricature was directed primarily at gentlewomen is found across a range of publications which to some degree perpetuated the stereotype as they sought to address it. The anonymous author of an Irish pamphlet published in 1790 asked Britain’s parliamentarians to imagine a group of ‘amiable females’ among whom they might fnd ‘an aunt, a sister, or a niece’.6 They were asked to approve a ‘College for Old Maids’, to be funded by a female head tax on all families above the rank of ‘peasants and working artifcers’. The benefciaries, however, would be restricted to ‘ladies’ of ‘moderate fortunes’ able to contribute personally a minimum of £200 to the venture. This would secure them a home, servants and ‘all the comforts and advantages of society’.7 The Irish-born evangelical Lady Isabella King established a similar venture in Bath in 1816, although her vision of fnancially independent spinsters living with and subsidizing poorer single gentlewomen proved unsustainable.8 In the novel Millenium Hall (1762), admission to the eponymous female sanctuary was sought by women who (like Agnes Porter) had capital of £2,000, the novelist Sarah Scott emphasizing that for women on their own, the interest received from this was not enough on which to live ‘genteelly’.9 The author Jean Marishall, herself a spinster, considered the diffculties of women who were ‘single and unprotected’ alongside other social ills in A Series of Letters (1789). She deplored the high number of her contemporaries who were brought up in polite society only to end being ‘known by nobody’ and left ‘the best part of their lives to suffer every evil attending confned circumstances’. Marishall suggested that a county tax to ‘support or augment’ their incomes would prevent them being ‘considered as hangers-on on their relations’.10 Notably, in these texts the gentlewomanly requirement of polite society follows closely on the necessity of a roof. Marishall insisted she was not undermining marriage but asked bluntly, if ‘solitary maidens’ were indeed always fretful, ill-looking and discontented, was it ‘because they have not got husbands? No.’ If they had enough money to participate in sociability and keep up their status, they would not be unhappy. Indeed, she argued, women known to be ‘county annuitants’ should be paid ‘particular attention and respect . . . in every company’ so that by example the ‘illiberal practice of ridicule and neglect’ presently directed at ageing spinsters would gradually cease.11 Marishall knew that when spinsters themselves proposed solutions to their diffculties—especially fnancial ones—both proposals and proposers were likely to be dismissed. Echoing the Irish pamphlet author’s appeal to masculine self-interest, she pointed out that if an individual gentlewoman’s ‘consequence’ was supported, the standing of her kin was also upheld. The importance set on genteel marriage during this period refected the concern of Britain’s social and political elites in sustaining existing hierarchies of privilege. From the Jacobite rebellions to the American and French revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, national structures of power and authority were threatened or actually overturned. The accompanying human cost of Britain’s global military commitments from the mid-eighteenth well into the nineteenth centuries was 38

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high. These factors contributed to a persistent fear of social breakdown and a perceived need to maintain population levels within a framework of socially legitimate and economically viable unions. Contemporary belief that the national birth rate was falling was incorrect, but from The Spectator magazine’s pronouncement in 1712 that ‘celibacy is the great evil of our nation’, pamphlet writers repeatedly drew public attention to the ‘Danger of Celibacy to a Nation’, meaning non-marriage rather than sexual continence.12 ‘No wonder the British Name is less terrible than formerly’ lamented one, contemplating the ‘melancholy Consideration that Eight Hundred Thousand Females should lie uncultivated’. To make wives and mothers of them would ‘restore the British Glory, and the Balance of Europe to our hands.’13 Nothing, it was argued, ‘can contribute more, towards preserving the Welfare and Honour of this Nation . . . than a strict Observance of the matrimonial Institution’.14 Further, ‘the Resolution of Living a single Life when under no lawful Impediment [is] one of the wickedest Obligations that human Nature can impose upon it self Injurious to the Publick, and directly contrary to the Laws of God and Nature.’15 Genteel marriage, which drew families of rank into mutual alliance through the ties of kinship and patronage, was represented as a bulwark against societal collapse. Gentlemen also had a responsibility to marry and contribute ‘to [their] species, to [their] country, and to [their] religion’, of course.16 There were regular proposals, both serious and satirical, to tax or fne those ‘Drones in the great Hive of the Common-Wealth’ who were not ‘industrious to repair from their own Loins the native Strength of the Kingdom’.17 No such fnancial sanctions were suggested for unmarried women; to do so would have presumed their fnancial autonomy. But the presumptions and pressures applied to male gentility were different. A gentleman who indulged in illegitimate paternity was not debarred from legitimate family life. Even those who persisted unwed into middle age might be recalled to the norms of marriage and posterity, while spinsters who married past possibility of childbearing (driven by lust, it was presumed) could expect to see their condition caricatured as harshly as their never-married counterparts. The old bachelor caricature functioned less as a deterrent or punishment and more as a prod to reformation. It chastised and chivvied, and where sexual language or imagery was employed, it was mocking rather than vicious. Like the old maid, the caricature was clearly aimed at those of genteel rank and above. A two-volume classifcation of Old Bachelors: Their Varieties, Characters, and Conditions (1835) noted that the type was least numerous among ‘the labouring classes’,‘little shopkeepers and second-rate tradespeople’, and was dedicated to the Duke of Devonshire,‘Prince of Bachelors’.18 Solitude was also a defning attribute of the old bachelor stereotype. A chapbook author of 1757 pronounced his doom: ‘alone in the Day, and alone in the Night; alone in going abroad, and alone in returning home’.19 Selfshness went hand-in-hand with the ‘solitude of celibacy’.20 The ‘solitary’ narrator of the Confessions of an Old Bachelor (1827) was also ‘morose, eccentric, peevish’, among other social faults.21 Here too, however, a gendered difference is evident. Gentlemen who felt constrained by pinched incomes still had comparatively unfettered access to sociability. They needed no chaperone, could go about on foot alone without attracting attention and could thus maintain their networks not just by invitation—admission to places of formal parade such as assembly halls, and household-based sociability among kin—but also by access to the open male conviviality of tavern and coffee house. The latter, although not polite sociability, played an important part in maintaining men’s social connections, along with the male clubs and associations which met in these settings. Professional networks were a further support. Depictions of the threat which solitude posed to gentlemanly status thus focused instead on the wifeless household, in which there was no one for whom the bachelor’s comfort was a priority, and no one to ensure genteel standards were visibly kept up. The bachelor could expect his servants to take full advantage of his domestic ignorance; female housekeepers especially 39

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were suspected of wanting to insinuate themselves into a false position of wifely infuence and authority.22 The novelist Susan Ferrier described in The Inheritance (1824) an old bachelor who had reached a typical state of social and personal ossifcation, year upon year in increasing isolation ‘sitting in the self-same parlour, in the self-same chair, and in the self-same frame of mind’. He was ‘a picture of lonely old age . . . left at the mercy of a mercenary, unprincipled servant, destitute even of the necessaries of life’.23 If nothing worse, the bachelor would inevitably fall into ‘very uncouth habits with living alone’.24 This understanding of loneliness as domestic isolation from social equals, with consequent loss of status, is explored more fully in the following section, which examines spinsters’ personal experiences and expressions of being alone. The normative force of polite sociability is evident in a contemporary opposition of reason and depression, verging on mental unbalance. The author of Old Bachelors demanded rhetorically, ‘what wonder that a man becomes mentally diseased . . . whose home is the home of the solitary, and whose affections are centred upon himself?’25 His activities were no more than ‘a barren round’, and he could not hope to avoid the ‘busy, coroding Cares [and] black and gloomy Thoughts’ which would soon be his only companions.26 The Irish pamphlet writer’s proposal of a ‘College for Old Maids’ was justifed on the grounds that ‘Formed for society, solitary seclusion is never the object of our voluntary choice, while unbiased reason is permitted to regulate our conduct.’27 This linkage of rationality and right conduct meant that those isolated from polite sociability could feel a potentially severe impact on their self-esteem and self-identity. One spinster warned a younger and still unmarried correspondent that solitude was often accompanied by an unhealthy degree of introspection, liable to lead to depression,‘what was called of yore melancholy’ and perhaps at last to ‘alienated’ reason. Recalling the writer and moralist Samuel Johnson’s admonition to ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, and connecting this vulnerability to depression with her own condition and circumstances, she refected ‘Alas! I have all my life been too much of both.’28 When a solitary life was represented both as the inevitable consequence of a choice not to marry and as a choice which in itself could not be made by a person in sound mind, there was a strong implication that spinsterhood was evidence of a personal failure of reason.

Perceptions of Sociability and Solitude During this period in which the old maid was increasingly painted as a social anomaly, the number of women in genteel families who remained unmarried rose. Rather than existing on the social margins, many took up responsibilities in the heart of family life. They joined relatives’ households or set up independently on income from annuities or inheritance. They were noticeable in provincial towns, where they could access genteel domesticity and sociability more easily and more cheaply than in the countryside or a city. The caricature of print culture was to some degree a pushback against these visible ‘spinster clusters’.29 As far as possible, they tried to live with kin. Economic pressure sometimes made this a necessity; social norms made it desirable. It might mean establishing an unmarried sibling household or boarding with friends of similar income and status drawn from cousinage relationships. Where income was insuffcient or insecure, it might mean living with an elderly relative who could offer a home in return for companionate care. What mattered was visible family connection. Single gentlewomen were expected, advised and often chose to put up with uncongenial homes or even domestic discord rather than lose this proof of identity and respectability. The women whose letters and journals are scrutinized here range from those who were fnancially dependent in varying degrees to those who were independently wealthy. As gentlewomen they belonged to a ‘language community’ in which the norms of genteel status and behaviour were constructed, sometimes contested, and reinforced.30 Their personal writing both responded 40

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to and fed into the prevailing discourses and language of published texts. All knew their status could be undermined by association with the old maid caricature. Their expressions of what it meant to them to be alone were—like the occasions which prompted them to expression— notably similar. But spinsters who described being alone or feeling solitary had no intention of lowering their own status. Their self-representations within the conceptual duality of sociability and solitude commonly communicated both a sense of exclusion from polite sociability, and a determination to remain within it. Multiple understandings emerge of the experience of being alone. Among the most damaging to genteel status was lack of company. Company was the setting in which polite sociability was practised. This is evident in the journals of Christian Dalrymple, who inherited her family estate of Newhailes near Edinburgh in 1792 when she was 27. Dalrymple’s annual journals served as a record of social interaction rather than a space for personal refection. She was clear that company meant the presence of her social equals or betters. At the dull end of November 1798, she ‘went to the Musselburgh ball, where was nobody else’.31 Nobody, at least, worth her notice. She was similarly dissatisfed the following winter at the Edinburgh assembly, where she might have expected a more elevated gathering. Instead she ‘had to walk in alone’, before heading home to ‘a solitary Supper’.32 This was especially dispiriting as she had just moved into town for the season to make socializing easier. Receiving company at home meant similarly polite interaction, above the mundane discourse of family and household. It was the mark of a genteel family’s integration into kin and social networks, to the extent that a baronet’s wife claimed lack of company as good reason for leaving her husband, blaming him for ‘the very inhospitable manner of our house . . . though our Fortune was considerable . . . disregard (not to say contempt) must ever be the consequence’.33 Days when Dalrymple neither made nor received visits were rare and passed over tersely,‘at home no Company’, but they were tallied nonetheless against her balance of ‘Company dinners’ for which every guest’s name was logged.34 Inability to go into company or to receive it was understood in the same terms. Another spinster heiress passed the severe winter of 1801–02 on her Aberdeenshire estate with her gentlewoman companion, who recorded that the two were ‘alone the greater part of the time’.35 Even fve sisters living together could think of themselves in this way. The Fergussons, unmarried female cousins of Dalrymple, moved reluctantly from London to rural Dulwich with their widowed father in his attempt to save money. ‘There is no family that can wish to be always at home & always alone, which in winter must be the case’, wrote Allan Fergusson, explaining her sisters’ resentment at being deprived of easy access to their London acquaintance.36 She predicted that in short time they would be reduced to ‘vicerage maids’, examples of unpolished rusticity.37 Not that residence in London was a guarantee of polite company. The Mayfair household from which the architectural Adam family built a public presence was run by two of the Adam sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth. The brothers’ ambition—especially Robert’s—drove them to relentless sociability. But the sisters kept themselves apart, aware of their bachelor brothers’ rakish reputations and cautious of having their own reputations tainted by association. Regardless of personal preference, their sociability was constrained by their brothers’ behaviour. In 1790, discussing a possible visit to relatives in Scotland, Margaret Adam admitted she would prefer a ‘quiet retreat’ in the country to the social bustle of Edinburgh, because ‘Betty & I by living so much alone are turned quite wild.’38 Doubtless she still saw herself as a gentlewoman, but she was literally out of practice. Without the external stimulus of company and polite conversation the sisters had become uncivilized, their polish worn thin, their talk descended from the conscious display of ‘elegant sentiments’ to exchanges of familiar practicalities.39 Hence Margaret’s preference for a rural retreat where her atrophied social skills might pass unscrutinized. Even an otherwise assured 41

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aristocrat like Lady Louisa Stuart could claim a conversational diffdence arising from lack of company. ‘As habits of solitude render me more and more unft to talk myself I am proportionately thankful to those who will talk to me’, she told a regular correspondent.40 Her self-excuse was somewhat disingenuous; as was the case for other women discussed here, including Margaret Adam and the author Susan Ferrier, recognition of what was socially expected could co-exist with a dislike for the effort of performing in company. The Adam sisters at least had each other as a buffer against loss of status. When Margaret described herself and Elizabeth as being ‘alone’ in the house, she defned them as a genteel domestic unit, set safely apart from and above the servants, who also had a home in the busy and sometimes crowded household. It was assumed that a gentlewoman with no domestic companionship of her own rank would become too close to her servants, sinking to their status through the erosion of her authority and distinct position. This was the situation feared by the author Elizabeth Hamilton, who, in her early 20s before she gained an identity and income from publication, lived with her widowed uncle in Stirlingshire as his household manager. Although she was grateful for the home she had with him, his ‘inferior station’ could not prop her own status.41 They lived rurally, her few female friends had moved away after marriage, her sister was in Ireland, and her only brother in India barely took trouble to maintain the family relationship; in two years she had only two letters from him.42 Her return letters expressed in a disjointed way her unhappy sense of social isolation, punctuated by reproach as she tried to impress on her brother her unimpaired gentility, her need for some acknowledgement of her diffculties, and the fanciful wish that he return from India to live with her and their uncle.43 When instead he blamed her ‘for repining at the solitude in which my lot is cast’, she detailed the extent of her deprivation.44 ‘Till my uncle makes his appearance at dinner-time, I have no more use for the faculty of speech than the Monks of La Trappe’, she complained,‘then, indeed, I get a little conversation in the style of the country, of the badness of the weather, the deepness of the roads, the qualities of manure, or politics.’ A year made no change; in 1782 she wrote,‘This is one of the most solitary winters I have ever passed . . . [I am] condemned to pass the best days of my youth in such a solitude, that I might . . . be as well shut up in a monastery.’ She had ‘no companions to enliven any part of it’.45 Her days were spent giving household directions and her evenings in listening to her uncle talk over his farming concerns, followed by four hours of reading to him. Such sociability as was available could not be described as polite:‘The ideas, the conversation of people in a certain style of life—of people who have never mixed in company, nor improved by books, cannot fail to be frequently disgusting to a mind of delicacy.’46 Hamilton’s sense of encroaching isolation as the only gentlewoman in her home was closely echoed by her fellow author Susan Ferrier. By 1809, in her mid-20s and keeping house for her widowed father who she saw only at meals, Ferrier already felt that she was ‘doomed’ to spend her days by a ‘solitary fre’ and her nights with ‘all the old tabbies in town’.47 Both Hamilton and Ferrier, however, understood the social value of having a place and a familial role in a relative’s home. Despite Hamilton’s concern that her gentility would be gradually dragged down by her uncle’s ‘inferior station’, her position as manager of his household was unarguably better than having to fnd rooms in lodgings and paying to live with strangers. This is why, in the same letter in which she detailed for her brother the extent of her solitude, Hamilton also told him of the ‘many invitations’ she had from a married friend––and then emphasized that she had turned them down so that her ‘worthy’ uncle should not ‘pass these long winter evenings alone’.48 This apparent about-turn was also voiced by Susan Ferrier and other spinsters referenced in this chapter. It was not a rejection of polite sociability but a plea for recognition of their familial roles and contributions.49 Their gentlewomanly self-sacrifce of company for the beneft of an elder relative was insurance against the stereotyped fate of the selfsh old maid, forgotten by 42

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her kin and left to end her days as one of the many ‘solitary maidens in this country . . . who sit alone in their dreary abodes’.50 This need to keep up a visible family connection, to avoid the stigma of loneliness depicted in the old maid as ‘poor, friendless and unconnected . . . vainly wishing for the endearing ties of kindred, and the attentions of affectionate connexions’, was felt even by spinsters who were far from poor.51 In a wealthy Edinburgh sibling household of two unmarried sisters and a bachelor brother, the Innes sisters, like the Adams, largely avoided company in order to keep their distance from their banker brother’s dissolute sociability. This self-seclusion laid them open to social coercion; on one occasion their brother directed them in his absence to uphold the hospitality of the house by giving ‘at least’ three company dinners a week, with the argument that it would prevent them being ‘Sad & Solitary’.52 Their household companionship alleviated their situation, but from the elder sister Marion’s death in early 1799, the younger, Jane, found herself struggling to maintain social boundaries as one of her brother’s illegitimate families gained a more frequent and assertive presence in her home. Gilbert Innes’ careless undermining of his sister’s reputation and household authority led to her experiencing a level of mental distress which was evident to sympathetic kin. Jane Innes was in fact wealthy enough in her own right to set up home independently. She was also in her early 50s, so less likely to attract the prurient censure which might be directed at a younger woman heading a household. Yet she was advised bluntly by one of her male cousins, a close family friend, that it was better to stay where she was, as ‘you can not live alone you must have some Companion’.53 When an Edinburgh contemporary, a Miss Abercromby, died in 1825, her ‘melancholy’ end,‘dying without a relation living with her’, was a matter for public gossip. Attention was drawn to the ‘striking’ fact of ‘a [gentle]woman living alone with servants, in a large house, in a large town like Edinburgh’, and she was judged to have been ‘very odd, not to say deranged’.54 Wary of attracting similar judgement, Innes continued to live with her brother for nearly a decade after her sister’s death, retreating into reclusion. Her relatives commiserated, pleaded with her to accept at least occasional invitations which would take her out of the household, and fnally urged her to domestic separation, acknowledging that she was ‘neglected and ill treated by those who ought to be your support and protector’, and had ‘vexations, which are the ruin of your health, and peace of mind’.55 Innes’ journals confrm the misery, isolation and resentment she felt. Fearing like other spinsters that her household role went unrecognized, she refused an invitation to join her brother on a spa visit with the assertion that solitude was her ‘chief sollace’.56 Like other spinsters, her self-imposed restrictions can be read as an attempt to reinforce gentility rather than outright rejection of company. By ostentatious self-sacrifce of their engagement with polite sociability, or by refusal to compromise on it, women drew attention to their irreproachably genteel conduct. Innes’ long deferral of action, at least partly tactical, was instrumental in gaining her relatives’ support. In 1809, aged 61, she fnally moved into a large house where she lived with both servants and a succession of female companions, in conformity with polite expectation. The cases outlined above indicate that spinsters who felt their status threatened by constraints on their sociability could, ironically, use expressions of loneliness to support their selfidentity. But neither cultural fuency nor the undeniable material comfort of their lives negates the strength of emotion felt when confronted with a prospect of old age in which every outward sign of being a gentlewoman had been lost. The diffculties examined thus far were exacerbated in the experience of Susanna Clerk, a niece of the Adam siblings. Clerk moved from Edinburgh to join the Adams’ London household after Elizabeth Adam’s death in 1796. The intention was that she would be both a genteel companion and a managerial support to Margaret Adam, now in her 60s. But Clerk’s position and status were precarious from the start. Her aunt needed little help. Further, Clerk was one of seven siblings, none of whom married. Her father’s ability to 43

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provide for her was limited, and after his death she was fnancially reliant on her eldest brother, with whom she had a poor relationship. She had almost no personal cash; her inheritance was a share of her family’s household furnishings, which her brother had begun using.57 Both her aunt and her uncle William Adam gave her occasional allowances of £20, but this addition to her funds was informal and irregular. She was sensitive to the implication that she was a dependent, rather than a contributor, in the Adam household. In little more than a year after her arrival in London her mental and physical health had become a serious concern to Margaret Adam, who told a relative she ‘often had reason to think Susy Clerk not happy . . . nothing can be duller than the life she leads’.58 Adam had no company network into which she could introduce her niece, who lacked other ways into the polite sociability of the capital. Clerk developed multiple physical symptoms, including ‘headachs, sickness, pain in her stomach, in her Bowels, in her back’, which her aunt connected to her mental unease. By cautious questioning Adam discovered her niece had deliberately kept quiet about an invitation to spend several weeks in Ramsgate,‘on account of leaving me alone’. She had also stayed silent on a possible visit to Scotland, although her aunt was sure she had ‘wished very much’ to go. Margaret Adam had no desire to be a constraint on her younger relative’s opportunities, and said so, which, rather than allaying Clerk’s doubts, increased her overwhelming insecurity about her present and future place in this or another family household. ‘She dreads the Idea of being fxed here for my life (& no wonder)’, Adam wrote,‘she G[rieves] at the thought of leaving me alone, and in this confict of her mind, the supposition of my wishing her away comes to her relief . . . she then sais but why will you force me away from you’.59 Clerk’s insecurity was not unfounded. When her father died in 1812, her eldest brother’s reluctance to offer her a home, and his tardy provision of her small inheritance, made it clear she could not place any future reliance on him. After her aunt’s death around 1820, she stayed on in London as domestic manager for William Adam, then in his 80s and the last of the sibling household. At this juncture Susanna Clerk’s situation can be compared to that of Elizabeth Hamilton: she was grateful to have a home with a relative, even if that meant conforming her life to that of her elderly uncle. She had ‘already spent . . . nearly the best part of [her] life’ with the Adams.60 Like Hamilton, she knew she would have to face the loss of her home and the prospect of living with strangers when her uncle died; Hamilton had to endure the ‘discomfort of a solitary lodging’ before she was able to set up house with her sister.61 But the circumstances in which Susanna Clerk had to re-establish herself were particularly traumatic. The Adam brothers had been notoriously bad business managers, and as William Adam aged, his mistakes became irretrievable. In the wake of a second bankruptcy, shamed by the thought of seeking help from relatives who had already lost money through him, he committed suicide at the end of January 1822. Forced to suddenly confront where and how she could live, Clerk turned frst to her eldest brother, who was brutally clear that she should stay in London, or go abroad, or anywhere else, to lessen the chance of the scandal seeping out in Edinburgh. Aware that other relatives might follow his lead as head of her family in cutting her off, Clerk had to fnd another household in which her family name and gentlewomanly status would be recognized. Any claims she had to London connections had been centred on and bounded by the Adam household, and although she had lived in the city for nearly 25 years she was now effectively alone there. She wrote to Edinburgh acquaintances, two Miss Hepburns, to ask if she could board with them. Their response evidences again genteel spinsters’ familiarity with the language of polite loneliness, and the personal uses they could make of it. The Hepburn sisters’ emotional acknowledgement of Clerk’s crisis was sandwiched between pragmatic refusal: ‘Were any of us left alone, which must sometime or other be the case, we certainly would board, having the same horror at living alone that you have . . . but to be a boarder, or have a boarder, is very different.’62 Any fellow-feeling they had for Clerk’s fear of isolated old age was not enough to secure 44

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her a home. Their letter gave no clue whether they had heard of either William Adam’s suicide or her brother’s break with her, but although their tone was sympathetic, it was clear they too would prefer her to stay outside their orbit. Clerk remained in London for several years in the area of her old home, in ‘a small lodging . . . the cheapest I could fnd’.63 Susanna Clerk’s experiences of polite loneliness were articulated by other spinsters who observed her situation: dullness, dread, grief, horror. This verbal trajectory follows a lifetime’s erosion of kin-based supports to female gentility, from lack of company, to cumulative lacks and losses which made it harder to access company as personal agency and recognition of status diminished. Lodgings were a gentlewoman’s last resort; a separated wife living in ‘almost total solitude’ observed that when women were ‘forced to live in lodgings, they are shut out from domestic comforts and a social freside’.64 Clerk’s ‘small lodging’ was a household reduced to bare physical form; she was no longer living in a familial home, and she had no familial role to play.65 She was quite clearly alone, the property of no one.

Conclusion Despite the disparity in their relative social positions and security of income, when the women in this chapter spoke of what it meant to be alone, they expressed themselves within the common discourse of solitary spinsterhood. This is not to argue that their experiences of being alone were the same, nor is it evidence that they were necessarily unhappy when alone. But solitude in the context of sociability—especially the performative sociability which underpinned polite culture—was widely represented and understood as a negative and unwelcome state. In popular discourse, divine purpose as well as human reason directed individuals to hierarchical interdependence. ‘Solitude’ with this sense persisted through the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries, although Susan Ferrier’s ‘picture of lonely old age’ (1824) may indicate the lexical shift some scholars have identifed.66 This evolution is in sharp contrast to a mid-20thcentury proposition that while the word ‘loneliness’ expresses pain, ‘solitude’ can be read as ‘the glory of being alone’.67 In recent historiography the term ‘solitaries’ has been used to designate those living bodily alone in single-person households.68 In current media discourse on wellbeing, solitude has been described as ‘a lovely word. It means being alone but not lonely’. These divergent defnitions emphasize the importance of recognising and examining ‘solitude’ and ‘solitary’ within a historical lexicon of loneliness.69 A spinster’s understanding of being alone in a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century household could encompass at the same time an undesired isolation from her social peers, and a desired separation from her social inferiors. This chapter’s examination of spinsterly solitude offers a different perspective from which to assess the historiographically familiar topic of eighteenth-century polite sociability. The interactions which cemented kin connection were both performative and prescriptive. The latter aspect of polite sociability is apparent not just in sources such as the conduct manuals which gave minute direction on genteel gesture and manners,but also in the deterrent and deliberately vulgar caricature of the old maid, whose supposedly inevitable isolation was represented as deserving of contempt rather than pity. The ubiquity of the caricature confrms that there was a recognized obverse to polite sociability: a punishing state of social invisibility which can be called polite loneliness.

Notes 1 Considerations on Establishing a College for Old Maids in Ireland (Dublin: 1790), 7, 8. 2 Agnes Porter, Journal, 2 Dec. 1790, 18 Feb. and 4 Aug. 1791, in A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter, ed. J. Martin (London/Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1998),

45

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

96, 106, 123. When working for a former pupil, her role was partly companionable, and she joined her employers in the evenings and at dinner. Hereafter, she is referred to as Porter. Porter, 23 Jan., 4 Aug. 1791, ibid., 103, 123. Porter, 26 May 1791, ibid., 117. The Old Maid’s Garland (?Newcastle upon Tyne, 1765), 3. College, 19. Ibid., 9–11. Jackie Collier,‘The Truly Benevolent Lady Isobella King, 1772–1845’, Bath History XI (2009): 63–78. Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 89. Jean Marishall, A Series of Letters, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1789), 2: 113–14, 116, 118. Ibid. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 1992), 158; Susan S. Lanser, ‘Singular Politics: The Rise of the British Nation and the Production of the Old Maid’, in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 311; The Spectator, no. 528, 5 Nov. 1712 (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1766), 248; Female Grievances Debated in Six Dialogues (London: 1727). The Batchelor’s Recantation. Or, His Estimate of the Expences of a Married Life Re-consider’d (London: 1731), 2. An Address To . . . The Batchelors of Great-Britain (London: n.d.), 4. Female Grievances, 140. The Spectator, no. 500, Fri. 3 Oct. 1712 (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1766), 120. Female Grievances, 160. Old Bachelors: Their Varieties, Characters, and Conditions, 2 vols (London: John Macrone, 1835). An Address to the Gentlemen under the Denomination of Old Bachelors (London: 1757), 10. Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from Her Correspondence, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 1: 26. E.F.J. Carrington, Confessions of an Old Bachelor (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 4. Old Bachelors, vol. 1, 43–4; Confessions, 8, 331. Susan Ferrier, The Inheritance (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Limited, 1929), 147, 508. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (London: The Gresham Publishing Co., n.d.), 25. Old Bachelors, vol. 1, 43–4. An Old Bachelor’s Refections on Matrimony (Glasgow: Brash & Reid, n.d.); Address to the Gentlemen, 10. College, 7. Louisa Stuart to Louisa Clinton, May/June 1822, in Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton, ed. J.A. Home (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1901), 257. The term was coined by Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 9, no. 4 (1984): 355–76. See Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13–15. Christian Dalrymple, Journal, 23 Nov. 1798, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NLS), Mss 25458. Dalrymple, 20 Jan. 1800, NLS Mss 25459. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 2009), 199. Dalrymple, 11 Jan., 24 Mar., 21 June 1798, NLS Mss 25458; 4 Nov. 1813, NLS Mss 25465; 28 Aug., 2 Sept., 27 Nov. 1824, NLS Mss 25481. Mary Bristow, Journal, Dec. 1801, Aberdeen University Special Libraries and Archives, Aberdeen, MS 3470/7/8. Wives, too, could feel isolated from their social equals when wintering on rural estates, especially if their husbands took urban leave to advance family interests. See, for example, Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 22, 55, 143; Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), 117. Allan Fergusson to Christian Dalrymple, 15 July 1791, NLS Mss 25454. Male forenames given to gentlewomen highlighted family and patronage ties. Same to same, 30 July 1791, NLS Mss 25454. Margaret Adam to Susanna Clerk (sen.), 19 Oct. 1790, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NRS), GD18/4961/30.

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Polite Loneliness 39 James Boswell on Jean Dempster, in Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ed. F.A. Pottle (London: The Reprint Society, 1952), 237. 40 Louisa Stuart to Louisa Clinton, Mar. 1822, in Home, Letters, 251. 41 Benger, Memoirs, vol. 1, 78. Hamilton was raised by her paternal aunt, and uncle by marriage, and remained after her aunt’s death in 1780. Ibid., 74. 42 Ibid., 83. 43 Ibid., 78. He joined them briefy after returning from India in 1786. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 85–8 passim. 46 Ibid., 78. 47 Susan Ferrier to Charlotte Clavering, ?1809, Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, 1782–1854, ed. J.A. Doyle (London: John Murray, 1898), 58. 48 Benger, Memoirs, vol. 1, 87. 49 It could also mask evasion of company when the effort of polite interaction was unwelcome. 50 Marishall, Letters, vol. 2, 114, 118. 51 Mrs Ross, The Balance of Comfort, Or, The Old Maid and Married Woman, 3 vols (London: A.K. Newman and Co., 1817), 1: 108. 52 Gilbert Innes to Jane Innes, 27 Dec. 1790, NRS GD113/5/105/11. 53 George Scott to Jane Innes, 4 June 1800, NRS GD113/5/70b/7. A novel heroine, shorn of family supports, noted ‘If I mean to live in society, I must reside with some friend’. Margaret Cullen, Home, 5 vols (London/York: 1802), 5: 124. 54 Helen Graham, Parties and Pleasures: the diaries of Helen Graham 1823–1826, ed. J. Irvine (Perth: Paterson, 1957), 139. 55 Elizabeth Lindsay to Jane Innes, 21 Oct. 1806, NRS GD113/5/59b/59; George Scott to same, 31 Oct. 1806, NRS GD113/5/70c/10. 56 Jane Innes to Gilbert Innes, 25 June 1799, NRS GD113/5/105/28/1. 57 Valuable household goods were often left to women in lieu of fnancial legacies. 58 Margaret Adam to Mary Drysdale, 29 June 1798, NRS GD18/4961/82. 59 Ibid. 60 Elizabeth Clerk to Susanna Clerk, 6 Feb. 1822, NRS GD18/4999/3. 61 Benger, Memoirs, vol. 1, 130. 62 A. Hepburn to Susanna Clerk, 14 Feb. [1822], NRS GD18/4999/5. 63 Susanna Clerk to John Clerk, n.d., NRS GD18/4999/9. 64 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 24. 65 Clerk eventually moved to Portobello; she could hope for better recognition of her rank (and easier access to credit) by living near Edinburgh, where her estranged brother was a prominent public fgure, rather than in London where her family name was unknown. 66 Ferrier, Inheritance, 508. See also Claire Walker in this volume. 67 Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 18. 68 Keith D.M. Snell,‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42, no. 1 (2017): 2–28. 69 Ciara McCabe, professor of neuroscience, quoted in Amy Fleming, “Gimme 20!” The Guardian, 5 Mar. 2022.

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3 GENDER AND LONELINESS IN BUSINESS* A Milliner and Her Agent in Eighteenth-Century Southern Europe Anne Montenach

The role of emotions has been recognized by the founding fathers of political economics, and notably by Adam Smith—who, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), saw emotion as a key element in the development of morality. However, it was only recently reincorporated into economic analyses where it began to challenge the classic theory of the rational individual. Over recent decades, the rapprochement of psychology and economics and the growing importance of experimental and behavioural economics have led to the introduction of emotions into economic analyses through a demonstration of the essential role they play in certain situations, such as decision-making, negotiation and confdence-building, and in daily interactions in the work and commercial environments.1 Emma Rothschild, an economic historian, has suggested that ‘some sort of economic history of sentiments or emotions is important, and even unavoidable, in trying to understand the great economic and political transformations of the eighteenth century.’2 The theme of loneliness, which can be placed in the group of emotions and emotional states (‘the feeling of being alone’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary), has not yet attracted much interest from economic historians. On the other hand, solitude (‘the state of being alone’), or more precisely singleness and widowhood, is a theme that has already been explored by historians interested in the role of women in modern European economics. These studies have disputed the image of vulnerable singleness and called into question stereotypes of loneliness and isolation. In particular, they have highlighted the importance of siblings, kin and other relationships for widows and never-married women. From an economic point of view, they have demonstrated that single women, especially widows, should not be systematically associated with poverty and small-scale survival strategies but could also take an active role in the early modern economy as independent tradeswomen.3 This chapter will focus on one aspect of professional loneliness that has not attracted much attention: the way people coped with isolation, whether in running their business or just doing their job, and more specifcally, given the documents at our disposal, how women and men expressed their feelings and reacted to loneliness. The source material is a series of letters sent in 1778 by a travelling salesman to a Lyonnaise modiste, his patron, during his six-month journey to Italy. Given his situation, accessing the ‘very substance of emotions’ is a complex process since commercial letters like these are not a priori the place where a person would honestly voice their inner feelings separately from their social and, here, professional situation.4 This correspondence 48

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-5

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cannot be described as an exchange of letters since only the agent’s letters were deposited in the archives: no second voice, therefore, exists, though this does not prevent us from seeing the subtext of a businesswoman’s ‘loneliness’. Despite these reservations, these letters offer insights into the different levels of loneliness that affected the two protagonists: Etienne Dupheis, in his role as travelling salesman, and Mlle Mandier—visible only through her agent’s correspondence—as a single woman trying to run a business.

International Trade: A Lyonnaise Modiste and the Italian Market In the eighteenth century, women were gradually excluded from certain economic sectors, due to growing regulation and requirements for investment capital, or obliged to provide support for brothers, sons and husbands in family enterprises. Yet the fashion sector was emerging as a rare opportunity for women to carry on an independent business with total autonomy and with the tacit acceptance of society: in particular, millinery and mantua-making provided niches in which single and independent women could run businesses and establish themselves in the corporate community.5 Modistes benefted from and were catalysts for a growing market in consumer products in modern Europe. Initially part of the French haberdashers’ community, this predominantly feminine guild became independent after Turgot’s abolition of guilds in France in 1776, at a time when the urban bourgeoisie was replacing the royal court as the driver for consumer demand and impulse buying. These new entrepreneurs sold products such as lace, ribbons, fowers and feathers produced by other guilds for the adornment of dresses and other garments. Given the speed with which fashion changed and the multiplication of advertising opportunities (dolls, visiting cards, specialized press), these women needed to react quickly to new fashions in order to satisfy their clients. They found themselves at the very heart of innovation and creation of value. At the same time, they were essential intermediaries between a rich and mostly female clientele and a predominantly male supply chain, with whom they developed complex credit arrangements.6 The fashion world was also the market par excellence for stimulating emotions and generating desires and thus was a key element in the emergence of capitalism.7 Parisian styles continued to dominate French tastes, at least until people began to take an interest in English fashions in the 1780s, and were in high demand throughout Europe, thus allowing the most famous French modistes to develop a network of foreign agents and rich clients. In the archives of the Tribunal de la Conservation des foires in Lyon, where documents relating to bankrupt merchants were deposited, there is a fle containing some 30 letters sent to Mlle Mandier, a modiste living in Rue de l’Arbre Sec, Lyon, in the 1770s.8 Very little is known about this woman, beyond the fact that all her documents (essentially letters and a shipments ledger) were seized in December 1778, most probably due to bankruptcy. Half of the letters are from her agent, Etienne Dupheis, who travelled around Provence and Italy on her behalf during the spring and summer of 1778. The remainder are letters from retailers in Marseilles and Italy with whom she had negotiated contracts. Having recourse to an agent already suggests that Mlle Mandier was relatively wealthy even if, as we will see later, she was experiencing some business diffculties. Etienne Dupheis’ letters provide information on her attempts to establish a very prestigious international clientele, at a time when she was in competition with other modistes in Lyon and Marseilles for the Italian market. Françoise Bayard and Lesley E. Miller have shown that, by the eighteenth century, sending people out to act effectively as travelling salesmen was a technique used by Lyonnais silk and fashion merchants for increasing their sales throughout Europe. In the silk sector, correspondents and agents ‘were the interface between manufacturers and their markets’.9 They travelled long distances with cases of silk samples that were regularly renewed thanks to Lyon’s effcient postal service. Following a predefned 49

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itinerary, they visited cities where they could seek out new customers—retailers and wealthy clients, particularly those close to royal and princely courts—and develop their contacts with suppliers. They were expected to make regular reports on their contacts to their principals: eagerly awaited by their patrons, these letters were often accompanied by orders and commissions. In return, agents expected that orders,additional samples,and above all,substantial funds to cover their travel expenses (e.g. transport costs, food and lodging, laundry, postage and visa fees for foreign countries) would be sent to their lodgings or their clients.10 Etienne Dupheis’ correspondence allows us to observe not only his strategies for winning new markets, but also different facets of his loneliness and his gradual downward spiral towards fear of running out of money, due to Mlle Mandier’s silence, his social isolation and, fnally, his mental distress.

The Misfortunes of a Travelling Salesman: Financial Diffculties and Social Isolation Étienne Dupheis left Lyon in early March 1778 and sent his frst letter from Marseilles on 13 March. He indicated that he had arrived there ‘a couple of days ago, in good health’, despite the diffcult conditions involved in his journey: he hoped to travel directly from Avignon to Antibes but, in addition to the ‘excessive cost’ charged for this journey, the ‘abominable’ state of the roads ‘throughout Provence’—‘because it has rained continuously for over two months’—had fnally convinced him to go ‘straight’ to Marseilles ‘and wait for passage on a ship’. If that was not possible, he would go to Toulon where apparently ‘there were more frequent ships for Genoa’.11 On 23 March, he was in Antibes. Arriving in Genoa towards the end of March, he was blocked there for nearly 15 days by ‘abominable weather, endless contrary winds’ until he was able to embark for Livorno on 13 April. From Livorno, he went ‘straight’ to Rome and then to Naples, where he stayed for more than one and a half months. From there, he began his return journey by an inland route via Rome, Florence, Modena, Parma, Milan and Turin (Figure 3.1). His last

Figure 3.1 Étienne Dupheis’ itinerary (March–August 1778). Source: Map prepared by the author.

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letter, sent from Turin on 26 August 1778, indicates that he expected to leave for Lyon the next day and arrive there on Wednesday, 2 September. In each city along his route, his role was to fnd new clients, both individuals and professionals, for his patron in a competitive market and amid price wars with other agents from Lyon. In Marseilles, while waiting for a passage, he ‘tries to meet people who will take your articles’ but saw that it would be ‘very diffcult’ to ‘make any headway with the shipowners’ because ‘we are living with the uncertainties of war and no one is prepared to take risks with foreigners’. The Treaty of Paris between France and the United States of America had been signed a little over a month earlier. Attached to his letter from Antibes were three small ‘memoranda’ relating to orders placed by modistes in Marseilles, one of whom was the client of a Lyon rival. Nevertheless, he noted that ‘if you give her a good price, you will have her business.’12 As fashions changed quickly, everything should ‘be expediated by diligence as quickly as possible’ to Marseilles and then by sea (notably to Livorno) or directly by using Italian merchants in Lyon as intermediaries. In his letter of 6 April from Genoa, Dupheis asked Mlle Mandier to carry out these orders ‘without wasting time within ffteen days, because it would be best if they arrive at the very latest by the end of next month’.13 The reliability of clients was a key element and Dupheis was constantly justifying his choices: in Genoa he met with four merchants and their partners who were, he told Mlle Mandier, ‘solid persons as far as I can tell from the good information I have been given’, while another was described as ‘someone who wanted the merchandise for nothing’. Madame Constantin, a modiste in Livorno,‘enjoys a very good reputation here, which they tell me is very solid’. In Naples, he received only ‘very good reports’ about François Devaux, whose wife ‘is also a modiste’. On the other hand, it was important that the agent should inspire confdence and adapt to clients’ tastes: ‘in this country’, he wrote from Naples on 30 May, ‘they are only interested in soft colours, so please ensure that ribbons, gauze handkerchief with ribbons around the edge in the English fashion are not in harsh colours like the blue and tan in my sample no.612 which is awful.’14 Over the days and weeks, Mlle Mandier’s silence, despite having promised before his departure to write every fortnight (as he had done very regularly), worried Dupheis and put him in an increasingly precarious fnancial position. Another Lyonnais agent, François Grognard, had a similar experience around the same time: he complained about delays in receiving letters from his partners in Lyon.15 In Antibes, where he had ‘very strong hopes’ of receiving news on his arrival, Étienne Dupheis wondered about Mlle Mandier’s silence and wrote that he found himself ‘in a singular position, with not enough money for continuing my route and not knowing yet how he would leave’.16 In Genoa, where he found himself in ‘very critical situation, without money, to the point where he did not know what to do’, he was ‘forced to use shameful methods’ which caused him ‘infnite pain’:‘after solicitations’, he had managed to borrow ten louis from a Lyonnais trading company.17 The distress caused by his isolation was primarily due to fnancial problems: without news from his patron, he was forced to humble himself by borrowing money from his fellow merchants. In Livorno, nearly two months after leaving Lyon, he learnt at last from his patron that she had sent him a bill of exchange and a box of samples, both of which were essential for the continuation of his journey, care of merchants in Naples. However, he was still worried about the slowness and diffculties of these exchanges and went so far as to repeat three times—in the body of the letter, the margin and next to his signature—his pressing need for samples: ‘I doubt’, he wrote, ‘whether you will be able to send me these samples of fowers in time, unless a ship is ready to sail from Marseilles. You can always send them to me by the coast or here in Livorno or Genoa.’18 On his arrival in Naples, he found neither the bill of exchange nor the expected samples and thus, according to his letter of 6 May,‘[she had] cut off [his] arms and legs’. Once again ‘without 51

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resources’, he was obliged to pawn his watch and borrow two sequins from the innkeeper in order to pay the coachman. He feared that, if he did not receive some money in the next post, he would have to sell part of his wardrobe and some samples, or give up his journey. Under his signature, he added:‘In the name of God send by the frst post some money, without which I do not know where I will be.’19 On 17 June, he had at last received ten louis from his patron but she sent ‘gold [i.e. French currency] rather than paper notes’, so he lost 40 sols for each louis in bank charges. He also reproached her for the inadequacy of this sum (‘you ought to assume that I do not have enough to travel very far, I hope that in a few days you will send me more’) and, above all, for the rarity and irregularity of her letters. His last letter from Naples, dated 27 June, indicated that he did not expect ‘the arrival of an answer’ to his letter of 6 May,‘despite the fact that I have many times begged you to send me some money as soon as possible’.20 Starting his journey home from Rome, he reminded her bitterly that, being without money,‘there were no resources that he had not tried, Jews, pawnbrokers and others’. He ended his letter with an address where she could write to him in Milan, which she did not do.21 His mood became more sombre, as can be seen in the frst letter sent from Turin:‘given that I am here in the greatest distress . . . and generally without a sol, please send me at least a dozen louis to take me as far as Lyon’. His last letter, dated 28 August, indicated that he had at last received a letter from her but no money,‘despite all that I have said to you in my previous letters’. His bitterness was palpable: ‘since you do not believe me at all, it is quite useless to write to you’. Once again, he was obliged to discuss his situation with a ‘friend who loaned me 12 louis’.22 Quite apart from the fnancial diffculties caused by lack of news and funds from his patron, isolation was a serious problem: absence of networks and lack of reliable letters of recommendation would have serious consequences and frustrate attempts to attract a wealthy local clientele. For example, although he had arrived in Genoa with a letter of recommendation for an Italian company, it ‘was summarily refused’—which might have been a sign that his patron had a bad reputation or was completely unknown in the town. In Rome, an ‘immense capital city’ where he had ‘arrived without letters of recommendation for anybody’, he had to ‘run from one place to another to meet merchants’. In the end, he was reduced to seeking out modistes ‘who produce their own wares and only want what they cannot make better themselves’. Without contacts or recommendations, he ‘despairs of being able to achieve much’ with rich individuals,‘princesses or cardinals’ who, he said,‘as soon as they need anything rich and tasteful . . . order it directly from Lyon, having already all the contacts they need’.23 In Naples, he found himself without funds ‘not daring to ask for money from people who have no orders for me or whom I have neither met nor seen’. Having little success with the local modistes, he had to resort to ‘obtaining an entry into the palaces’ by bribing valets. This, however, led to his receiving many orders from the Marquise de La Sambuca—whose husband was frst minister to King Ferdinand of Naples’ between 1776 and 1784—and other court aristocrats, both men and women.24 Later in Florence, he was able to borrow the equivalent of 160 livres from a local merchant, thanks to a letter of recommendation that Lyonnais hatters had had ‘the goodness to give [him]’.25

Male Loneliness in Business Dupheis emphasized the importance of regular correspondence with Mlle Mandier from his frst letter. It begins: ‘To prevent you from worrying about me, I take advantage of this missive to inform you of my arrival in this city’. Throughout his long journey, every letter begins with a reminder of his previous letter and a reference, where appropriate, to the few letters he had received from her. Through this mostly one-sided correspondence, he sought not only to confrm that his letters had not been lost but also, more importantly, to strengthen his relationship 52

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with her. Very quickly Dupheis’ letters contained indications of his feelings of isolation and distress due to her silence. In all probability, expressions of nostalgia and loneliness would be common in letters between merchants and their families, even if, as Andrew Popp has suggested elsewhere in this volume,‘the fgure of the male entrepreneur [was seen] as an heroic individualist’.26 Before the invention of the telegraph, exchanges of letters were of paramount importance for families separated by travel or migration: they allowed those left at home to follow and imagine the journey taken by the head of the household, and literally enfolded migrants, negociants and merchants in a network of correspondence which, in addition to its importance for business,‘constitutes the most effective rampart against the traveller’s feelings of nostalgia and loneliness’.27 At the same time, business correspondence had become increasingly codifed in modern Europe.28 As Francesca Trivellato has pointed out, the growing use of stereotypical business language drew on both a centuries-old vocabulary, expressing social dependence, trustworthiness and loyalty and new codes of civility and politeness borrowed from the nobility: terms such as ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ recur frequently when referring to partners, collaborators, agents or simply potential clients or suppliers—in fact, any person with whom one might develop regular business exchanges and letters and on whom one could rely. Nevertheless, this codifed language of friendship and affection was in fact an expression of vested interests and merchants tended to remain very discreet about their true emotional life.29 Dupheis’ letters can be placed somewhere between these two types of correspondence. On the one hand, he was writing to a patron who was seeking to expand her clientele in major Italian cities. Above all, his role was to transmit commercial information and orders and let her know what samples he needed, but in a less formal way than in a correspondence between merchants since he constantly reminded her about his fnancial diffculties. On the other hand, even though Mlle Mandier was not a member of his family, he regularly expressed his more intimate feelings which would have been better suited to correspondence with his closest friends and relations. Thus, Dupheis’ letters are similar to those written, some hundred years later, by Portuguese migrants to their families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: their letters constantly mentioned both commercial issues and their personal concerns. This ‘combined language of interest and emotion’ is in particular full of references to the ‘sacrifces’ made by these migrants who were working, often without regard for their health or comfort to provide a better life for their families. While they frequently complained that their efforts did not seem to be suffciently recognized by their loved ones, they expected their wives to support them wholeheartedly and be faithful in all circumstances.30 Behind references to lack of money and social isolation due to lack of credible references in the cities he visited, signs of Dupheis’ mental distress and the disillusionment caused by his patron’s silence became increasingly noticeable as he continued his journey. ‘For two days’, he wrote from Antibes on 23 March, ‘I have been as bored as a dog here’. During his long stay in Naples, he wrote several times about his feelings of loneliness and abandonment and his mental suffering due to the absence of letters from Mlle Mandier—not knowing whether it was voluntary or not. Soon after his arrival, he wrote that he had ‘neither the strength nor the courage to take commissions’ and begged her to ‘please not forget him’, adding ‘I am always alone and living in my lodging like a hermit, I wait impatiently for your response which I hope will draw me out of my melancholy and the sad state in which I fnd myself ’. A fortnight later, still without news from Mlle Mandier, he expressed his worries about her: ‘until now I have not often seen letters from you, I do not know what has caused this long silence, please may I have the pleasure of knowing that you are in good health at least once a fortnight’. On 17 June, he reminded her of her promise before his departure to write at least twice a month and tried to reassure himself that 53

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‘no doubt her occupations prevented her from doing so’. Yet again, he begged her to send him some news:‘please when you have nothing better to do, send me a few lines in your handwriting to calm my fears’.31 The fourth and fnal letter from Naples, dated 27 June, was much longer and rich in commercial information. He again asked her for money and reproached her for the lack of news and instructions, which, from the point of view of their affairs, cost him precious time in a highly competitive situation and also affected his state of mind, the two being closely intertwined: I have not received any answer to my letter of 6 May . . . I do not know why there is this long silence, I do what I can for procure you some business and you have totally abandoned me . . . you cannot know the wrong that you do me, I eat a lot of money and I am as bored as a dog, the seasons march on, the time available for obtaining commissions is passing, other agents are making sales, while I remain alone and, as I follow in their footsteps, I fnd only the crumbs left by these gentlemen.32 Believing that he was wasting his time, he decided to return home. The long letter written in Rome on 16 July indicates that he had had no news for almost two months (the last letter from her was dated 22 May):‘it is now absolutely clear that I will not receive an answer to any of my letters from Naples’. Once again, he poured out his soul and most of the letter is flled with his complaints. Such a display of emotions may be somewhat surprising, but it was not necessarily unusual: in the same year an annoyed Lyonnais patron told his clerk, ‘there is no point raising useless matters in your letters which are mostly flled with your problems and sufferings and your bile, but nothing about commissions. Each to their own.’33 Nonetheless, a barrier had been breached since Mlle Mandier’s silence could be interpreted as expressing her discontent or dissatisfaction with her agent: ‘on the other hand, I am quite persuaded that you must not be very content with the business that I have found for you, despite my best efforts.’34 A similar tone can be seen in his letter from Milan dated 11 August, although he seemed unable to accept the idea that Mlle Mandier had voluntarily abandoned him: ‘either you have totally deserted me or my letters do not reach you’. ‘Not knowing what has caused this long silence’, he said that he had decided to return quickly to Lyon and stressed that this had been ‘the most diffcult’ journey and had caused him ‘great unpleasantness’. Arriving in Turin on 19 August, he referred to his boredom for the third time since he left:‘I am bored to death here & I do not know at what time or moment I will be totally done with this voyage’. ‘Boredom’, from Dupheis’ pen, could be interpreted as both a sense of emptiness due to the absence of real business activities—without orders or instructions from his patron, he was unable to act as her agent— and as a lassitude or perhaps mental exhaustion caused by that same lack of instructions which he might interpret as negligence or, worse, a disavowal of his contract.35 At times, this isolation and distress was so serious that, while in Rome, he offered to resign in terms which we could be forgiven for reading as a farewell letter from a suitor: ‘I declare, on my faith as an honest man, that this is the frst and the last [voyage] that I will make for you, . . . preferring a hundred times to be the lowest clerk in a store than to put myself in a similar situation.’36 However, his last letter from Turin, in which he said he hoped to arrive in Lyon a few days’ time, took a more optimistic tone: he looked forward to ‘the pleasure of seeing you in order to discuss our business affairs’.37 Overall, the ‘language of affect and sacrifce’ used by Dupheis when writing to his patron, together with clues found in other letters, suggests that we should correct our image of travelling salesmen and merchants in the eighteenth century as purely ‘homo economicus’.38 In addition to giving him instructions about their affairs, Dupheis expected that his patron would reassure him about the efforts he made to carry out his mission as well as possible,nor was above moaning about her silence, which he interpreted as indifference. Dupheis does not appear to have considered 54

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himself less of a man or less professionally competent because he wrote about his emotions and his vulnerability during these periods of loneliness. Paradoxically, the amount of space he dedicated to his personal feelings in these letters suggests an underlying and yet more ‘dominant’ attitude towards someone who was a woman as well as being his patron. Not only did he consider that she should have the time and energy to care about his feelings, but he also allowed himself openly to criticize the way she managed her affairs.

A Businesswoman Alone: A Question of Self-Presentation Although Dupheis’ letters express the loneliness of the travelling salesman and the mental suffering caused by constant disappointments in obtaining news from Mlle Mandier, they also give us insights into the isolation of the lady herself. None of her letters have survived, so we have no information on her marital status or her family—the use of ‘Mademoiselle’ being most probably indicative of her professional status; consequently, we are reduced to building hypotheses from the few clues in Dupheis’ correspondence.39 Apart from his mother, mentioned only in his frst letter posted from Marseilles on 13 March, the person making the most regular appearances in Dupheis’ correspondence was his uncle. From Marseilles, he merely asked Mlle Mandier to pass on his greetings:‘If you see my uncle, do me the pleasure of assuring him of my respects and I hope to hear news of him soon in Genoa.’40 But later letters suggest that this uncle had also played a role in mentoring Mlle Mandier’s affairs, which might indicate that she was not close to her own family. The documents in the archives do not provide any information on Mlle Mandier’s age or business experience. However, her relative isolation, implied by the subtext of Dupheis’ letters, offered him a pretext for his interference, using this uncle as intermediary, in his patron’s affairs. From Livorno, Dupheis wrote: [I]f anything is causing you diffculty with this commission, as was the case with previous commissions, pray consult my uncle who, I believe, would be very happy to be useful to you if you should have occasion to see him, I beg you to pay him my respects.41 Dupheis seemed to be worried about her being alone and without counsel when making decisions. He himself referred to this situation in a letter from Naples which he copied to his uncle; in another letter, dated 11 August from Milan, forwarded ‘under cover’ of this gentleman, he hoped that ‘he would give it to her personally’.42 These few clues suggest that, despite his patronage relationship with Mlle Mandier, he did not hesitate to question her ability and competence indirectly, either as a business owner or as a woman. A second series of clues sheds light on issues relating to self-image in commercial correspondence and to the importance of gender in business affairs. The initiatives taken by Dupheis for presenting Mlle Mandier to their potential clients reveal how, as a man, he considered himself to be of prime importance to his patron’s professional success. The question here was whether it would be better, depending on Dupheis’ interlocutor, to mention that Mlle Mandier was a woman and sole owner of her business or to have a more neutral business identity, such as ‘Mandier et Cie’, in order to inspire confdence. In his letter dated 13 April 1778 from Genoa, Dupheis said that he had taken orders from merchants there—all men—‘using the name Mandier et Compagnie in order to enhance your reputation’;‘it would do you no harm’, he added,‘if you always signed your name in this way’. ‘For modistes’, however, he said that she was in the same business,‘and thus in a better position to serve [them] in terms of taste and value for money’. Elsewhere he presented her as an ‘agent or manufacturer, without saying that you are a Demoiselle or anything else’.43 In other words, the fact of being a woman, a modiste and, to all intents and circumstances, the sole 55

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owner of her business was only a positive argument when he was negotiating with women in the same profession because they would see that she shared their tastes and did not charge them high prices. However, in meetings with male clients, this approach would have quite the opposite effect, according to Dupheis, as it would be seen a weakness and thus made it more diffcult to build confdence and consequently a proper commercial relationship. Dupheis, therefore, recognized and played to gendered assumptions regarding women’s lack of business acumen and competence, whereas the small-scale modistes expected a degree of fair play or sisterhood with Mlle Mandier because she was a woman. Interestingly, Mlle Mandier’s correspondence from her new male clients were all addressed to ‘Messieurs Mandier & Cie à Lyon’, at least in the initial letters. She seemed to ignore her clerk’s advice, as in later correspondence with Martin Verone and Pierre Pougaud from Marseille, for example, she called herself ‘Mlle Mandier [sometimes followed by ‘& compagnie’] faiseuse de mode a Lyon’. However, Marseillais companies charged with conveying her cargo to Rome, Naples and Livorno systematically used the term ‘Messieurs Mandier & Cie, négociants a Lyon’ (Figures 3.2a, 3.2b, 3.2c).44 A third and last indication of Mlle Mandier’s possible isolation can be seen in the somewhat authoritative tone in Dupheis’ letters and his reproaches about the poor management of her business affairs. These letters provide evidence of the ambiguous relationship between the agent and his patron. Initially, they were full of advice on the colour and quality of products suitable for the Italian market and indications of local prices—all of which can be seen as part of his role as her travelling salesman. As the weeks passed, he also dared to reprimand his employer with increasing candour and to cite a number of reasons why she was responsible for the poor results from his efforts. First, her merchandise was not up to the standards expected by an Italian clientele. In Naples, he had shown his samples, trimmings and dresses to the best modistes in the city, who ‘all told [him] that they are worth nothing at all, . . . being all in the same fashion’. He added that ‘when compared with what I have seen here, the difference between theirs and yours in terms of elegance and taste, is like night and day.’45 Then he reproached her for sending samples that were too small or arrived too late and, above all, did not correspond adequately or respect orders from customers which he had obtained with great diffculty. In his last letters, Dupheis sharply criticized Mlle Mandier’s business management, saying that if he had worked ‘for any other company’, his collection of samples would have been of much higher quality than hers,‘[as] he barely dared to show [them] to those businesses’; furthermore, her banking arrangements ‘in order [he might] have money in the cities’ were so inadequate that he was ‘obliged to resort’ to ‘shenanigans’.46 ‘I am persuaded’, he wrote on 26 August from Turin, ‘that you have great diffculties and worries and that sometimes your business has not gone as well as one might expect, but you will permit me to say that you have the greatest fault, which I will explain to you in due course.’47 These references to bad management are corroborated by letters from clients found by her agent. For example, the Marseillais merchants, Martin Verone and Madame Moreau, claimed that she tried to force their hand by sending them merchandise that they had not ordered and which they did not know how to sell while also charging high prices without any reductions (‘which I fnd very dear’, said Madame Moreau) and ‘overly expensive’ carriage.48 Others complained about delays in deliveries: François Devaux, in Naples, wrote on 29 August that he had received ‘no news’ about his order, saying that ‘since the season for the ribbons that I ordered from you is now over, I beg you not to send them to me’. On 1 September, the Marietti brothers in Milan were surprised that they had not yet received their order given to Dupheis. Finally, although Mlle Mandier apparently knew how to make use of bills of exchange, Pierre Pougaud in Marseille reproached her for having badly prepared the waybill. 56

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Figures 3.2a, 3.2b, 3.2c Letters received by Mlle Mandier (ADR, 8 B 1023, 23 March, 4 May, 22 June 1778). Source: Photographs by the author.

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She had apparently forgotten to include the value of the merchandise and had specifed that the parcel contained ‘fashion accessories’ when, in his opinion, ‘it should have been sent as ordinary haberdashery’—with the result that the Lambesc customs offce had increased the duty payable by one-third.49 In the end, Mlle Mandier seemed to be unaware of what Clare Crowston calls the ‘economies of regard’ which ensured the success of other modistes at that time: the ability to innovate constantly and to fulfl clients’ orders precisely and rapidly.50 Mlle Mandier’s business was dependent on other suppliers, about whom we have almost no information. Communications between Lyon and Italy were slow and not very reliable while fashions changed constantly, and this has affected the terms of credit afforded to clients. Taken together, all these issues may well have contributed, in whole or in part, to the bankruptcy of Mlle Mandier’s business at the end of 1778.

Conclusion Étienne Dupheis’ letters provide an insight into the various emotional states that generate loneliness, boredom and resentment, as well as hope and discouragement.51 Isolation, for both Dupheis and Mlle Mandier, was far from productive, offering a strong contrast with the positive image of single women in business so keenly discussed in recent historical research. Furthermore, using gender as an analytical tool shows that the issues and constraints due to loneliness were quite different for these two protagonists, if only in terms of their self-image. This allows us to challenge certain suppositions about the expression of emotions: while Dupheis wrote extensively about his complaints and reproaches, thus demonstrating his vulnerability due to loneliness, Mlle Mandier emerges as an absent and silent fgure due to the lack of pertinent sources. However, Dupheis’ emotional outpourings, no doubt more acceptable for an eighteenth-century man, do not appear to undermine his virility, nor did the gendered hierarchies indirectly refect in his letters. Though placed in a situation of professional subordination vis-à-vis Mlle Mandier, he—like some of his correspondents—did not hesitate to express (more or less explicitly), in the advice and instructions he sent her, a sentiment of superiority over a woman who was perhaps more isolated than him. As we can infer indirectly from Dupheis’ letters, Mlle Mandier did not have access to family or friends who, as historical research has shown, could be crucial for the success of businesswomen at that time. This isolation, because she was a woman, rendered her very fragile in the eyes of her own employee, as well as those of her male clients and suppliers, who did not hesitate to take a patronizing attitude towards her. Indeed, the world of fashion seemed to be a substantially masculine affair, or at least a territory bitterly defended in the face of competition from women in this sector. However, nothing about the way that Mlle Mandier herself lived and reacted to her solitude in the business world is perceptible, compared with Dupheis’ verbal outpourings about his own emotions. The inadequacies of their relationship encourage us to refect on the heuristic impact of expressing emotions found in our studies of economic history, yet they also invite us to handle these questions with great prudence as we uncover ‘these distant areas of intimacy’ through the prism of such inadequate evidence from the past.52 Dupheis’ letters do allow us to observe two ‘opposable’ forms of solitude through the experiences of these protagonists who were prevented from communicating by circumstances but who were unable to understand each other’s situation: on the one hand, Dupheis’ melancholy, expressed as a material and moral yet concrete experience of loneliness and, on the other, Mlle Mandier’s silence and indications of her own isolation in the world of business. 58

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Notes * Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, TELEMME, Aix-en-Provence, France. I am grateful to Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton for their helpful advice on this chapter and to Caroline Mackenzie for the translation. 1 Emmanuel Petit, Économie des émotions (Paris: La Découverte, 2015); Jon Elster,‘Emotions and Economic Theory’, Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1998): 47–74; Robert H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988); Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Ludovic Cailluet, Fabian Bernhard and Rania Labaki,‘Family Firms in the Long Run: The Interplay between Emotions and History’, Entreprises et Histoire 91 (2018), special issue ‘Émotions et entreprises familiales’: 5–13; Quentin Deluermoz et al.,‘Écrire l’histoire des émotions: de l’objet à la catégorie d’analyse’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 47 (2013): 155–89. 2 Emma Rothschild,‘An Alarming Commercial Crisis in Eighteenth-Century Angouleme: Sentiments in Economic History’, Economic History Review 51, no. 2 (1998): 268–93 (269); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Laurence Fontaine,‘Prodigality, Avarice and Anger: Passions and Emotions at the Heart of the Encounter between Aristocratic Economy and Market Economy’, European Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2018): 39–61. 3 See, among others, Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600– 1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017); Julie De Groot, Isabelle Devos and Ariadne Schmidt, eds, Single Life and the City 1200–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Pamela Sharpe, ‘Literally Spinsters: A New Interpretation of Local Economy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review 44, no. 1 (1991): 46–65; Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds, Singlewomen in the European Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, c. 1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007); Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006). 4 Deluermoz, ‘Écrire l’histoire des émotions’; Clémentine Vidal-Naquet, ‘Écrire ses émotions. Le lien conjugal dans la Grande Guerre’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 47 (2018): 117–37. 5 Laurence Fontaine, Le marché. Histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 78–84; Deborah Simonton,‘Milliners and marchandes de modes: Gender, Creativity and Skill in the Workplace’, in Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914, ed. Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach (New York: Routledge, 2015), 19–38; Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Eleanor Mosley and Other Milliners in the City of London Companies 1700–1750’, History Workshop Journal 71, no. 1 (2011): 147–72. 6 Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex. Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 151. 7 William Sewell Jr,‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Past and Present 206 (2010): 81–120. 8 8 B 1023: Papiers de Mademoiselle Mandier, marchande de modes (1778), Archives du département du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon (ADR). 9 Françoise Bayard, ‘Voyager plus pour vendre plus. Les commis voyageurs lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle’, Entreprises et histoire 66 (2012): 62–78; Lesley Ellis Miller,‘How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers Sold Silks, 1660–1789’, in Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe, ed. Jon Stobart and Bruno Blondé (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85–98. 10 Bayard,‘Voyager plus’, 71–6. 11 ADR, 8 B 1023, 13 Mar. 1778. 12 Ibid., 13 and 23 Mar. 1778. 13 Ibid., 6 Apr. 1778. 14 Ibid., 13 and 24 Apr., 30 May 1778. Miller,‘How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers’, 92. 15 Miller,‘How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers’, 92. 16 ADR, 8 B 1023, 23 Mar. 1778. 17 Ibid., 13 Apr. 1778. 18 Ibid., 13 and 24 Apr. 1778. 19 Ibid., 13 Apr., 16 May 1778.

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Anne Montenach 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 17 and 27 June 1778. Ibid., 16 July 1778. Ibid., 11, 19 and 28 Aug. 1778. Ibid., 6 May 1778. Ibid., 6 May, 27 June 1778. Ibid., 24 July 1778. See also chapters from Begiato, Chalus and Carr in this volume. Gilles Bertrand,‘Marchands en voyage dans l’Europe du second XVIIIe siècle. Étude de quelques carnets de route, récits et correspondances de marchands du Sud-Est de la France’, in Commerce, voyage et expérience religieuse XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, ed. Albrecht Burkardt (Rennes: PUR, 2007), 161–79 (172). See also Serge Chassagne,‘Les voyages d’un marchand de soie catholique à la fn du XVIIIe siècle, Joseph-Marie Guérin’, in Ibid., 87–112 (111–12); Marcelo J. Borges, ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It? Language of Transnational Affect in the Letters of Portuguese Migrants’, in Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender and Migration, ed. Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian and Linda Reeder (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 19–38; Andrew Popp and Robin Holt, ‘Entrepreneurship and Being: The Case of the Shaws’, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 25, no. 1–2 (2013): 52–68. Roger Chartier, ed., La correspondance. Les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2009), Ch. 7. Borges,‘Whats’ Love’. ADR, 8 B 1023, 16 and 30 May, 17 June 1778. Ibid., 27 June 1778. ADR, 8 B 730–11, 25 June 1778, quoted by Bayard,‘Voyager plus’, 74–5. ADR, 8 B 1023, 16 July 1778. Ibid., 11 and 19 Aug. 1778. Ibid., 16 July 1778. Ibid., 26 Aug. 1778. Bayard,‘Voyager plus’; Bertrand,‘Marchands en voyage’; Chassagne,‘Les voyages’; Borges,‘What’s Love’, 22; Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar, ‘Emotions on the Move: Mapping the Emergent Field of Emotions and Migration’, Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015): 73–80 (76). In general, more research was carried out on commercial documents involving men. See, for instance, Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche, eds, Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1995); Natacha Coquery, François Menant and Florence Weber, eds, Écrire, compter, mesurer. Vers une histoire des rationalités pratiques (Paris: ENS Ulm, 2006). For example, correspondence between a widow from Normandy and her clients: Daryl M. Hafter, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Businesswoman: Madame Marie Jue’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 35 (2007): 127–34. Serge Chassagne, Une femme d’affaires au XVIIIe siècle: la correspondance de Madame de Maraise, collaboratrice d’Oberkampf (Toulouse: Privat, 1981). ADR, 8 B 1023, 13 Mar. 1778. Ibid., 24 Apr. 1778. Ibid., 30 May, 11 Aug. 1778. Ibid., 13 Apr. 1778. Ibid., 23 Mar., 4 May, 22 June 1778. Ibid., 30 May 1778. Ibid., 16 July 1778. Ibid., 26 Aug. 1778. Ibid., 14 and 25 Apr. 1778. Ibid., 4 May 1778. Crowston, Credit, 9. Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Deluermoz et al.,‘Écrire l’histoire des émotions’; Vidal-Naquet,‘Écrire ses émotions’, 135; Andrew Popp and Robin Holt,‘Emotion, Succession, and the Family Firm: Josiah Wedgwood & Sons’, Business History 55, no. 6 (2013): 892–909.

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4 ‘MY SOLITARY AND RETIRED LIFE’ Queen Charlotte’s Solitude(s) Mascha Hansen In August 1761, barely three months after the death of her mother, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818) left her Northern German home for England in order to marry George III (1738–1820), a man completely unknown to her. Two of her four brothers sailed with her as far as Stade, but from then on, the three attendants she had been allowed to take with her were all that remained of her old connections. Unlike her cousins of the house of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Princess Charlotte had not been taught English and had to take lessons before she was able to communicate with anyone who did not speak either French or German. Having lost family and friends, home and country almost all at once, it is hardly surprising that she suffered from loneliness.1 Charlotte never returned to Germany, and while she assimilated to her new home in many ways, she nonetheless continued to experience surges of loss and longing for her old connections throughout her life, especially in troubled times. While at frst, Charlotte’s troubles would have been of the private kind—her frequent pregnancies necessitated a certain retirement and the king’s fear of a meddling wife forced Charlotte to keep her friendships to a bare minimum—her later troubles were in the public eye: the king’s recurrent bouts of mental instability, the controversies between George III and his heir due to the Prince of Wales’s frequent amorous peccadillos and heavy debts, the toll the War of American Independence and the French Revolution and its aftermath took on royal family life, politically, fnancially and emotionally. Moreover, from the start, Charlotte had to contend with a formal court etiquette that limited her choice of acquaintances, movements and occupations. While eighteenth-century observers may have been sympathetic, the young queen’s private troubles would not have seemed particularly noteworthy: for the daughters of the nobility, marriage generally required a move to a different region, sometimes to a foreign country. They grew up with the strong belief that family and family estates were of enormous importance and that their personal happiness had to be subsumed under, or actually consisted of, securing the more valuable goals of property consolidation and family aggrandizement.2 On marriage, the integration of young princesses into their new families accordingly often proved diffcult: loyalty to the old family was not all that easily and quickly replaced by loyalty to the new. Some came to feel even stronger ties to their frst homes, as did Charlotte.3 Loneliness, thus, must have been a fairly common experience among women of the nobility, many of whom were married with little concern to their emotional wellbeing. The queen’s lifelong yearning for the place ‘where [she] used to be so happy’ may thus be no exception to the rule.4 Her personal battles with loneliness, the cultural framework that caused and DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-6

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exacerbated her condition, but also the ways and means at hand—interpersonal, religious, literary, fnancial—to regain what she considered to be a state of tranquillity provide fascinating material for a study of the complexities of the concept of loneliness in the eighteenth century. This chapter will focus on Queen Charlotte’s correspondence with her brother Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1741–1816). Her letters will be discussed in conjunction with the contents of her library, as listed in the catalogue of the auction that took place after her death in 1818, in order to explore how her personal understanding of solitude may have been shaped by literary explorations of that fashionable theme, using the term ‘literature’ in a broad sense to span philosophical, religious and fctional discussions of the pangs or pleasures of solitude.5 The fnal section will outline some of the steps Queen Charlotte took to alleviate her sense of loneliness. In modern terms, loneliness is ‘a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others; an emotional lack that concerns a person’s place in the world’. To Queen Charlotte, the ‘occupational hazard’ of a lack of sympathetic, accessible friends was exacerbated by her inability to access a meaningful place: her patrie, Germany, and more particularly, her home country of Mecklenburg.6 Usually writing to her brother in French, the queen used the terms ‘solitude’,‘solitaire’ and ‘seule’ to describe her feelings, indicating both an emotion and a state of social isolation, and she responded to her predicament with the use of various emotional practices. In Monique Scheer’s defnition, emotional practices are ‘habits, rituals, and everyday pastimes that aid us in achieving a particular emotional state.’7 The particular emotional practices required from a queen, practices that also concern the ‘capacities of a body trained by specifc social settings and power relations’, were tightly regulated by public scrutiny and royal etiquette.8 Her very body was of public interest—in the early modern period the queen’s body was both a political body and at the same time emphatically a feminine one, a body that would bear future kings.9 Solitude and singularity were part and parcel of the social role to be performed by a queen: she was by defnition ‘outstanding’, alone at the top of a social hierarchy but rarely ever alone in everyday life; under constant social surveillance but barred from most social circles; acquainted with everyone but severely limited in her choice of friends. A queen, the famous bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu declared, had to be ‘pleasing in the domestick scene, and great in the publick’, a perplexing juxtaposition of the contemporary ideal of submissive femininity with a notion of grandeur that seems to imply demonstrative agency as well as public aloofness.10 The domestic scene, in Montagu’s conception of queenship, should have provided a counterpoint to the reserve a queen was under in her public role, but this is not how things worked out in practice, as I hope to show in this chapter. Whether in the public or the domestic sphere, as a ‘felt experience’, loneliness is not restricted to a single person; it is an experience that is—somewhat counterintuitively—best understood as produced within social interactions.11 While the queen’s ‘story’ of loneliness is personal one, her experience was also very much shaped by contemporary models not only of gender but of sociability. Lawrence Klein has suggested that we ‘move beyond narratives that depict a shift from either sociability to individualism or from individualism to community. In the thought and writings of the period, the themes of self and society, individual and other, solitude and sociability, are all present in a complicated confguration’.12 The ‘behavioural codes, cultural prohibitions and specifc emotional regimes’ imposed on a queen clashed with the newly emerging ideals of a more egalitarian sociability.13 Yet sociability was not the antonym of solitude, nor was it just the other side of the coin: solitude was more closely opposed to—and interwoven with—notions of intimate friendship, of meaningful personal interaction with accessible, sympathetic others. Literary and philosophical conceptions of the solitary self, stronger and more self-suffcient in rejection of a superfcial society, are only one 62

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strand in a complex web of narratives, and sociability should be kept in mind as ‘a key question and resource for the history of emotions’.14

Loneliness at Court: People, Places, Practices To the young queen’s new subjects, her being uprooted seemed a good thing, even a necessity since they suspected Neustrelitz, her home town, of having fostered insular notions that would prevent this foreign princess from integrating into her grand new surroundings and taking up her role as queen of the British nation (Figure 4.1).15 Elizabeth Montagu, some twenty-fve years the new queen’s senior, felt sure that the young woman had been brought up in complete ignorance: The sight of our brilliant Court, the salutations of our navy on her arrival, the opulent appearance of our towns, and the greatness of our capital city will astonish her . . . There seems not to be a very good choice of ladies about her, there is not one who is quite ft to teach her even the forms of her publick conduct, none at all equal to advise her private, ignorant as she must be of the behaviour that will be expected of her.16

Figure 4.1 Benjamin West (1777), Queen Charlotte. Oil on Canvas. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Montagu’s letter suggests that she saw queenship primarily as a ‘great situation’ to be enjoyed ‘with pleasure and gratitude’, especially in the company of a young and good-natured king. While inclined to expect the worst from a young queen left to her own devices, Montagu underestimated the diffculties of creating emotionally satisfying social ties in that position.17 So did everyone else, for that matter: a handsome young king would have been considered ample compensation for former relations now lost or inaccessible except by letter, and despite the odds, Charlotte’s relationship with her spouse is generally described as loving and supportive, at least throughout the frst decades of their married life. In the absence of intimate letters—very few survive—it is diffcult to gauge the royal couple’s closeness and the meaning of the relationship to either. George III may not have selected his wife as a political confdante, but then the queen may not have been quite open with the king either, particularly in family matters: the affairs of the house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz often had to be carefully broached to him, or so she claimed in her letters to her brother.18 The king insisted from the start that she was not to make particular friends so as to avoid dividing the household into separate parties or factions, an injunction she dutifully obeyed but which made it diffcult for her to feel at home.19 Moreover, there were few weeks that the royal couple did not move from one palace to the next, from London to Kew to Windsor and back in a never-ending circle, possibly exacerbating the queen’s sense of uprootedness.20 Judging from her letters, her strongest ties were those to Charles, her second eldest brother, three years her senior, who would inherit the duchy in 1794, when their eldest brother died unmarried. Charles was her emotional anchor, her confdant and the person whose happiness interested her more than her own, as she repeatedly assured him.21 He visited her in England in 1772 and 1786, but their experiences and opinions were mostly shared by means of letters, resulting in a correspondence that spans almost fve decades, of which some 440 letters in the queen’s hand survive. Few of Charles’ replies have been preserved, but those few show a sympathetic concern for her plights and a shared confdence in matters of interest to both, such as literature, education and fnancial diffculties.22 Even if the letters were often liable to inspection by all kinds of eyes, the restraint the queen habitually put on herself vanished when she felt she could pour out her heart to him: she was lonely at court, she told him, cut off from the innocent amusements offered by agreeable society. Her young children could not, as yet, provide adequate, that is rational, company: I regret more and more that I do not have any society but that of my children, since we enjoy everything together our conversations cannot be animated, and our lives are too uniform and far too retired for us to get to know the world.23 Knowledge of the world was necessary to provide material for entertaining conversations, but such knowledge, presumably in the sense of personal experience, remained unattainable to her at court. For years, Charlotte did not give up the hope that the king would pay a visit to Hanover at least, but she knew her husband’s reluctance to leave the country. She regretted the fact that she could not travel like other people, particularly hoping to visit Pyrmont, then an important German spa town close to Hanover where her brother often sojourned. Her ‘letters home’ reveal a perpetual longing for her native country. Indeed, the queen herself noted that she suffered from homesickness even years after her move to England:‘from time to time I believe I am beset like the Swiss by Heimweh’.24 Heimweh, or nostalgia, was a term used in the nosology of the day, and was not considered to be without danger, as it was thought to divert the body’s energies and, in severe cases, might lead to death. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the only known cure was 64

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a return home, though over the next decades,‘moral’ treatments, such as an intense imagination of native scenes, were explored.25 However, the term and the disease were associated with young men, especially soldiers, and frequently derided as provincial, childish or immoderate among members of the elite: loneliness, by contrast, seems to have elicited more understanding.26 Queen Charlotte’s use of the German term suggests that she picked it up from literary rather than medical sources, where it tended to be linked with the language of sentimentality and longing, with melancholia and the spleen.27 As this is the only instance of the term occurring in the queen’s letters, Charles may have decided not to follow up on this tentative search for an explanation on the queen’s part. Her homesickness is nonetheless evident in her letters: during the 1770s and 1780s, she used noticeably more German phrases in her letters than before or after—sometimes to ‘hide’ sensitive issues but more often to connect with her patrie. She deplored the loss of German acquaintances at court and flled her letters with gossip about the German nobility.28 Writing to her brother was her only solace, she claimed,‘almost the only thing I do without compulsion.’29 There were some secondary benefts to loneliness in this, but sharing her emotions with her brother may also have cut her off from forming closer ties at court. Her desperation culminated in a letter written shortly after her 29th birthday, in which she lamented her lack of cheerfulness (gaieté), and the vacuity of court life: ‘the solitary and retired life I lead does not agree with me.’30 The letter implies that she considered her lack of happiness to be the result of the many restrictions placed on her at court, without being specifc as to the form these restrictions took. Her main contention may have been the fact that she could not go abroad rather than court etiquette as such. She struggled to accept her life not just as a duty but as a choice, even as an act of individual agency on her part: [I]t is my lot in life, I have made it, and I would make it again with extreme pleasure, & if I fnd some inclination to the contrary, I tell myself it is a sacrifce that I made but it is not a misfortune & how many others more worthy than I of a better fate have more to endure.31 She felt ashamed, not of being lonely but of having said too much, indicating that loneliness was (as it still is) considered at best a ‘light’ malaise compared to poverty or bereavement. While these pangs of loneliness were a recurring emotion over which she struggled to exert some control, at this point in time she felt literally overcome: her body expressed (decharge) her emotion, she maintained, since her heart was overfowing—switching into German, she used the term überkommen (‘overcome’)—and she felt forced to reach out to her brother: I may have said too much & gone beyond the boundaries of prudence, but I beg you to see this as the result of an overfowing heart that pours itself out into the hands of a brother of whom I promise myself all possible discretion. As a British queen, she could not voice her homesickness except to her brother, and it may have been safer even with him to blame her solitary life rather than her marriage for her ‘wicked’ discontent. The letter’s unusually drastic imagery may have served as an abreaction, a practice which requires ritual destruction: she asked her brother to ‘burn this if you love me’. In the conception of Monique Scheer, this is to ‘do’ an emotion rather than to ‘have’ it, with the body ‘expressing’ feelings from the (hidden) inside to the (visible) outside of the body.32 The practice of loneliness moreover involves the materiality of pen, paper and fre here, as well as that of the body, including 65

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the symbolism of helping hands. ‘Doing’ an emotion may have alleviated the stress associated with loneliness and longing, and other common emotional practices of her day, such as quoting biblical maxims, also served to calm the queen’s pent-up feelings: Es ist nicht gut, daß der Mensch alleine sey (‘It is not good for the man to be alone’ [Genesis 2:18]) is a maxim she frequently quotes in her letters, even when suggesting her younger brother Ernest had better take a mistress (une Amie).33 Yet duty and religion, although they may have alleviated her loneliness, offered no ultimate solution to the problem, and her emotional practices proved to be inadequate because there was so little she could do to mend matters. Writing alone, while it may have had a therapeutic function, could not change the formal structure of court life, and three years on, her brother’s letters were still her only amusement, she claimed, since all others were forbidden to her.34 For over ‘fourteen or ffteen years’ she had not felt real joy, she continued—a time span leading back to her marriage in 1761 and the birth of her frst child in August 1762, the beginning of two decades of constant childbearing.35 With a rare use of irony, she deplored the debilitating monotony of royal family life:‘Our life is one of unity without much amenity, & in a short time it will have perfected me completely in that stupidity of which I feel already in possession of a good dose.’36 There were emotional areas in her life she felt she could not share at all:‘there are sore chords one does not like to touch.’37 Four years later, her married life would be severely strained by the king’s frst major bout of mental instability, another area of her private life the intimate details of which she could not share with anyone, not even her brother.

Literary Expressions of Solitude and Sensibility As Sarah Goldsmith has pointed out, the literature of sensibility enabled members of the elite to voice their emotions, since ‘[t]hose who demonstrated a deep capacity for feeling also demonstrated a capacity for nobleness’.38 Much as she liked to emphasize the importance of reason, the language of sensibility was also employed by Queen Charlotte, and may count as another emotional practice, a literary one in which the stern etiquette operating against her takes on the role of a Gothic tyrant sternly forbidding all innocent amusement.39 Friendship, to her, was based on Sensibilité du Coeur and shared feelings, yet sharing her feelings at court seemed well-nigh impossible to her.40 Janice Hadlow avers that the queen kept an iron control over her feelings in the presence of others and, unlike her husband, felt unable to ‘abandon the constraints of formal behaviour’ to engage with her children in a less formal manner.41 Clarissa Campbell Orr similarly assumes that the queen generally exercised ‘extreme self-discipline’ in her role of hostess during the fortnightly drawing rooms, endured because, apart from childbearing,‘by social means to help cement to the crown the political and fnancial elites and their relatives and clients’ was a queen’s function in the royal household.42 These drawing rooms, and the terrace walks at Windsor Castle later, were generally rather formal affairs, in which attendees had to wait until they were spoken to.43 Court etiquette thus did severely limit the queen’s pleasure in company: conversations with visitors who might have qualifed as members of a ‘good and agreeable society’ had to be conducted after strict rules—that is, anyone besides the king and queen had to stand throughout. At Mrs Delany’s in 1785, Frances Burney, who was to become the queen’s keeper of the robes a year later, observed the diffculties the queen faced when trying to ease conversation: the queen, she wrote, always had a small table brought to her to put her work or her tea on, ‘or, when she has neither, to look comfortable, I believe; for certainly it takes off much formality in a standing Circle’.44 There were no effortless fows of conversation, as in the bluestockings’ salons, since the queen could not limit the effects of hierarchy to follow the sociable practices of her day. Instead, she tried to console herself by seeking the solace of literary entretiens.

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Figure 4.2 Charles Wild, A View of the Queen’s Library at Frogmore House. Aquatint engraving. William H. Pyne (1819), The History of the Royal Residences, plate 28.

Reading was a practice she made use of to alleviate her loneliness, but it was not necessarily a practice pursued in solitude. She employed two readers, Elizabeth de la Fite and Jean-André Deluc, and occasionally requested others to act in that role.45 The queen was read to while she had her hair done (a time-consuming affair) or did needlework, usually together with a circle of other members of the household, but she also snatched time to read for herself in-between duties. Reading alone, or with Madame de la Fite, the queen often recurred to German books. She prized the works of Christoph Martin Wieland, a writer who suffered from social isolation and addressed the tensions between civilized sociability and a corrupt world, as well as Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Moralische Vorlesungen (1770), sentimental moral lectures that the queen thought immensely comforting, or so she told her brother.46 Many of the German books in the queen’s library addressed the topic of solitude and may have infuenced the queen’s view of solitude as a means to self-perfection (Figure 4.2). Thus, her library catalogue lists two volumes merely by their title, Der Christ in der Einsamkeit (The Christian in Solitude, 1779), both printed in Breslau but perhaps written by different authors. The one by Martin Crugot (1759) had at frst been composed as an Erbauungsbuch for Johanna of Anhalt-Dessau, abbess of Herford Abbey, a secular convent to which Charlotte had belonged when still a princess. Crugot considered solitude to be the source of virtue:‘In solitude, the soul gets to know itself ’, while ‘those, whose amelioration Virtue doubts, are banished from the happy felds of solitude into the bustle of society’.47

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More importantly, the queen’s library also contained Johann Georg Zimmermann’s monumental work on solitude, Über die Einsamkeit (1784–85), albeit in the French translation by J.B. Mercier (1788), which reduced the original four volumes to just one.48 Considering that Zimmermann had been physician in ordinary to His Majesty at Hanover since 1768, and a busy correspondent of the queen’s reader, Deluc, she may already have been familiar with the frst part, published separately in 1773 (Von der Einsamkeit), and with the four-volume set.49 Zimmermann wrote the longer version in answer to another book on solitude, Jacob Hermann Obereit’s Die Einsamkeit der Weltüberwinder (1781), also in the queen’s library. In his four-volume book, Zimmermann expressed the convictions of an age: the popularity of his work alone suggests that he managed to address both a ‘hot topic’ and provide socially acceptable remedies. The work was abridged, reprinted and pirated more than sixty times in England alone between its frst appearance there in 1791 and 1850.50 Mercier’s abridged version—the volume owned by the queen—was in turn translated into English as Solitude Considered with Respect to Its Infuence upon the Mind and the Heart (1788), a popular work as well, an eighth edition appearing in 1799. Mercier’s preface hastens to assure the reader that this was not another Rousseauesque attempt at misanthropy, but a work by an author who had carefully studied ‘the social duties of life’ (ii) and whose goal it was to enlighten mankind about ‘the attainment of happiness’ (i).51 Martina Wagner-Engelhaaf contends that there is not a single original thought to be traced in the 4,000 pages of Zimmermann’s work, and while that may be an exaggeration worthy of the physician himself, it is true that most of the ideas and the remedies presented were already common at the time.52 Zimmermann saw man as a creature alternately driven by his inclinations to solitude and to sociability respectively. To him, in keeping with the sociable notions of his age, a combination of both was necessary to achieve happiness, it was the alternation between being alone and being in company which led to experience, virtue and wisdom (IV, 308). He considered any self-sought isolation born of a feeling of superiority to be destructive: ‘he who wants to live off himself has found the best means quickly to starve, since he takes his mind for his nourishment, and eats his heart’ (II, 81, my translation). Zimmermann advocated a domestic, intimate sociability (I, 27), particularly recommending an emotionally fulflling relationship with a close friend. Although he despised customary visits, he was adamant that social duties must be fulflled. Solitude, however, could also be a relief from having to pretend to cheerfulness during the endless rounds of social calls considered obligatory in the eighteenth century (I, 19) and as a remedy against raillery and envy or undeserved contempt (IV, 103). The therapeutic measures against loneliness recommended by the physician Zimmermann are based on acceptance—not to wish for the one thing one cannot have—and effort: he bluntly advised his readers to pull themselves together (II, 175). He also recommended seeking solace in nature, particularly praising the pleasures of an English garden (I, 109, and IV, 6). Ultimately, however, Zimmermann, like Charlotte, considered religion to be the most important solace in adversity (IV, 281–97): ‘Nature, sublimity and religion form a therapeutical trias’ in Zimmermann’s works, according to Marcus Zenker.53 Zimmermann’s notions of the importance of religion, of female society, of domestic pleasures and of gardens would have appealed to Charlotte. Somewhat opportunely, Zimmermann also praised kings who valued mankind more than their crowns and whose palaces were kept in a quiet and domestic manner (I, 108). ‘[W]isdom and virtue’, he insisted, would ‘fourish at Court as in the extreme isolation of private life as long as one is surrounded by [good] heads’ (III, 374). The queen employed such heads whenever she could, placing emphasis on people who, like her, were infuenced by the Enlightenment but would not compromise on their religious beliefs, such as Deluc. Zimmermann moreover insisted that no one could be lonely who had intimate friends to correspond with (IV, 167). Charlotte may have disagreed with that somewhat optimistic stance: she longed to see her brother and converse in 68

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person with him.54 The queen does not mention reading Zimmermann’s work in these letters to her brother, but she refers to Zimmermann in his capacity as Hanoverian physician and may have corresponded with him in August 1777 concerning the health of her old attendant, Juliana Elizabeth Schwellenberg, who was taking the waters at Pyrmont. That she connected him with his work on solitude already then is evident from a telling slip of the pen: she thought Zimmermann would prove ‘solitaire’ (salutaire) to Schwellenberg.55 Apart from the German debates, the queen would have been aware of British and French literary trends in the feld of solitude: she owned an elegantly bound copy of Eicon Basilice, the Pourtraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitude (1649), the works of Rousseau (30, 34) and poems such as Courtier’s Pleasures of Solitude (1802 [1796]). In the eighteenth century, solitary musings were a literary fashion, but the invocations and celebrations of solitude in poems and philosophical musings often proved inadequate to address the needs of a female reader: the pose of the ‘promeneur solitaire’ had to be adapted to a female environment to be of use to women. Women of the elite, for instance, presented themselves as enjoying the solitude of their gardens instead, while ‘raising the spectre of loneliness’ at the same time.56 In literary depictions of the lonely self, women fgured mostly as spinsters or widows (except in the more radical literature of the late eighteenth century, such as the novels by Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays, which the queen presumably did not read), possibly adding to a sense of exclusion and even shame in the case of lonely wives and mothers, who would have been considered too busy, if they did their duty, to feel lonely in the frst place. ‘Time well spent’ was therefore a key concern to avoid blame, even to a queen whose duties did not encompass childcare.

Conclusion: Solutions to and Uses of Solitude Solitude, the queen maintained, should not merely be endured but used productively, as time to work, read or write in, and as a means to advance one’s own moral perfection:‘We begin our true solitude again, by me personally it should be employed but to perfect myself as much as possible in everything that is good, for the good of my children, especially my daughters.’57 Charlotte, too, employed the language of sentimental literature, but there is no neat adaptation of fashionable literary clichés in her letters, the remedies suggested by male writers did not help her, and, for all her botanical interests, her garden did not always provide philosophical consolation: ‘[I] run around in the gardens without fnding any joy of life there.’58 She was openly envious of her brother’s freedom of movement, and her letters fuctuate between rejecting a society she could not be part of (‘Bath must be as full as an egg’) and longing for a return to London (‘the little at least I see of society when in town’). Her letters, though they occasionally blame a corrupt world, repudiate those, like Zimmermann, who painted all the world as corrupt and joyless: ‘They say the world is bad, I do not think it is any worse than it was before, but being always on one’s own one creates a world for oneself that does not exist at all.’59 Her own ideal of sociability was very much in keeping with that of the bluestockings. As she wrote to her son Augustus:‘we must not forget Society of which we are a part. My taste is for a few select Friends whose Chearfullness of Temper & Instructive Conversation will pass the Time away.’60 Yet court life offered nothing of the sort, she wrote, her offcial duties being ‘a pain rather than an amusement’.61 Surrounded by people almost all day long, especially when in London, she alternately complained of loneliness and of a lack of solitude:‘I’m never alone for two minutes.’62 The lack of time for herself meant she was busy but not occupied, or not productively so: to her, reasonable occupations such as reading and writing, botanizing or doing needlework were the most effective remedy, the key to alleviating almost any kind of adversity, including loneliness. In a letter-treatise sent to her brother about the education of his daughters, she insisted that young 69

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people ought to learn how to be self-dependent so as not to have to rely on others to relieve their boredom.63 She felt proud of her capability to make good use of solitude, smugly decrying the ennui that took hold of English society due to bad weather conditions:‘as I know how to amuse myself when I am alone, the weather does not deject me’.64 Frances Burney, too, noted that the queen had no patience for those who did not know what to do with themselves.65 Occupation as a remedy may have suffced to alleviate her loneliness for quite a few years, but when even her emotional contact to her husband became severely strained in 1788–89 during his frst serious illness, she sought another outlet, buying herself a ‘petit paradis’, Frogmore, in 1790–92, in an explicit exercise of personal agency. Frogmore, a country retreat, a place where the queen literally took roots by having thousands of shrubs and bulbs planted, was very much also a sociable space for all kinds of amusements, public breakfasts, grand fêtes and even occasional games of skittles.66 The queen lavished money on the decorations of the rooms, lovingly outlined in William Pyne’s History of the Royal Residences (1816–19), decorating a whole room with portraits of her German family (I, 3–5).67 Usually spending her mornings there, away from the formality of Windsor, she was frequently accompanied by her unmarried daughters but also by other members of the royal household.68 Botanists visited to work with Lightfoot’s herbarium and discuss botany with the queen, and she made sure the gardens were of interest to scientists and elite visitors. Frogmore thus offered space for productive solitude but also an opportunity for less formal sociability. It was an enormous asset to have a place of her own: Frogmore offered her tranquillity and probably also some measure of content. After the events of 1788–89 and the 1790s—the king’s illness and her eldest son’s disastrous marriage—she needed solitude to rid herself of the burden of representational duties and to escape a public opinion that had turned against her during the regency debates and held her responsible for the moral failures of her eldest sons.69 As the Napoleonic Wars swept through Europe, severely impeding even the exchange of letters with her brother, the queen felt helpless in the face of so much suffering, and solitude again became a relief: As to myself, I admit that the solitary life we have been living for a year now is what suits me best at the moment . . . the calamities of my home country have gripped me in a manner that makes me abhor the racket of the world . . . There is nothing but my room, my work, and my books to calm me, not even music has the power to soothe me anymore.70 Charlotte here speaks of the solitude ‘we’ live in, probably implying the presence of her daughters, all of whom except the eldest were still part of the royal household. According to Flora Frazer, however, it was now the turn of the princesses to feel dissatisfed with life at court, without the prospect of an establishment of their own, caught between the king’s illness and the queen’s worsening temper.71 To the queen, Frogmore continued to be a refuge, though she admitted to her brother that their time was spent reasonably but not happily.72 Throughout the eighteenth century, a complaint of loneliness may have been more acceptable on the part of a woman than any expression of anger or dissatisfaction, and the queen’s letters left out, or indeed replaced, emotions that (in a queen) would not have been considered appropriate.73 The language of sensibility, however, probably prioritized one kind of emotion—a melancholy loneliness—over others, and the queen’s feelings may well have been more complex. The latent discontent with her life, hinted at in her letters, would later on be openly expressed by means of angry retorts whenever an attendant tried to leave or a daughter wanted to get married. Over time, the queen’s public behaviour, the aloof but condescending manner in which it was appropriate for her to treat people, may well have had an impact on her social relations even within 70

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her household. ‘People move about in their social environments . . . supremely practiced at the subtleties of movement, posture, gesture, and expression that connect them with others as well as communicate to themselves who they are’, Monique Scheer avers: a dominant social role, such as queen, which has to be communicated by means of posture and gesture at all times, may also prevent more satisfactory, more resonant emotional practices.74 Solitude, to Queen Charlotte, implied various feelings: distress, discontent and frustration but also relief, productivity and even safety. It was both a negative experience (in the sense of being lonely) and a positive one (in the sense of having time for herself). Solitude also enabled her to ‘practice’ loneliness—for instance, in her correspondence with Charles—providing an opportunity to share feelings and thus to enjoy more intense relations with her beloved brother. He had known her before she became a queen, and this may be the main reason why she felt free sometimes to forget that role in her correspondence with him—highlighting the fact that queenship was, and probably still is, essentially a solitary business.

Notes 1 The loss of a spouse, close friend or relative or a move away from familiar surroundings and friends—being ‘bereaved or divorced or uprooted’, in the words of Robert Weiss—frequently results in a feeling of isolation. See Robert S. Weiss,‘The Study of Loneliness’, in Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation, ed. Robert Weiss (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, [1975] 1985), 7–30 (here 15–17). 2 For a critical discussion of marriage policies among the European nobility, see Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168ff. 3 For the queens of Prussia in the eighteenth century, see Karin Feuerstein-Praßer, Die preußischen Königinnen (Munich: Piper, 2008), 60. George III’s sisters Caroline Matilda and Augusta also preferred their old home. See Stella Tillyard, A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 141, 59; and for Queen Charlotte and Olwen Hedley, Queen Charlotte (London: John Murray, 1975), 92–3, 232–3. 4 LHAS 27 May 1805. Unless indicated otherwise, all letters quoted are taken from the collection of letters from Queen Charlotte to her brother Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz preserved at the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin (LHAS), 4.3–2: Hausarchiv des Mecklenburg-Strel. Fürstenhauses mit Briefsammlung. The original letters are in French and have been translated by me. 5 A Catalogue of the Genuine Library, Prints, and Books of Prints, of an Illustrious Personage, Lately Deceased (London: Messrs. Nicol’s, Booksellers to His Majesty, Pall Mall, 1819). For the literary cult of loneliness, especially in Germany, see Walter Haug,‘Programmierte Einsamkeit: Zur Anthropologie eines narrativen Musters’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), 59–75 (here 64). 6 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5. 7 Monique Scheer,‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220 (here 209). 8 Scheer,‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 193. 9 Regina Schulte, ‘Der Körper der Königin-konzeptionelle Annäherungen’, Der Körper der Königin: Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höfschen Welt seit 1500, ed. Regina Schulte (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 2002), 9–23 (here 15–17). 10 Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. Emily Climenson, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1906] 2011), 2: 252. 11 See, for example, Katie Barclay, The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (London: Macmillan Education, 2020), 2, 8; Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 218; Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift, Gott und Einsamkeit. Einführende Bemerkungen’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 13–26 (here 13, 17). For loneliness as a universal phenomenon, see John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York and London: Norton, 2008), 7:‘the need for meaningful social connection, and the pain we feel without it, are defning characteristics of our species’.

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Mascha Hansen 12 Lawrence E. Klein. ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (1997): 153–77 (here 156). 13 Katrina O’Loughlin, ‘Sociality and Sociability’, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 64–6. On eighteenth-century sociability, see, for instance, Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé, eds, British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth-Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019). 14 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 28; O’Loughlin, ‘Sociality and Sociability’, 66. Compare also Susanne Schmid, ‘Einleitung’, in Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit um 1800, ed. Susanne Schmid (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 7–16 (here 11). 15 See Hedley, Queen Charlotte, 31. 16 Elizabeth Montagu, ed. Climenson, 2: 251–2. 17 And yet, as Clarissa Campbell Orr points out, the queen did make friends with her ladies of the bedchamber, Lady Harcourt and Countess Pembroke, though the language of sentimental friendship, it seems, was mostly reserved for her brother: Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Queen Charlotte: “Scientifc Queen”’, in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 236–66 (here 244, 257)). 18 Orr,‘Partners in Power’, 72. 19 Ibid.; and Orr ‘Queen Charlotte’, 239–40. 20 LHAS 10 July 1776; for the impact of ‘being ‘everywhere and nowhere’, see also Janice Hadlow, The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians (London: William Collins, 2014), 221. 21 See, for instance, the letters written on 8 Oct. 1799 and 8 Oct. 1803 LHAS; compare also Hadlow, The Strangest Family, 221–2. ‘Family correspondence was a powerful tool for mitigating distance’ as Sarah Goldsmith avers in ‘Nostalgia, Homesickness and Emotional Formation on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour’, Cultural and Social History 15, no. 3 (2018): 32. 22 Three letters dating to 1813 have been preserved at the LHAS (4.3–2: Hausarchiv). 23 LHAS 17 Dec. 1784; 1 July 1783. 24 LHAS 29 June 1774. 25 Lisa O’Sullivan,‘The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-Situating a French Disease’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67 (2012): 636–49. 26 See Goldsmith,‘Nostalgia, Homesickness’, 21 and 19; O’Sullivan,‘The Time and Place’, 628. 27 For the use of ‘homesickness’ in late-eighteenth-century literature, Jean Starobinski,‘Rivers, Bells, Nostalgia’, The Hudson Review 61, no. 4 (2009): 603–17. 28 LHAS 20 Mar. 1772. 29 LHAS 10 Feb. 1772. 30 LHAS 19 May 1773. Janice Hadlow describes how by the 1770s,‘the pressure of custom and tradition had squeezed out many of the small informalities’ and ‘[e]tiquette had edged out easy simplicity’ in the life of the royal family (The Strangest Family, 214). 31 LHAS 19 May 1773. 32 Scheer,‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 198. 33 LHAS 20 Mar. 1772. 34 LHAS 20 Jan. 1776. 35 It is also an estimation borne out by the testimony of Colonel Graeme, who wrote to Lord Bute praising the princess’s ‘Good humour & good spirits’ in 1761 (quoted in Hedley, Queen Charlotte, 32). For a possible connection between childbearing and the queen’s depressions, see, for example, Hedley, Queen Charlotte, 124. 36 LHAS 20 May 1777. 37 LHAS 17 Dec. 1784. 38 Goldsmith,‘Nostalgia, Homesickness’, 12. 39 LHAS 20 Jan. 1776. 40 LHAS 16 Sept. 1771. 41 Hadlow, The Strangest Family, 206. 42 Orr, ‘Partners in Power’, 67. See also John Styles, ‘Enlightened Princesses between Germany and Britain’, in Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World, ed. Joanna Marschner, David Bindman and Lisa L. Ford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 31–51 (here 40–1).

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‘My Solitary and Retired Life’ 43 Aileen Ribeiro,‘Being at Court’, in Enlightened Princesses, ed. Marschner, 171–5. 44 Frances Burney: Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London et al.: Penguin Books, 2002), 223, 226. 45 See Campbell Orr,‘Queen Charlotte’, 244. 46 LHAS 8 Nov. 1774. For Wieland’s personal battles with loneliness, see Klaus Schaefer, Christoph Martin Wieland (Stuttgart and Weimar:Metzler,1996),29–30. For Gellert,see Sibylle Späth,‘Vom beschwerlichen Weg zur Glückseligkeit des Menschengeschlechts: Gellerts Moralische Vorlesungen und die Widerstände der Realität gegen die empfndsame Gesellschaftsutopie’, in ‘Ein Lehrer der ganzen Nation’: Christian Fürchtegott Gellerts Leben und Werk, ed. Bernd Witte (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1990), 151–71. On the notion of productive loneliness in the eighteenth century, see Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Produktive Einsamkeit: Studien zu Gottfried Arnold, Shaftesbury, Jacob Hermann Obereit und Christoph Martin Wieland (Hannover: Wehrhan, 2002). 47 Martin Crugot, Der Christ in der Einsamkeit (Breslau, 1760), 133. Three works of that title were written in answer to each other. The second, by Christoph Christian Sturm (1761), was written to repudiate Crugot’s notions of a secular Christ, claiming that the original book was not about Christian solitude at all, and a third, by Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1764), followed in Sturm’s footsteps. The queen had other works by Sturm, but it is unclear which of the three volumes she had in her library. 48 Johann Georg Zimmermann, Über die Einsamkeit (Leipzig, 1784/85). 49 For their correspondence, see Hans-Peter Schramm, ‘Der Zimmermann-Nachlaß in der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover’, in Johann Georg Zimmermann, königlich großbritannischer Leibarzt (1728–1795), ed. Hans-Peter Schramm (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 221–67. For Zimmermann’s correspondence with Wieland on the topic of loneliness, see Dehrmann, Produktive Einsamkeit, 60. 50 See Markus Zenker, Therapie im literarischen Text: Johann Georg Zimmermanns Werk Über die Einsamkeit in seiner Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2007), 58–9. 51 While Mercier considers the achievement of happiness to be the main goal of the work (ii), this is less prominent in the more ambivalent German original: Zimmermann oscillates between despair and a rather didactic sense of hopefulness, expressed in the familiar German sentimental strains of the time. 52 Martina Wagner-Engelhaaf, ‘ “Unheilbare Phantasie und heillose Vernunft”: Johann Georg Zimmermann, Über die Einsamkeit (1784/85)’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 265–77. 53 Zenker, Therapie im literarischen Text, 401, my translation. 54 LHAS 28 Jan. 1791. 55 LHAS 7 Sept. 1776. 56 Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 146. 57 LHAS 14 Feb. 1772. 58 LHAS 23 May 1773. 59 LHAS 29 Dec. 1775; 13 June 1783. 60 The letter is quoted in Hedley, Queen Charlotte, 180. For Queen Charlotte’s bluestocking sympathies, see Clarissa Campbell Orr,‘The Queen of the Blues, the Bluestocking Queen and Bluestocking Masculinity’, in Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 233–53. 61 LHAS 13 June 1783. 62 LHAS 20 Jan. 1786. 63 LHAS 9 July 1782. 64 LHAS 1 Feb. 1776. 65 Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Sabor and Troide, 225. 66 See, for instance, Campbell Orr, ‘Queen Charlotte’, 41, and the offcial guide Frogmore House and the Royal Mausoleum (London: Royal Collections Enterprises, 2003), 6, 33, and Mascha Hansen, ‘Breakfast at Frogmore and Feathers in Portman Square: Women’s Property and Elite Sociability’, Études Anglaises. Special issue on Sociable Spaces, ed. Valérie Capdeville and Pierre Labrune, 74, no. 3 (2021): 300–16. 67 W.H. Pyne, The History of the Royal Residences of Windsor Castle, St James’s Palace, Carlton House, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, Buckingham House and Frogmore (London: A. Dry, 1819). 68 See, for example, a letter by the queen to her Vice Chamberlain, William Price, 30 July 1807, GEO/ ADD/2/73, Georgian Papers Online, accessed 15 Apr. 2021, https://gpp.rct.uk/GetMultimedia. ashx?db=Catalog&type=default&fname=GEO_ADD_2_73.pdf. 69 Already a year before these troubles began, she had written to Charles that she feared the severity of the world’s judgement and her own tranquility if ever it were to turn against her (6 Feb. 1787). See Florence

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Grant,‘Visual Satire and Caricature’, in Enlightened Princesses, ed. Marschner, 265–75 (here 266; 275–5), for some of the events that turned public opinion against her, and compare some of the many caricatures collected by Kenneth Barker in George III: A Life in Caricature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). LHAS 23 Apr. 1807. See Flora Frazer, Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (London: John Murray, 2004), 254–5, 267–70; Hadlow, The Strangest Family, 436, 549. Though both make allowances for the queen’s temper, neither takes her continuous suffering for her patrie, ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, into account. LHAS 2 Apr. 1813. On gendered emotions, and rage as a masculine emotion, see Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 91–2. Scheer,‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 203.

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5 ‘I FEEL AS IF PART OF [MY] SELF WAS TORN FROM ME’ Entrepreneurship, Absence and Loneliness in Nineteenth-Century England Andrew Popp

In Britain, the nineteenth century was an age of expansion and displacement. Industrialization powered surging economic growth. New machines and modes of working revolutionized productivity. Invention and imitation poured forth a foodtide of new goods. New markets and connections were made over ever greater distances. In the wake of these changes, new modes of living emerged. Communication and travel were revolutionized, transforming forms and patterns of mobility. Relationships with time and distance altered. Cities grew almost compulsively. Culture did not remain unaltered. New values emerged. Samuel Smiles devoted Self Help to propagating the lesson that people’s ‘happiness and well-being as individuals in . . . life, must necessarily depend mainly upon themselves—upon their own diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control—and, above all, on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character.’1 No fgure was more emblematic of this age of individualism than the entrepreneur, who grew to occupy an ever more central, totemic position within society, his identifcation with the age and the culture ever stronger, his traits ever more prized.2 These new modes of living engendered new subjectivities, catalysing new emotional experiences. Historians have argued that loneliness as a distinct emotional experience was a product of the nineteenth century—a reaction to the alienation attendant upon industrialism, urbanism, and intensifying mobility and distanciation. Fay Bound Alberti claims that ‘loneliness in its modern sense emerged as both a term and perhaps also a recognisable experience around 1800 . . . reinforced by the . . . emergence of an intense ideology of the individual: in the mind sciences, in economic structures, in rational philosophy, and politics.’3 These forces stand personifed by the manly Smilesian entrepreneur. As a self-reliant individualist, the entrepreneur stood alone.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-7

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John Tosh claims that ‘the nineteenth century was clearly pivotal in entrenching an entrepreneurial, individualistic masculinity’.4 Similarly, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall argue that for middle-class men in the early nineteenth century: [their] calling to [enterprise] was not in doubt, for their identity depended on their ability to operate as economic agents. To become adult men within their own terms they must provide a livelihood which made possible a domestic establishment where they and their dependents could live a rational and morally sanctioned life. 5 Thus, at the same time, a growing ideology of domesticity meant that the lives of the commercial, manufacturing, and professional classes ‘were increasingly organized around the dual commitment to work and home’.6 For men, there was a complementarity between the roles at home and abroad in the world. But there was necessarily tension too, for men’s commitment to home represented an ‘an emotional reaction to a sense of alienation from the very circumstances that made possible his success’.7 The imperative to be an active, enterprising public fgure demanded men’s absence from the domestic sphere that validated their success. Some men experienced this as acute emotional pain, for far ‘from carrying the blustering certainty of the late Victorian paterfamilias, early nineteenth-century masculine identity was fragile, still in the process of being forged’.8 This chapter explores the loneliness of absence created at the nexus of the public and the domestic for male entrepreneurs and their families, focusing on the experiences of John and Elizabeth Shaw, who will be introduced shortly. It examines loneliness in the context of separation and absence, following Bound Alberti in construing loneliness as ‘a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others’.9 The coordinates for this emotional history are provided by the relationships between the public and the private, the commercial and the domestic, men and women, home and abroad. The sources are letters John and Elizabeth exchanged over several decades. These letters are, as Tosh observed of the correspondence between Isaac and Sarah Holden, suitable for ‘readings alert to the play of entrepreneurial values, patriarchy and domesticity’.10 Following a brief literature review, I will in turn introduce John and Elizabeth and their entrepreneurship, explore their experience and expressions of loneliness and examine the role of letters in mitigating those experiences. Before concluding, I will relate their experience of loneliness to their understandings of domesticity.

Entrepreneurial Loneliness in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters Contemporary entrepreneurship studies depict a desire for high distinctiveness of identity amongst entrepreneurs as conficting with a need for belonging. Dean Shepherd and J. Michael Haynie, acknowledging the idea that ‘entrepreneurs are somehow distinct and different represents a central theme in the entrepreneurship literature . . . and [that] to identify oneself as an entrepreneur provides individuals with the opportunity to satisfy their need for distinctiveness’, argue that this is ‘often . . . at the expense of belonging, and, ultimately, psychological well-being’. In particular,‘a lack of belonging can result in feelings of isolation’. They recount how an ‘unexpected demon’—loneliness—captured one entrepreneur.11 There is then an association between entrepreneurship and loneliness. However, the ahistorical, culture-free analyses of entrepreneurship scholars do little to help us study this relationship as an historical phenomenon. Instead, this chapter will briefy examine four topics: entrepreneurship, 76

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masculinity and domesticity; separation, absence and loneliness; loneliness in letters; and letters as sources for history. It is well established that the period from the later eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a changing relationship between men, their economic roles and domesticity. Increasingly, men were told that they ‘must act’—that is, to be active, enterprising agents in the public sphere.12 However gradual the process, the ‘masculine persona which emerged within [the middle classes] was organized around a man’s determination and skill in manipulating the economic environment, always within an abiding belief in a world shaped by religious forces.’13 This captures well some of the essential components of John Shaw’s life but not all of them. His private, domestic life was of great importance to him, and in this, he was again characteristic of his time, his class, and his place. Home also typically meant marriage, and the ‘signifcance of marriage for middle-class men cannot be overestimated. It profoundly affected their economic, social, spiritual and emotional life as well as everyday standard of comfort.’14 Davidoff and Hall argue that the ‘domestic sphere sat outside of the public world of commerce where rational, male and virtuous friendship determined social relations’.15 Indeed, Tosh talks of a ‘spiritual valorisation of the home’, especially among Evangelicals. In the couple he examined, who show striking parallels to John and Elizabeth, Sarah Holden ‘maintained that only in the home could she and Isaac attend to their real needs’. Isaac, in ‘denying their home its due attention, was in danger of losing his spiritual mooring’.16 There was a tension here that was not easily resolved, for the domestic and the public were, in reality, interpenetrating and inseparable. Family became an endeavour mimicking the public realm of business. As Elaine Chalus observed of the Fremantle family, each of them ‘accepted that s/he had a part to play in a joint enterprise that demanded duty, service and sacrifce’.17 This project seeks to historicize our understanding of the experience of loneliness. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that eighteenth-century naval women ‘experienced the anxiety of parting, loneliness of separation, vicissitudes of communication and fearful uncertainty of outcomes for their loved ones . . . in broadly similar ways to their modern counterparts’.18 Loneliness is both unique and ubiquitous. Framing loneliness as absence, it is unsurprising that much of the most relevant literature focuses on separations caused by travel. Elaine Chalus and Katie Barclay, for example, examine the experience of separation among British elites, often occasioned by some form of public service or role (rather than by the entrepreneurial function performed by John Shaw). The naval families studied by Chalus also faced the real possibility that separation might be rendered permanent by accident or combat. Elizabeth must have had greater confdence that John would return safely from his journey’s across northern England. Nineteenth-century emigrants also faced the likelihood of permanent separation from loved ones and their letters offer further testimony to the relationship between absence and experiences of loneliness. In all of these cases, then as now, separation and loneliness were tightly coupled. Letters are, of course, occasioned by separation and it is therefore unsurprising that they provide a rich source of expressions of loneliness. As Tosh observed of his subjects,‘the occasion for [for their correspondence] was part of the problem’.19 It seems unnecessary to seek for multiple testimonies when we have that of one of Barclay’s witnesses, who lamented simply that ‘my absence from you is the only suffering I have’.20 Likewise, Davidoff and Hall quote an Essex doctor who seems to have found himself surprised by loneliness while his wife was away: ‘I am now alone at home which is very dull and dreary . . . I now know the value of my absent friend and the feelings connected to the married state.’21 However, if correspondence sprang from separation, then it also helped combat it. As Chalus writes of the Fremantles, their ‘letters over these years apart demonstrate the ways that they used intimacy and sharing to span distance and forward their shared interests and ambitions.’22 For John and Elizabeth, too, corresponding was 77

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the principal method they had to mitigate separation and loneliness. Time and time again they tried to write themselves back into each other’s presence. We need to examine the work correspondence does. Finally, as we have seen, Tosh viewed the correspondence between Isaac and Sarah Holden as suitable for ‘readings alert to the play of entrepreneurial values, patriarchy and domesticity beneath the surface’.23 There is a large, sometimes cautionary literature on letters as sources for history. Martyn Lyons, for example, has argued that letters only ever represent ‘fragments of experience’.24 Nor are they uncomplicated windows onto the subjective, interior self of the author. Expression is fltered through linguistic conventions and socially constructed norms, even in the private correspondence between a husband and wife.25 We all dissimulate at times, even with those with whom we are in the most intimate relationships. More often than not, our articulacy fails us, and a ‘great deal always remains inaccessible’. Thus, no correspondence can straightforwardly be read as a ‘faithful refection of the past’.26 Nonetheless, I agree with Tosh that it is right that we sometimes allow our ‘witnesses [to] step boldly into the box and unburden their hearts’.27

Making Markets, Making Connections, Creating Distance John and Elizabeth (née Wilkinson) Shaw were married in 1813. John was a hardware factor, based in Wolverhampton, in the English Midlands, famed as a centre of metalware production. At the time of his marriage John was frmly embarked on his career in business. As a factor, his entrepreneurship was dedicated to making connections. He travelled ever-growing distances across Northern England, building markets, satisfying demand, coordinating blossoming fows of goods, amassing wealth. He was abroad in the world, performing his role with vigour and success. His job was to match supply with demand, making markets in the process, triggering orders and coordinating the aggregation and dispatch of products, stimulating fows of material goods that reached ever more distant parts of the nation’s expanding retail network. Alongside these material fows were fows of fnance, largely in the form of credit. John was as important to the coordination of these fows as he was to those of physical goods. A third fow consisted of information. One component of this fow was his correspondence with Elizabeth; overwhelmingly but not exclusively personal, these letters contained much about business, about the state of trade, about who had paid and who had not, about the standing and stability of a local banks or about the workers at the warehouse. John also kept up a vigorous exchange with his employees and partners; a stream of missives relaying the information most recently received. Within this fow was encoded a vast amount of intelligence about the state of the market, whether it be febrile and active or dull and stagnant. Even more deeply encoded within it was information pointing to the wants and desires, the tastes and sensibilities, of Northern England: metropolitan and provincial, urban and rural, industrial and agricultural.28 Thus did John make and maintain the connections through which markets were activated and kept in near constant motion, playing his part in the compulsive expansion of the market and the economy. This was hard, embodied labour. The market demanded John’s presence and attention. It pulled him from home frequently and for long periods. In 1813–14, the period immediately following his marriage, the average length of a selling journey was 47 days. Journeys were undertaken four times a year. In 1823, Elizabeth calculated that they had spent four years of the frst decade of their marriage apart.29 It was also arduous work. Conditions were primitive, roads and accommodation poor and days long. John complained frequently of wind and rain, of cold and chills, of tiredness and low spirits. It was a role to which he had been raised. Early in his career as a traveller, his mother had encouraged him to ‘pluck up your spirits; put on a proper degree of modest assurance; and be 78

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what I hope to see you; an active tradesman; and a noble virtuous character’. But travelling had ever challenged his resolve and his manliness. If his mother had urged him to become ‘an active tradesman; and a noble virtuous character’, then she had also prefaced those words with an admonition:‘We much wonder you dislike travelling: pluck up your spirits; put on a proper degree of modest assurance; and be what I hope to see you.’30 On another occasion, she was even blunter: For goodness sake what are you made of; you are no Edwards [her maiden name]; remember on this your frst journey in a ‘new way to you’, you will stamp your chariskter [sic] for a trade’s man. I wish I was at your elbow, [I] would endeavor to rouse your spirits if you really possess any.31 The stresses were not only bodily but also psychological and emotional. Expansion and growth brought volatility and instability. Systemic vulnerabilities in banking threatened all and the law offered little protection. A want of money was a constant fear. It took little for markets to become congested, choked for the lack of money or credit. The possibility of failure dogged everyone’s steps, weighing on John’s mind. In 1819, for example, he complained that had ‘been very fat in spirits—things are so dreadfully fat and bad’.32 This psychological toll compounded the emotional toll of separation from family. Whatever the vagaries of the market, this was, over time, an expansionary process. If in 1813– 14 John’s journeys had averaged 47 days, in 1810–12 the average had been just 34.7 days. For John, expansion came through extending and deepening his networks, adding new destinations to each journey and seeking out new customers in existing destinations. He was not alone and each year competition on the ground grew thicker. The market was crowded. John and others like him were not only heightening competition and driving growth but also introducing ever more distance into the economy. Critically, distanciation implies not merely a spatial effect but also one that is emotional or psychological. For a factor such as John, maintaining existing commercial connections depended on faceto-face relationships and a degree of familiarity and sociability. Extending the network required venturing into the unfamiliar. On one occasion, John had explained to Elizabeth that he had misjudged when and to where she should next write to him,‘not well knowing the fresh ground I was going on’.33 John was constantly encountering strangers in places unknown to him. The familiar was being progressively crowded out. Across the period 1810–14, the frm visited at least 525 individual customers. Taking one example, in 1810 John visited no customers in Liverpool, but 12 in June 1812, and 23 by June 1814. Of the 12 customers visited in June 1812, only fve were running active accounts, but by June 1814, that number had risen to 14. This was a process that required diligent application, but it was also one that made the maintenance of sociability more diffcult. Both John’s journey books and his letters testify to his attempts to glean information about potential customers who were strangers to him. Of course, in seeking this information on new customers, John relied on existing customers whom he knew and trusted, but connections were necessarily becoming more attenuated. The multiplication of customers naturally also reduced the importance to the frm of any individual customer and even as the duration of journeys grew there was less time to spend with each.34 Nonetheless, even as late as January 1831, John could write Elizabeth to relate time spent with a customer: I went last evening to take supper with Mr Holgate . . . and had quite a treat—with his daughters playing—three of them sat down to the pianoforte and another to the Welsh harp and most delightfully they performed—he has a fne family of nine children all at home.35 79

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This scene of someone else’s contented domestic life is touching, but these glimpses into a world of friendly sociability lying beyond the market were rare. Life on the road was lonely. Business and separation met in John and Elizabeth’s lives in one fnal way. John likely met Elizabeth working behind the counter of her family’s shop in Colne, Lancashire. For Elizabeth, marrying John meant physical separation from her own family, with whom she had close, affectionate relationships. Over the years, she returned to Lancashire frequently, often for prolonged periods. Travel, separation and absence became woven into the fabric of daily life. In May 1821, John relayed to Elizabeth that ‘Betsey [their daughter] says we will go a journey when Mamma and the boy come home—She says you are gone a journey to get orders’. Elizabeth was visiting relatives in Lancashire, but to the little girl, journeys and absence were inextricably associated with business.36 These were the conditions under which Elizabeth and John experienced separation from one another. In response, across many years, they wrote of how they felt in the absence of the other. They wrote of what solitude meant to them, of how they understood the purpose of marriage, of their ideals with regard to home and domesticity, of their attitudes towards independence and of the obligations and anxieties of being in business, all of which helped frame their approaches to absence. The letters reveal not only their confrontation with absence but also evidence of the resources on which they drew in that confrontation.

‘I Feel as If Part of [My] Self Was Torn From Me’: Experiencing Separation John and Elizabeth undoubtedly experienced painful feelings of loneliness when they were apart. In 1813, very shortly after their marriage, Elizabeth told John, ‘I thought I knew what absence was before I was married but I believe I never knew rightly what it was before now—I feel as if part of [my] self was torn from me.’37 Absence could feel like erasure, like death:‘I don’t only wish to know that you are in the land of the living but I wish you to tell me so’.38 In one particularly impassioned letter, John reassured a distraught Elizabeth that she was not ‘absent from my mind’.39 The fear that physical absence might warp into emotional absence shadowed them. Even before they wed, the spectre of separation stalked John and Elizabeth’s marriage. For Elizabeth, the ‘greatest evil I fear . . . is your having to leave me so often—I shall have to be nearly half my time alone’.40 John and Elizabeth never fully accommodated themselves to separation. In 1832, just short of two decades of marriage, Elizabeth complained to her father that John had ‘been out [on the road] from seven to eight weeks and I do not expect him home now till the latter end of next. . . . It is a trial to me but what must we expect’. John was equally affected, noting how ‘I feel exceedingly low—Indeed I always do on leaving home.’41 The experience of separation/absence was multi-layered. Loneliness was powerfully embodied. Each craved the body as well as the heart of the other. As a newlywed, Elizabeth told John, ‘I have been so starved in bed that last night I had an extra blanket.’42 These feelings could become disturbing and unsettling. Elizabeth recounted,‘One night I dream’d that you were locked in my embrace. The pleasure I felt awoke me [and] I was disappointed to fnd it nothing but a dream.’43 Elizabeth was particularly passionate and expressive in the following passage: Oh my dear John, I lay in bed thinking how I shall enjoy clasping you to my bosom, calling you by all those names my affection can invent. I think of it until I almost imagine it a reality. . . . I feel as if I never should be satisfed with kissing you and embracing you so you must prepare yourself for it. Nay I even talk of eating you—but at this rate I shall frighten you so I had better hold my tongue till I have you safe here.44

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We are reminded of how Addie Brown, in Karen V. Hansen’s study of a mid-nineteenth-century erotic friendship between two African-American women, told Rebecca Primus,‘Your most affect letter to me was like a pieces of meat to hungere wolfe.’45 The physicality of the imagery—of starvation, hunger, appetites and consumption—is compelling testimony to Elizabeth’s need for John to be bodily present in her life. Absence also seeped into more mundane aspects of life. The experience of separation, absence and loneliness focused on the home, the image of which worked to catalyse memories and to maintain connections. Refections on home could be prompted in John both by departing and by remaining at those times when it was Elizabeth who left. Thus, he observed how the ‘pleasures and enjoyments of home acquire much more might and infuence on one’s mind every time I go from home’.46 But he also took great pleasure in the domestic and was often at home with the children while Elizabeth was in Lancashire, prompting a different perspective on the experience of separation: It appears now my Dear Girl a long time since I saw you. I do assure you being at home when you are away is very different to being on a journey—one has much to occupy ones mind and time and attention but coming into one’s meals . . . without seeing you does appear so strange and uncomfortable that I could not live alone again for a trife. It’s true that I have got our little lad to play with but . . .47 Most poignantly, John recounted to Elizabeth how he and their son John ‘sat down to dinner alone. . . . Roast beef, pudding and cabbage, potatoes and new asparagus’. But young John was puzzled,‘saying Papa why does there not be somebody else here to eat this nice dinner.’48 John and Elizabeth were not alone in using accounts of domestic scenes to build and maintain intimacy. Thus, Barclay has argued that, by the nineteenth century,‘the ideals of domesticity shaped how couples corresponded, and letters were marked by lengthy descriptions of domestic life, of children’s prattle, family gossip,and household events’,and that they ‘produced images of domestic happiness to establish intimacy over distance’.49 To give a specifc example, Chalus has described Elizabeth Fremantle as being ‘especially good at depicting intimate scenes in domestic spaces that [her husband] knew well, and in capturing the children as characters’.50 This leads us to ask what role letter-writing played in their adjustment to their experiences of absence and loneliness?

‘Letters . . . Are the Best Medicine in Your Absence’: Letters and Loneliness Tosh argues that Sarah and Isaac Holden confronted each other with ‘painful directness in regular correspondence, the occasion for which was part of the problem’.51 Correspondence is the child of absence. Elizabeth and John’s correspondence contains powerful evidence of this central tension, one that meant that whatever consolations corresponding contained there were always accompanying sorrows. Distance might be eroded, but it could never be eradicated. Because they had had to conduct their courtship at a distance, writing had always been central to how Elizabeth and John constituted themselves to each other and together as a couple. Mostly, letters served a positive function, bringing pleasure and comfort. For example, on Christmas Day 1812, as their courtship was drawing to a conclusion, John told Elizabeth that ‘the receipt of my letters cannot afford you more pleasure than I do experience in writing to you—It is I can truly affrm of my pleasures the frst and the greatest’.52 Often, they tied the value of letters to their experience of absence. They repeatedly wrote to each other thus: ‘Write me a long letter as I have nothing else to comfort me when you are away’, ‘According to your request I take up

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my pen to inform you how we are going on in your absence’ and ‘If you will but send me letters often those are the best medicine in your absence . . . a letter from you does me more good than anything.’53 Perhaps the most effective statement of the centrality of corresponding to their joint confrontation with separation came from Elizabeth in November 1812: If, when you get this, you should be poreing [sic] over Compositions of Debtors and Bankrupts Stocks—Do you think all my nonsense will have any tendency to make you forget for a few minutes—forget all your cares and sorrows and think that as you love, so you are belov’d—but shall I call this nonsense? No, rather let me term it the greatest earthly bliss that can be enjoy’d where minds in unison are mutually disclosed.54 Thus, Elizabeth summons John back into her presence, their mutually disclosed hearts and minds transcending distance and worldly economic affairs. Letters could never fully reconcile or resolve separation and loneliness, however. As Hansen found for her subjects,‘Letter-writing consoled . . . little.’.55 John and Elizabeth frequently feared that absence might be misread as forgetting. John began a particularly impassioned passage in a letter written in 1816: I cannot describe to you the feeling and sensation of my mind on receipt of your letter . . . which just come into my hands. Oh my dear girl . . . you cannot for a moment conceive my silence could in any way be attributed to a want of affection . . . [or] that you are absent from my mind as I declare to you that you are and have been more upon my mind than ever.56 Physical absence did not have to mean emotional loneliness; minds separated could remain in communion.

‘I Sigh Not for Grandeur’: Loneliness and Domesticity Elizabeth and John’s experience of and reactions to absence and loneliness were shaped by the contours and strength of their shared vision of familial domesticity. Karen Harvey has argued that ‘it was during the eighteenth century that modern domesticity was invented, before coalescing into the more intense nineteenth-century domestic culture.’57 John and Elizabeth, born in the late eighteenth century, lived on the cusp of that transition. Harvey suggests: Contemporary meanings of home, particularly in the later eighteenth century, suggest something other than a collection of social relationships (family), an economic unit (household), a physical construction (house or domestic interior), or a co-resident unit bounded by household management (household-family). Instead,‘home’ encompassed all these meanings and more, connoting emotional states and serving imaginative or representational functions.58 All the evidence supports a claim that this captures John and Elizabeth’s understanding of home. For them, home was where family was made; it was a shared emotional space. We have seen the enjoyment John took in domestic pleasures, such as a dish of fresh asparagus. Such modesty characterized the couple’s shared vision of the domestic. No words, no matter how closely they conformed to popular tropes and clichés of the day, better captured this vision than Elizabeth’s declaration: ‘I sigh not for grandeur—love in a cottage would suit my wishes 82

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better than a splendid mansion’.59 Another part of this vision, formed during courtship, was what Elizabeth and John were to be to one another: she hoped that they might ‘strive to help each other on in the Heavenly road and by bearing each other’s burdens fulfl one of the highest duties of our intended union’.60 Life was not meant to be lived alone. Given what lay before them, the metaphor of the road they would tread together is striking. In the same period John gave expression to a very similar vision of love and home conjoined. On Christmas Day 1812, he recounted it to Elizabeth: I soon found I was alone [and] I experienced a pleasure in sitting in my own home and by my own freside—such as one that I had never before felt and I prized them highly . . . but still I found something else wanting. I wanted a sincere, tender and affectionate friend—one to whom I could unburden myself and speak my inmost thoughts—one who would be feeling alive to all my pleasures and pains.61 Here home emerges as a space of shared love and sympathy. Elizabeth replied to John’s letter on 1 January 1813: So you cannot be content to live alone in your own home and have every comfort. I should wonder if you could, or any body else of a sociable disposition. Of all things I should dislike to live alone—I used to think I should like [it]—but no hermitage for me. I relish a little company but like to fnd it at home—don’t like to roam for it.62 Elizabeth subtly elaborates their vision of the domestic, contrasting it with the world beyond its walls. Home is defned in counterpoint to public spaces, from which it provides refuge. Elizabeth told John how ‘regards travelling I am quite of your opinion respecting . . . in any way mingling so much with the world that it certainly has a tendency to withdraw all serious impressions . . . without particular watchfulness.’63 In another letter from late 1811, she explained herself even more clearly: I should not like to be obliged to travel like you, it would unsettle me, and cause a dissipation of the mind which should unft me for refecting, or meditating upon serious things—a little solitude is useful and necessary, to become acquainted with ourselves.64 In the following passage, Elizabeth contrasts home and ‘abroad’ particularly effectively: I certainly think families are render’d comfortable by having things convenient, but more than this is only outward show and is not absolutely necessary to happiness, especially to those whose greatest pleasure is to live at home, for they feel not those wants that rovers abroad, in quest of pleasure, feel.65 In leaving the home, however necessarily, John was placing himself among an anonymous mass of rovers, who were abroad in an unrooted quest for pleasure. When he frst began his life on the road, John’s mother had feared for him without her ‘at you elbow’, unprotected by her ‘parental arm’.66 We have little evidence relating to John’s childhood, but a handful letters from his mother and between he and his siblings, William and Margaret, survive. His mother’s letters suggest she was often unhappy and unfulflled in her marriage, but this was not completely characteristic of the emotional tenor of the family. There is more evidence of Elizabeth’s youth amid her large family, contained in a signifcant number of letters 83

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exchanged among the seven siblings, who were often separated by schooling and then by work and marriage. The Wilkinson siblings enjoyed close and affectionate relationships as youths and young adults. Elizabeth also had especially close relationships with her parents. Elizabeth, like her siblings, was educated away from home, as her own children would be in time. Thus, leaving home was not a novel experience for her when she left Lancashire to marry and settle in Wolverhampton, even though her letters made it clear that the Black Country was entirely unknown territory for her. Aside from John, she would be among strangers. She settled well, however, and made friends of John’s mother and sister and, in particular, John’s business partner, Henry Crane, with whom she sometimes shared sociable evenings when John was on the road. Nonetheless, Lancashire and the family home in Colne long occupied a central place in Elizabeth’s physical and emotional world, a place to which she returned frequently, both bodily and in her thoughts. She remembered home and past events, the grain of the life she had lived there, in her letters. For John, his family home remained nearby, somewhere that was visited frequently. These were the experiences of family with which Elizabeth and John approached their own partnership and the creation of their own domestic space. If attention appears to have strayed from the central theme of loneliness, then it is because we should understand John and Elizabeth’s loneliness when apart as being the product not only of simple absence from each other but also of the specifc absence from each other’s presence together in the physical and emotional space provided by their home. They were agreed on the role that home was to play in their lives together. Home was not simply a place where they lived; home was where the greatest pleasure was to be found and enjoyed, together. They delighted in their children. Their marriage remained loving. We can believe they were happy. And then in the late 1830s the correspondence fell silent, though they had two decades of married life ahead of them, until John’s death in 1859. It is likely that John was fnally able to retire from his life on the road—success had been achieved, wealth accrued, sons had joined him in the business. He and Elizabeth could be together, no longer apart. Meanwhile, the world around them only carried on expanding, the interconnections only growing longer, denser, and more complex, the crowds growing ever larger.

Conclusions I address two tasks in this conclusion. The frst is to consider the distinctiveness of the loneliness experienced by John and Elizabeth, in terms of class and occupation. The second is set their loneliness within a wider cultural history of the nineteenth century. Of course, John and Elizabeth experienced their loneliness as unique, entirely specifc to them and their relationship. Did the fact that John’s absences were driven by his entrepreneurship matter? And was their loneliness coloured by their position as members of the middling sort? Neither question is easy to answer. John was very frequently anxious about business, with good reason. Catastrophic failure was a real possibility for all people in business. Moreover, he was often most forcefully brought up against economic insecurity when away from home—for example, when either orders or credit dried up. And he had baulked at travelling from a young age, despite his mother’s harsh and highly gendered doctrine of manly economic independence. It was an ideal that he struggled to match, emotionally and psychologically, even if he succeeded brilliantly economically, dying a wealthy man. But he knew he would likely return home, unlike the emigrant or the mariner, and return to the consolation of a home and family he was able to support in increasing comfort. If there is a tension in having to leave home in order to have a home, then there was also genuine emotional recompense. At home, John was also able to live a gentler masculinity, one less focused on the sense of ‘character’ his mother had tried to instil in him. In this respect, he was not like 84

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Isaac Holden, whose masculine identity was almost entirely subsumed in his occupation as a ‘man of Busines’.67 Whatever their social status in later life, John and Elizabeth were frmly of the middling sort. It was among the middling sort, those men and women studied by Davidoff and Hall, that the cult of domesticity began its formation, as they sought to distinguish themselves from both the artisan and labouring classes and from the elites. John and Elizabeth are absolutely of this culture, their language for talking about love, marriage, domesticity, and loneliness saturated in tropes found not only in other letter collections but also in popular novels, sermons, songs and other forms of literature of the day. However unique their loneliness felt to them, they expressed it very conventional terms. Moreover, there are very strong similarities between their expressions of loneliness and those of the elite studies by Barclay and Chalus. It is hard to argue that John and Elizabeth’s experience of loneliness was very strongly distinctive because of either class or economic function. Finally, I want to set this case in a wider cultural framing. Samuel Smiles, frst historian and biographer of the generation of entrepreneurs to which John belonged, wrote about loneliness and its relationship to developments that had transformed British society across the century to 1850. For Smiles, loneliness was an urban condition and thus one of modernity; social sympathy and connection were rural and pre-modern. Smiles says the following on his frst encounter with London: ‘It was not the sights . . . but the size of London that impressed me. I was in a great city of some three millions of people, where I was only a stray unit, knowing nobody’. He felt empowered by the experience of anonymity the city offered, but that was not his only response: To most men London may be an utter solitude. . . . They may live there unknowing and unknown. In the midst of millions they may be alone. . . . The people are strangers to each other; each is intent upon his own business, knowing nothing and caring less about what his neighbours are doing, or feeling, or suffering.68 In the country, however, each person ‘is more of an individual; he is also more responsible to those around him’.69 It was clear to Smiles where the blame lay, that is with the class mores and interests of the bourgeoisie and the commercial elite—mores and interests that ‘wilfully invite the worst dangers of urban society. For where is individual worth in this emptiness, facelessness, and loneliness, where genuine human ties wilt before sham?’70 Smiles’s words help us better locate John and Elizabeth’s experience of loneliness in a wider set of forces. John was a man abroad in the world, writing home of the great bustle he experienced in cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, even as he and Elizabeth were simultaneously building a shared vision of love in a cottage. In John and Elizabeth met the vectors of many powerful forces—production, exchange, consumption, mobility, growth—reshaping British society in the nineteenth century. Loneliness was not meant to be one of the wages of diligence and success, but it was. The entrepreneur, in the fgure of John Shaw, emerges as a frail and sometimes lonely self.

Notes 1 Samuel Smiles, Self Help (London: John Murray, 1897), ix. 2 This gendered language is deliberate, referring to the entrepreneur as a male gendered construct. 3 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018), 242. 4 John Tosh,‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 331.

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Andrew Popp 5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2018), 229. 6 Tosh,‘Masculinities’, 331. 7 Ibid., 333. 8 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 229. 9 Bound Alberti,‘This “Modern Epidemic”’, 243. 10 John Tosh, ‘From Keighley to St Denis: Separation and Intimacy in Victorian Bourgeois Marriage’, History Workshop Journal 40 (1995): 193. 11 Dean Shepherd and J. Michael Haynie,‘Birds of a Feather Don’t Always Flock Together: Identity Management in Entrepreneurship’, Journal of Business Venturing 24 (2009): 317, 318. 12 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 229. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 324–5. 15 Ibid., 139. 16 Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 202. 17 Elaine Chalus, ‘ “My Dearest Tussy”: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle Papers, 1800–14)’, in A New Naval History, ed. Quinton Colville and James Davey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 47–69. 18 Ibid. 19 Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 194. 20 Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 112. 21 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 324. 22 Chalus,‘My dearest Tussy’. 23 Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 193. 24 Martyn Lyons, ‘Love Letters and Writing Practices: On Ecritures Intime in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 4, no. 2 (1999): 236. 25 My treatment of this issue is necessarily brief. See Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 19–21. 26 Mark Seymour,‘Epistolary Emotions: Exploring Amorous Hinterlands in Southern Italy’, Social History 35, no. 2 (2010): 149. 27 Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 205. 28 Andrew Popp,‘From Town to Town: How Commercial Travel Connected Manufacturers and Markets in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 4 (2009): 642–67. 29 Ibid., 660. 30 Shaw Letters, No. 29, Elizabeth Shaw (mother) to John Shaw, 15 June, 1801. GB 150 SHAW, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections. 31 Shaw Letters, No. 30. Elizabeth Shaw (mother) to John Shaw, 30 Aug. 180? (Illegible, but probably 1801). John was raised in an atmosphere in which notions of character and role were explicitly gendered, his mother once advising him ‘to be warm in the pursuit of Business, if you meet repulses follow up and with a cheerful [sic] countenance and modest resolution you will carry the point—you will say I know nothing abought it, but this much I know, that if nature had form’d me of the other sex I would have made a handsome competency ere now’. Shaw Letters, No. 34, Elizabeth Shaw (mother) to John Shaw, 27 Feb. 1802. 32 Shaw Letters, No. 16, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 28 Nov. 1819. 33 Shaw Letters, No. 12, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 9 Apr. 1816. 34 For all details of the journeys, see Popp,‘From Town to Town’. 35 Popp,‘From Town to Town’, 665. 36 Shaw Letters, No. 17, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 10 May 1821. The Fremantles’ letters also mentioned children’s expressions of emotions on absent parents:‘I feel quite at a loss & wretched alone—poor little Tom distressed me many a time in the course of the day enquiring when his Papa would come home again’. Chalus,‘My Dearest Tussy’. 37 Shaw Letters, No. 40a, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, 1813. 38 Shaw Letters, No. 49, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, ND. 39 Shaw Letters, No. 12, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 9 Apr. 1816. 40 Shaw Letters, No. 21, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, 18 July 1812.

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Entrepreneurship, Absence and Loneliness 41 Shaw Letters, No. 79, Elizabeth Shaw to Thomas Wilkinson, 23 July 1832. Shaw Letters, No. 18, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 17 Dec. 1821. 42 Shaw Letters, No. 40a, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, 6 June 1813. 43 Shaw Letters, No. 47, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, 11 Mar. 1816. 44 Shaw Letters, No. 48b, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, 16 Apr. 1816. 45 Karen V. Hansen, ‘ “No Kisses Is Like Yours”: An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Gender and History 7, no. 2 (1995): 153. 46 Shaw Letters, No. 16, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 28 Nov. 1817. 47 Shaw Letters, No. 79, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 13 Aug. 1818. 48 Shaw Letters, No. 20, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 12 May 1822. Tosh has argued that men such as Isaac Holden ‘did not necessarily disparage the comforts of home, but they gave little thought to domestic concerns’. This was not true of John Shaw. Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 202. 49 Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 142. 50 Chalus,‘My Dearest Tussy’. 51 Tosh,‘Keighley to St Denis’, 194. 52 Shaw Letters, No. 10, John Shaw to Elizabeth Wilkinson, 25 Dec. 1812. 53 Popp, Entrepreneurial Families, 11–12. 54 Wilkinson Ms No. 28, Elizabeth Wilkinson to John Shaw, 25 Nov. 1812. 55 Hansen,‘No Kisses Is Like Yours’, 160. 56 Shaw Letters, No. 12, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 9 April 1816. 57 Karen Harvey,‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 21, no. 3 (2009): 523. 58 Harvey,‘Men Making Home’, 525–6. 59 Shaw Letters, No. 28, Elizabeth Wilkinson to John Shaw, 25 Nov. 1812. 60 Ibid. 61 Shaw Letters, No. 10, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, 25 Dec. 1812. 62 Shaw Letters, No. 29, Elizabeth Shaw to John Wilkinson, 1 Jan. 1813. 63 Shaw Letters, No. 6, John Shaw to Elizabether Wilkinson, 21 Nov. 1811. 64 Wilkinson Ms No. 8, Elizabeth Wilkinson to John Shaw, 15 Oct. 1811. 65 Wilkinson Ms No. 16, Elizabeth Wilkinson to John Shaw, 25 Mar. 1812. 66 Shaw Letters, No. 30, Elizabeth Shaw (née Edwards, mother) to John Shaw, 15 June 1801. 67 Tosh,‘From Keighley to St Denis’, 204. 68 Samuel Smiles, The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1905), 78. 69 Samuel Smiles, Life and Labour (London: John Murray, 1887), 356–7. 70 Kenneth Fielden,‘Samuel Smiles and Self-Help’, Victorian Studies 12, no. 2 (1968): 171.

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6 DAVID HUME AND THE DISEASE OF THE LEARNED Melancholy, Loneliness and Philosophy Charlie Huenemann When David Hume was in his early twenties he drafted a letter to a doctor of some renown, hoping to gain both a diagnosis and some encouragement (Letter 3, March or April, 1734).1 We have no reason to think he ever sent the letter; perhaps, as E.C. Mossner suspects, just writing the letter provided Hume with all the answers he needed.2 As we would put it in today’s terms, Hume was evidently suffering a form of depression, exacerbated by the extraordinarily high expectations he had set for himself. The encouragement he ended up receiving—perhaps at his own hand—was that he had only to embark upon a more active and social lifestyle and not stew overly much in the dry and obscure matters of philosophy. Nevertheless, within the next fve years he managed to write and publish A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), a lengthy work replete in the dry and obscure matters of philosophy and developed in himself a famously genial disposition in which his many friends and acquaintances took great pleasure. The surprising story of Hume’s own success in mental health not only is gratifying but also reveals the social conditions of melancholy and its attendant loneliness in Europe of the eighteenth century. It further invites us to consider how the peculiar psychology of philosophers has been understood even from ancient times. Finally, it opens a window into the personal context of Hume’s own philosophy and its distinctive tone that is at once profoundly sceptical and cheerfully easy-going. And so while this chapter’s focus is on Hume, we shall fnd much along the way that contributes to our understanding of these broader historical and philosophical matters. The plan is as follows. The chapter will frst examine Hume’s letter of 1734 and use it as an occasion to gather a better understanding of melancholy and loneliness as they were conceived at the time. Even as a young man, Hume was an extraordinarily acute observer of human passions and well-informed in his effort at self-diagnosis, so there is a sense in which this letter provides an informative diorama of the psychology of his day. It will then turn to Hume’s Treatise and to a relevant passage from the Enquiry, which illustrates the signifcance of both melancholy and loneliness for the practice of theoretical philosophy and for Hume’s own attempt to frame a ‘Science of Man’. Finally, it will turn to conclusions to be drawn from Hume’s discussion regarding the deeply informative relationship between loneliness and philosophical refection (Figure 6.1).

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Figure 6.1 David Hume. Print made by Joseph Collyer, 1748–1827, after Thomas Stothard, 1755–1834, undated. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Chauncey Brewster Tinker, B1975.6.17.

Letter From a Young Philosopher In 1734 Hume was living alternately in Edinburgh and at his family’s home in Chirnside (near Berwick-upon-Tweed). In the previous years he had fnished his university studies, abandoned religion, abandoned plans for a career in law and embarked upon the project of becoming a man of letters. But then a series of infrmities set in which led eventually to his writing the previously mentioned letter to a physician.

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In this letter Hume provides a careful account of his intellectual and physical development. He remarks that he discovered his inclination to ‘Books of Reasoning & Philosophy, & to Poetry & the polite Authors’ when he was in his mid-teens. Along with this inclination he found in himself a boldness to think through these questions for himself as a philosopher, but after three or four years of this effort, his ‘Ardor’ was suddenly extinguished. He found that his efforts to fashion himself into a philosopher were useless and ineffectual: [Philosophical inquiries] are exceedingly useful, when join’d with an active Life; . . . but in Solitude they serve to little other Purpose, than to waste the Spirits, the Force of the Mind meeting with no Resistance, but wasting itself in the Air, like our Arm when it misses its Aim.3 Hume consulted a local physician, who warned him against ‘the Vapors’, a warning he ignored at the time. But then he noticed in himself a new symptom—‘a Ptyalism or Watryness in the mouth’—which made him reconsider. He returned to the physician who laughed and told Hume,‘I was now a Brother, for that I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned’, a clear reference to melancholy. Hume still was not convinced of the diagnosis, since he did not experience any ‘lowness of Spirit’, but he began a daily regimen of bitters, ‘Anti-hysteric Pills’, a pint of claret and eight to ten miles of horseback riding. Over the course of seven months, the new lifestyle seemed to help. Thereafter, he maintained a regular diet, reduced his riding to two or three times a week and walked every day. His appetite then suddenly increased, and he gained a few pounds and a cheerful countenance. People around him found him a better companion than before. He experienced some minor palpitations of the heart and continued to experience ‘a good deal of Wind in my Stomach’, which was usual and did not trouble him. He visited some mineral baths, renewed the ingestion of bitters and pills and added some ‘Anti-scorbutic Juices’.4 While maintaining this health regimen, he returned to his philosophical studies. He now believed himself capable of making progress where previous philosophers had failed by turning his attention to a careful study of human nature. He ‘scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own Inventions’.5 And so it seemed his youthful ardour for philosophy had returned. But now he encountered a new problem, which was the occasion of this letter. He knew he had to assemble his writings into a coherent work but found himself unable to do so. His problem, he believed, was not ‘Lowness of Spirits’ but a ‘Weakness’. He writes that in his reading of ‘French Mysticks’ he had learned that they had often complained of ‘a Coldness or Desertion of the Spirit’, which seemed to parallel what he was experiencing, but unlike them he had not yet ‘come out of the Cloud’. He was at the point of giving up on the ‘Pretensions of the Learned’, at least for the time being, and turning instead towards the more active life of a merchant: ‘to engage myself, as far as is possible, in that Course of Life, & to toss about the World, from the one Pole to the other, till I leave this Distemper behind me’.6 Indeed, Hume’s immediate plan was to move to Bristol to begin this new life as a merchant. But he thought he would frst consult this unnamed, learned physician to gain the beneft of his advice and to fnd out whether the physician believed a recovery to be likely. It must be borne in mind that Hume was only twenty-two years old when he drafted this letter and, as much as we should admire his intelligence, his acuity of insight and his grace and good humour in turning a phrase, we should also recognize that, like many twenty-somethings, he was full of himself and seeking external confrmation of his own genius. He shows little doubt that he is making new progress where the ancient traditions of philosophy have failed and that 90

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his thoughts once properly organized were deserving of ‘the Attention of the World’.7 He has no complaint other than his own inability to transform his scribbles into a recognizable masterpiece—a complaint not unknown among ambitious young scholars. Were it not for the fact that Hume did indeed go on to write several recognizable masterpieces of philosophy, we would read this letter as an all-too-common complaint of a young person beginning to come to grips with the fact that he just was not as special as he thought he was.

The Disease of the Learned That Hume wrote this letter to a physician, noticed the symptoms he mentions and took on the remedies he did tells us about how the infrmities he was experiencing were conceived at the time. We might begin with ‘the Disease of the Learned’. This particular phrase may have originated with this unnamed physician or be found in sources not yet identifed, but the association of being learned with suffering from melancholy has ancient roots. Aristotle (or perhaps pseudo-Aristotle) asks in the Problems (Book XXX, section 1): Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened among the heroes?8 The ancient author goes on to explain that when an atrabilious temperament, caused by an excess of heated black bile, combines with a particular mix of humours, the result is ‘men of genius’— cheerful, imaginative and erotic—who will then become despondent and even suicidal when the black bile cools and the enthusiasm is lost. As documented by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, the association of being learned with suffering from melancholy was reinforced in a great variety of texts extending from the ancient world through the Middle Ages.9 By the time of Robert Burton’s celebrated Anatomy of Melancholy (frst published in 1621), it seemed quite clear that the life of study leads directly to melancholy. Quoting an ancient source, Burton relates that the life of the scholar: dries the brain and extinguisheth natural heat; for whilst the spirits are intent in meditation above to the head, the stomach and liver are left destitute, and thence come black blood and crudities by defect of concoction, and for want of exercise the superfuous vapours cannot exhale.10 The superfuous vapours lead to all of the symptoms of melancholy—the lowness of spirit, loss of purpose, diffculty in sleeping, inability to engage in productive work and unsociability. Furthermore, while scholars busy themselves with books and ideas, they fail to gain any practical skills that will support their lifestyles and so must turn to unlearned patrons for even the most minimal support, subverting their pure passion for knowledge to whatever is favoured by these wealthy but unlearned philistines. There is plenty of cause here for melancholy, as Burton discusses at length. By the time that young Hume drafted his letter, physicians were no longer taking humoral theory seriously. But there was still widespread discussion of melancholy, or the vapours, as some sort of iatrochemical or iatromechanical medical condition that produced a wide variety of symptoms ranging from lowness of spirit, sadness and inability to focus to convulsions, frenzy and even suicide. Melancholy was seen as a disease affecting only people of the highest sort or people 91

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with suffcient learning, delicacy and sensitivity to be subject to it.11 Common labourers were thought incapable of suffering from melancholy, and so to have it was a mark of distinction.12 There was not a clear consensus among physicians as to its treatment, though changes in diet, more vigorous exercise and various pills were frequently prescribed. George Cheyne’s 1733 The English Malady provides interesting insight into Hume’s account of his symptoms. Cheyne was a Scot himself, born near Aberdeen and educated at Edinburgh before moving to London and beginning his practice there in 1701. The English Malady, written towards the end of his career, was immediately popular as a handbook for laypeople to help them to understand their own illnesses and implement Dr Cheyne’s recommendations (which consisted more often than not in more exercise, a diet of milk and vegetables, regular vomiting and more moderate drinking). Cheyne discusses a spectrum of diseases and complaints, but ‘the English malady’ itself refers to chronic nervous conditions like melancholy that arise in populations as they advance in learning and sophistication. Too much refnement led to the demise of the Greeks and the Romans, he supposed, and in his estimation the English were rivalling or surpassing the ancients in their degree of civilization, and so were now experiencing a spike in cases of melancholic individuals: Now since this present Age has made Efforts to go beyond former Times, in all the Arts of Ingenuity, Invention, Study, and Learning, and all the contemplative and sedentary Professions . . . the Organs of these Faculties being thereby worn and spoil’d, must affect and deaden the whole System, and lay a Foundation for the Diseases of Lowness and Weakness.13 The English malady, in short, is a physical and mental depression brought on by enjoying the fruits of an overly advanced civilization. The earlier physician Hume encountered seems to have agreed with Cheyne’s suggested treatment for melancholy. Loss of energy and feelings of ineffectualness are most obviously signs of melancholy, though Cheyne also observes that ‘Ptyalism or Watryness in the mouth’ is invariably present in early stages of the disease.14 And if Cheyne were to be believed, Hume would be rightly concerned about the sudden onset of this particular symptom, as melancholy can advance to a more serious second stage (delusions, instability, loss of memory, vertigo and convulsions) and then to a most serious third stage (dropsy, consumption, palsy, epilepsy and death). To forestall these later developments, Cheyne recommends a course of bitters and anti-hysteric pills but also increased exercise, and the best exercise is horseback riding: Certainly riding on Horse-back is the best of all, because of the almost erect Posture, the lesser Weariness, and the more universal and natural Motion of the Organs, with the constant Change of Air: and that the lower Regions of the Body, and the alimentary Instruments and Hypochondras are thereby most shaken and exercised.15 Playing billiards was also recommended. So the regimen Hume adopted was in accord with the medical understanding of melancholy at the time. Moreover, it should be noted that his worry was not just over his inability to write a philosophical masterpiece but also over the possible advance of his condition to much more serious stages. Hume compares his condition to that of ‘the French Mysticks’, and Mossner connects the reference to Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670–1742), whose 1719 Réfexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture Hume seems to have been reading at the time.16 Dubos makes many observations about the nature of genius that young Hume would have appreciated, but there is nothing in 92

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Dubos’ work to suggest any mystical overcoming of a ‘coldness & Desertion of the Spirit’. More probable is Adam Potkay’s suggestion that Hume had in mind Madame Guyon, a French mystic whose works were at the centre of a protracted dispute between Archbishop Fénelon and Bishop Bossuet in the court of Louis XIV.17 But what is particularly interesting is that Hume goes on to assimilate both the mystics’ religious passion and his own ardour for philosophy with an emotional force that can disrupt one’s nervous system: As this kind of Devotion depends entirely on the Force of Passion, & consequently of the Animal Spirits, I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty parallel, & that their rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Refections, & that warmth or Enthusiasm which is inseparable from them.18 Both religious fervour and profound philosophical refections might ‘discompose’ the nerves through their passionate force. It is interesting that Hume was reading the mystics at least in part as a psychologist, assessing their nervous conditions and fnding points of comparison with his own. An early conclusion he may have drawn is that both religious ecstasy and philosophical inquiry are, at least to some degree, bad for one’s health. If melancholy is a disease, then loneliness serves as both cause and symptom.19 Samuel Butler, writing in 1659, observed that ‘[a] melancholy man is one, that keeps the worst Company in the World, that is, his own; and tho’ he be always falling out and quarrelling with himself, yet he has not power to endure any other Conversation.’20 With the lowness of spirit that is at the core of melancholy, the sufferer does not have the energy to engage with others, and this makes the problem only worse, as the sufferer is left alone with their own poor company. As we shall see in the next section, in Hume’s own refections, his melancholy makes him ‘a strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly aband’d and disconsolate’.21 It is clear that Hume is thinking of what would now be called ‘loneliness’, though that is not the term he uses. The OED suggests that while ‘lonely’ was in common use at this time as an adjective, its primary meaning was the quality of being alone or solitary; in this sense, a tree could be lonely if alone in a feld. The term was not used to mark the emotion of feeling dejected for lack of company until the nineteenth century. Obviously, this does not mean that people prior to the nineteenth century did not feel lonely. But it does mean that they would not have used the term.

‘Nature Herself Suffces to That Purpose’ Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739–40, is a lengthy work consisting of three books covering human understanding, passions and morals (Figure 6.2). It is a famously sceptical work; as Hume himself writes in an abstract for the work, ‘the philosophy contained in this book is very sceptical, and tends to give us a notion of the imperfections and narrow limits of human understanding’.22 The overall conclusion of the work is ‘that we assent to our faculties, and employ our reason only because we cannot help it. Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.’23 The Pyrrhonian sceptic, in Hume’s mind, is one who allows certainty about nothing—not even the claim that nothing is certain. But human beings are not suited by nature to live with such scepticism. A brief review of Hume’s conclusions reveal why this should be so. Experience, according to Hume, is composed of discrete elements. The external world is conveyed to us as an aggregate of coloured patches, scents, tastes, sounds and textures, which are mixed with impressions of our own 93

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Figure 6.2 Title Page, A Treatise on Human Nature, Vol. 1: Of the Understanding (London: John Noon, 1739).

condition, such as individual episodes of joy, pain, fear, hope, desire, aversion and so on. We may observe resemblances among these elements of experience, as well as their conjunctions in space and in time, but the discrete quanta of experience do not imply anything beyond themselves. We may experience a patch of red combined with a round shape and a sweet taste, and we may call this combination ‘an apple’, but to posit that there is also, separate from this combination, an actual apple existing on its own, is to go beyond anything presented to us by our senses. We may experience a fash of lightning and witness a tree bursting into fames, but to believe that the fash 94

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caused the fre, or that the two events were joined by anything more than coincidence, is again to go beyond anything present to the senses. ‘All perceptions are distinct’, Hume writes in the appendix to the Treatise:‘They are, therefore, distinguishable and separable, and may be conceiv’d as separately existent, and may exist separately, without any contradiction or absurdity.’24 The world Hume is able to construct from the atomic elements of experience has no lasting objects, no causal connections among experiences and not even subjective selves since, in fact, all we ever experience when we try to observe a self, mind or soul is nothing more than a bundle of atomic experiences. But obviously, the world of ordinary human experience is much more than the world constructed by Hume, furnished with countless objects, selves, other people and an intricate web of causal infuence. How are we able to generate this additional content? Through nature and custom, Hume argues. Humans cannot live by reason alone, and they cannot help but to form notions of substance, of selves and of causal necessity, projecting their own passions and sentiments into a world beyond their senses and inventing for themselves a world richer than what experience provides.25 Our nature includes psychological faculties that reach beyond what reason can provide in order to secure a more practical mental economy for us, despite the fact that there is no rational justifcation for it. Psychology and biology take the lead when logic and epistemology fall short. It is not as much as an Enlightenment philosopher should hope for. If one were hoping for a practical form of life founded upon a rational understanding of one’s own circumstance, one will not fnd satisfaction in Hume’s conclusions. Hume himself writes as if he is devastated at the end of Book 1 and can barely continue his voyage into Books 2 and 3: Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffdent for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehension. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out to immensity. This sudden view of my danger strikes me with melancholy; and as ‘tis usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair, with all those desponding refections, which the present subject furnishes me with in such abundance.26 Later, at the end of Book 2, Hume offers an account of intellectual curiosity which provides a psychological explanation for the despair he exhibits in the previous passage. He writes that we love to engage in the operations of reason, but only when we also believe there is some point to it and some chance of our success. As soon as it becomes evident that our efforts are doomed to fail, we lose all interest; in Hume’s terms, we become ‘careless’ and ‘inattentive’.27 In this regard, he claims, philosophy is like hunting or gaming: so long as we believe we can obtain our quarry or win at a game, the efforts are meaningful, but as soon as we learn that no success is possible, our efforts lose all purpose, and it is impossible for us to continue making them. Once we are in the know, a snipe hunt becomes altogether impossible. But the despair Hume expresses at the end of Book 1 is far more dramatic than his philosophical conclusions warrant. After all, Hume was thoroughly aware of the ancient schools of scepticism and the annihilating power of their arguments, and his readers were as well. The 95

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realization that humans cannot provide rational justifcation for much of what they believe could not have been news to anyone. Why then should Hume cry out with such feelings of extraordinary devastation—as if he were Robinson Crusoe stranded on his Island of Despair?28 A plausible answer is that Hume was not merely confronting a familiar philosophical disappointment but also illustrating the way in which intense philosophical activity leads to—as he makes explicit—the passion of melancholy. Again, for emphasis, Hume was not just sorry to learn that an empiricist’s epistemology falls short of what John Locke had promised; no one can feel shipwrecked over that unsurprising realization. He was aiming to convey the fact that when anyone engages in the sorts of efforts, he makes over the course of Book 1 of the Treatise, one will fall victim to melancholy. This is a sensible point to make at this specifc juncture as Hume transitions in the Treatise from the abstruse philosophical questions of Book 1 to Book 2, which is a discussion of human passions. Just after the longer passage quoted earlier, Hume continues with an even more dramatic expression of the loneliness brought on by his philosophy: I am frst affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly aband’d and disconsolate. Fain wou’d I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side.29 In this report, Hume’s philosophical studies have left him feeling monstrous and alone. He would seek out companionship but feels unsuited for it; he would call others to join him, but no one in their right mind would want to share the place he occupies, besieged by a storm on all sides. He devotes the next fve paragraphs to attempts to argue himself out of his sceptical conclusions, only to realize that he has put into doubt the very reasoning that might rescue him, and he realizes moreover that he cannot set aside his attempts to reason without landing in ‘the most manifest absurdities’:‘We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all.’30 He is therefore in an entirely hopeless position: The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion as even more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my own existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any infuence, or who have any infuence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.31 The intensity of his own intellectual efforts leading to the heating of his brain, and the deep darkness he feels himself placed within, together with his inability to make any decisions or take any action: this is a textbook expression of melancholy. Such melancholy—and its modern descendent, depression—is impervious to reason, and Hume is sadly correct to conclude that his own efforts to overcome it by arguing with himself will come to nothing.

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But rescue arrives in the very next paragraph: Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffces to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impressions of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot fnd in my heart to enter them any farther.32 It is nature that rescues Hume from his philosophical melancholy, in what is perhaps the most profound and at the same time most pedestrian truth recognized by any philosopher: that the deepest philosophical meditation is only a mood that will pass as soon as one has the chance to be with other people. It is no argument or principle that saves Hume from his scepticism, but the chance to go out for dinner. One should not underestimate the importance of going out for dinner, especially in a culture as obsessed with sociability as both Scotland and England in the time of Enlightenment. As population grew in Scotland and became more urban over the eighteenth century, public houses became crucially important as places where people gathered to fnd and secure their places in social networks and hierarchies. In these pubs, clubs arose: Anthony Cooke observes that in Edinburgh, in 1750, there were more than 200 clubs, ranging from the Society for the Improvers of Knowledge of Agriculture to the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland.33 Later in his life, Hume was a member of several such clubs and societies, most notably the Poker Club, whose aim was to stir up discussion over lively questions of the day. If the younger Hume felt that philosophical effort needs to meet with resistance in order to feel like something more than wasteful motions in empty space, the older Hume answered that need by going out to crowded pubs for dinner, games and conversations with friends. The remainder of Hume’s discussion, the conclusion of Book 1 of his Treatise, is written from a quite different and more relaxed point of view. Nature has asserted itself and cured his melancholy; the only task remaining is to moderate his scepticism in such a way as to make it a meaningful and useful check upon anyone’s pretensions to dogmatic certainty. The darker and more disturbing effects of scepticism have been dispelled, and there remains only what he will later call a mitigated scepticism, which allows him to engage in intellectual discourse, to raise objections to others’ dogmatic assertions and to believe just enough in what nature inclines us to believe so as to be sociable and agreeable:‘If I must be a fool, as all those who reason and believe any thing certainly are, my follies shall at least be natural and agreeable.’34 This more relaxed attitude towards philosophical inquiry makes its way into the frst section of Hume’s more popular digest of the Treatise, his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): It seems, then, that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race . . . Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.35

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The ‘mixed kind of life’ is a dialectic between our philosophical curiosity and the requirements we have as social beings. As philosophers, we employ our intellects in seeking out explanations, causes and theories, but the lifestyle such research requires is not sustainable. As we have seen, Burton observed that the life of the scholar ‘dries the brain and extinguisheth natural heat’: we become lonely and lose motivation and despair over the value of what we discover. Matters are made only worse when sceptical doubts arise, making us feel as if all our efforts have amounted to nothing. But it is at this point that ordinary life intervenes, and we have occasion to meet with other people, converse, joke and redirect our minds from scholarly pursuits to the pleasures of company. Norman Kemp Smith describes this dialectic as balancing the vulgar with the philosophical: We cannot adjust the two principles [i.e. vulgar and philosophical] to one another, and also may not prefer either to the exclusion of the other. We successively assent to each. Both are natural to the mind, and both are necessary for its proper functioning; and it is through the balancing of each against the other, with an interdict against the universalising of either of them, that Nature preserves in health and equilibrium the complex economy of our human constitution.36 Balancing the philosophical with the vulgar is central to the ‘Science of Man’ Hume aims to establish in the Treatise. John O. Nelson observes that Hume’s Science of Man is limited by itself, in a sense: that is to say, the limits to knowledge uncovered through the Science of Man are meant to apply to the Science itself.37 In that Science, our dispassionate comparison of images and ideas is affected by our own passions and emotions, as when we feel the drive to satisfy our curiosity but also as when we feel discouraged and seek remedy for that discouragement. The balance of emotional antinomies is as much a part of his Science of Man as is his careful scrutiny of matters of fact and relations of ideas. Similarly, Don Garrett argues that our eventual attainment of emotional equilibrium allows us to continue to value theoretical inquiry. Humans have philosophical curiosity by nature—or at least some of us do—and even though we cannot remain in this mode for any lasting time, our respite from it encourages us to return again to the life of reason, even after experiencing the melancholy it occasions.38 To ‘be still a man’, as nature enjoins, means taking a break from one’s studies and heading down to the pub. It is as necessary to the life of the mind as access to a library.

Hume, Loneliness and Philosophy According to Hume, extended philosophical meditation causes melancholy because it is an unnatural activity. As his Science of Man is meant to establish, we end up believing in the continued existence of bodies and in the causal connections among objects and events not through any species of philosophical reasoning. Indeed, were we to limit ourselves to what can be proven to exist philosophically, we would be left with not very much: feeting impressions, pale ideas drawn from them, and passive recognition of resemblance and contiguity among them. That is to say, nothing in our experience would suggest to us anything outside the narrow limits of our own sensations. But nature leads us to assert that there are objects outside our experience, enduring through time, and causing our sensations, and also to assert that causes bring about their effects with a necessity that is entirely their own. To say that ‘nature leads us’ is to say that it is due to some feature of our own psychology, a feature which, for all we can know, does not track truth. Hence, to rein in our natural inferences and restrict ourselves only to what truly follows from our experience costs us mental effort, according to Hume, and this incurs two further costs. 98

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Firstly, our mental faculties are strained—blood heated, bile warmed and so on—and this causes melancholy. Secondly, the nature of our philosophical restrictions, together with the consequence of melancholy, make us unft for human company, and we may feel ourselves to be uncouth monsters. For who can enjoy dinner and a game of backgammon while not affrming the reality of our dining companions, the food we eat, the nourishment we expect it to provide, the enduring nature of the backgammon pieces and the continued stability of the furniture we sit upon? The sceptic’s life—which is to say, the life of one who lives solely by reason—is impossible to live. The good news, according to Hume, is that we cannot thwart nature for long. Our efforts at mental discipline eventually fail, and we return to our philosophical unjustifable and perfectly natural assumptions about who we are and what the world is. Though we may not endorse Hume’s narrow empiricism, and though our epistemology may be both less demanding (in terms of certainty) and more generous (in terms of what can be justifed), we may be inclined to agree with Hume’s account of the unnaturalness of philosophical refection. Philosophers—and scholars of many kinds—have the job of diving more deeply into conceptual matters than is usual. These matters very often concern parameters of ordinary life that are often taken for granted: the stability of concepts and distinctions, causal hierarchies that establish one set of phenomena as more basic than others, divisions of social roles and classes, appropriateness of emotions in given contexts and so on. The scholar who does not set aside the books or conference presentations for a night out on the town makes for bad company. We will not attribute this to the heating of the brain, but we will attribute it to the fact that the life of a scholar is not a normal life, at least when ‘normal’ means ‘what other people mostly do’. And what makes the scholar’s life abnormal is that it consists in questioning, overturning or at least ‘over-examining’ many of the general platitudes one takes for granted while attempting to be sociable. When we wish to be with others, the unexamined life is the better choice. The consequence is that the disease of the learned is to a large extent a disease of loneliness. Sometimes, of course, loneliness is exactly what we require as we think through our questions and the consequences of possible answers. We join in efforts with others and value both the praise and the corrections they offer, but every scholar must spend some time thinking alone. To understand is to possess an understanding in one’s own mind, to one’s own satisfaction, and developing such an understanding requires many hours of solitary dialogue with oneself. Scholars face the occupational hazard of doing too much of this and feeling themselves to be uncouth monsters when presented with the chance to join others in more convivial surroundings. Hume’s insight into this very human problem urges us to overcome our feelings of alienation and to join our friends once again and restore ourselves in their company: being scholars always, of course, but from time to time also being human.

Notes 1 David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1: 1727–1765, ed. J.Y.T. Grieg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 12–18. Hereafter ‘Letter 3’. There is reason to identify this physician as either George Cheyne (as maintained by the editor of Hume’s correspondence) or John Arbuthnot (as argued by Mossner), with further discussion in John P. Wright, ‘Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to a Physician’, Hume Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 125–41. The matter need not be decided for the purposes of this chapter. 2 E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 86–7. 3 Letter 3, 14. 4 Ibid., 15–16. 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 Ibid.

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Charlie Huenemann 8 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1498–9. 9 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964). 10 Richard Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 302 (pt 1, sec. 2, mem. 3, subs. 15). Hereafter ‘Anatomy’. 11 See Clark Lawlor,‘Fashionable Melancholy’, in Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall-Dickson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 25–53. 12 George Cheyne puts the point more brutally: ‘Fools, weak or stupid Persons, heavy and dull Souls, are seldom much troubled with Vapors or Lowness of Spirits’, in George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge 1991), 52. Hereafter ‘Cheyne’. Hence, Hume’s complaint of melancholy may have also been a bit of status signalling. 13 Cheyne, 54. 14 Ibid., 198. 15 Ibid., 180. 16 E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 71. 17 Adam Potkay, The Passion of Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 32. John P. Wright also suspects Guyon as the referent of Hume’s remark, and notes that Guyon ‘writes of a period of seven years in which she fnds herself in a “state of deprivation of all support, whether exterior or interior”’, leaving her feeling weak and powerless. See John P. Wright,‘Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to a Physician’, Hume Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 128. I am grateful to Jeffrey Smitten, and through him to Felix Waldmann, for pointing out the relevance of Guyon. 18 Letter 3, 17. 19 Burton identifes solitariness as both a cause of melancholy (Anatomy, 379; pt. 1, sec. 2, mem. 5, subs. 3) and as a symptom (Anatomy, 390; pt 1, sec. 3, mem. 1, subs. 2). Cheyne recommends ‘easy and agreeable’ conversation and ‘innocent and inexpensive’ diversion as remedies for melancholy, suggesting that being alone only makes melancholy worse (Cheyne, 182). 20 Samuel Butler, ‘A Melancholy Man’, as presented in The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. Jennifer Radden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 158. 21 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172. Hereafter ‘Treatise’. 22 Treatise, 413. 23 Ibid., 414. 24 Ibid., 399. 25 For a full discussion of the ways in which we project ourselves onto the world, according to Hume, see P.J.E. Kail, Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26 Treatise, 172. 27 Ibid., 288. 28 ‘I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offng, came on shore on this dismal, unfortunate island, which I called “The Island of Despair”; all the rest of the ship’s company being drowned, and myself almost dead’. Further discussion of melancholy in Defoe is found in Stuart Sim,‘Despair, Melancholy and the Novel’, in Melancholy Experience, ed. Ingram et al., 114–41. 29 Treatise, 172. 30 Ibid., 174. 31 Ibid., 175. 32 Ibid., 175. We might compare this passage to Burton’s observation:‘[T]hey complain, weep, lament, and think they lead a most miserable life . . . Yet by and by when they come in company again, which they like . . . they condemn their former mislike, and are well-pleased to live’ (Anatomy, 390; pt 1, sec. 3, mem. 1, subs. 2). 33 Anthony Cooke, A History of Drinking: The Scottish Pub since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 59–60. 34 Treatise, 175. 35 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 3–4. 36 Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941), 493–4.

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The Disease of the Learned 37 John O. Nelson,‘The Conclusion of Book One, Part Four, of Hume’s Treatise’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 24, no. 4 (1964): 512–21. 38 Don Garrett,‘Reasons to Act and Believe: Naturalism and Rational Justifcation in Hume’s Philosophical Project’, Philosophical Studies 132, no. 1 (2007): 1–16.

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7 FALLING IN AND OUT OF PLACE The Errant Status of Solitude in Early Modern Europe Giovanni Tarantino

The archetype of the solitary wandering fgure enveloped in madness, echoed in the synonymic repetition solo et pensoso with which Petrarch (1304–1374) commences the 35th poem of his Scattered Rhymes (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), appears in the sixth book of the Iliad, at the point where Homer recounts the fate of Bellerophon, who, unseated by Pegasus, has plunged into the vast Plain of Aleion in Cilicia. He wanders through it alone, tracing and measuring his inner bewilderment with his own footsteps. Petrarch, who did not know Greek, was able to consult the Latin translation by Leontius Pilatus (d. 1366) procured for him by Boccaccio; he also read Homer’s verse in the codex of Cicero’s Tusculanae disputationes transcribed by his secretary Giovanni Malpaghini. In Cicero’s exegesis, solitudo follows on from the mental affiction of aegritudo (sorrow, anguish, distress): this is the terrible, pernicious disease of the mind that suggests if not demands the ‘errant’ search for solitude, where one can fnd the longed-for tranquillitas (inner peace) and a solid constantia (endurance), a necessary condition for overcoming torment. In Petrarch’s Secret (Secretum), however, Saint Augustine, who engages in a dialogue with the author in the presence of the silent Lady Truth, warns Petrarch to avoid the fallacy of solitude and vehemently condemns sadness, sloth and complacency (tristitia, taedium and amaritudo animi), insidious pitfalls on the path of the solitary man.1 In the warning, there is an anticipatory glimpse—together with an inevitable ambivalence towards solitude (even in the biblical imagination the desert is at once frightening and heavenly)2—of the modern propensity to practice otium (a withdrawal from daily concerns), like Senecan sibi vacare (to make oneself vacant for oneself, as prescribed by the Roman Stoic philosopher), a temporary and intellectually active suspension from public occupations—an ‘ancient’ sensibility irreparably clouded by the intimist, hyper-ascetic and debilitating versions of monks or of the scholarly recluses of the Scholastic age.3 Mocking caricatures of contemplative men could be found across early modern Europe, together with warnings about the debilitating psychological and medical effects of celibate seclusion. While the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) had already illustrated the risks of the scholar’s sedentary life, it was the eighteenth century above all that saw a marked rise in dogmatic medical teachings about the health of scholars. The Dissertation on Workers’ Diseases (De morbis artifcum diatriba, 1700), a pioneering treatise on profession-related illnesses by Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), devotes a withering chapter to the diseases afficting scholars (Literatorum morbis). In it he theorizes that endless mental speculations lead scholars to develop saturnine and 102

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melancholic temperaments, caused by a concentration of animal spirits in the brain area and the thickening of the nerve fbres. And it was the pathological condition of melancholy, according to the Compendium of Medical Knowledge (Dizionario compendioso di Sanità) published in Venice in 1764, which caused them to be ‘melancholic, downcast and sorrowful’, or, sometimes,‘excessively cheerful without apparent reason’; ‘they tremble with fear, they do not have a jot of courage, they are tormented by vigils and love.’4 This chapter offers some refections on the ambivalence with which early modern European intellectuals—inescapably steeped in Christian and humanistic culture refected in a welter of continuities, resistances and contradictions—conceptualized and experienced solitude: as an empty vacuum on the verge of a divine flling or a cosmic fellow-feeling, as a pathology, as a stage of civilization, as temporary respite from the cares of life, as an essential requisite for consciously embracing the human condition or as the prelude to penetrating social critique. In so doing, solitude was something that they at once yearned for and suffered from, prescribed and condemned, celebrated and feared.

Christian Solitude The Christian appropriation of non-Christian conceptions and practices of solitude, a peculiar feature of the universalistic aspiration and the missionary strategies of the Church of Rome, fnds powerful visual representation in the frescoes by Taddeo Zuccari and his workshop (1565–1566) for the vault of the Room of Solitude in the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola. The iconography of the work was outlined by the historian, humanist and Augustinian friar Onofrio Panvinio (1530–1568) and fnalized by the writer and translator Annibal Caro (1507–1566), who left a detailed description in a letter dated 15 May 1565.5 Used as a study by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), it is known as the Room of Solitude or the Room of the Philosophers because the paintings on the vault depict characters and events from religious and secular history that offer virtuous examples of solitary life and meditation (Figure 7.1). In the centre of the vault is Amphion, Apollo’s pupil, who rebuilt the destroyed Thebes with the sound of the lyre. Then, there are two prominent and juxtaposed scenes, one depicting Christ and saints coming out of the desert and preaching to the people and the other portraying philosophers, who, out of an ill-placed sense of distinction, separateness and self-suffciency, turn their backs on the viewer and retreat from the world. In the right-hand section, the freplace side, the central panel shows Jesus Christ preaching between Saint John the Baptist and Saint Paul. In the lateral segments the Essenes are on the left—‘a Jewish people’, Caro explains, ‘saintly, chaste without women, solitary and contemplators only of divine and moral matters’—and the Druids on the right. In the centre of the lower band is a panel with Saint Paul of Thebes, the frst hermit, and Saint Anthony Abbot, with a crow bringing them bread. On the left, inside an octagon, is the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) with the inscription POST INNVMEROS/LABORES OCIOSAM/ QVIETAMQ. VITAM/TRADVXIT (after countless labours he devoted himself to a life free from duties and of quietness). Below him, inside an oval is Seneca with the motto PLVS/AGVNT/QVI/ NIHIL/AGERE/VIDENTVR (they do more those who seem to do nothing). Depicted on the right, inside an octagon, is Aristotle holding an epigraph with the words ANIMA FIT/SEDENDO ET/QVIESCENDO/PRVDENTIOR (by stopping and resting the soul becomes wiser) and, at the bottom in an oval, Menander with a theatrical mask to one side and the motto VIRTVTIS/ET LIBERAE VITAE/MAGISTRA OPTIMA/SOLITUDO (solitude is an excellent master of virtue and free life) (Figure 7.2). 103

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Figure 7.1 Vault of the Room of Solitude in the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, detail of Jesus Christ. Source: Reproduced by permission of Direzione Generale Musei Lazio—Palazzo Farnese—Caprarola (VT).

On the left-hand side of the vault, the central fgure depicts some anecdotes about pagan philosophers: the sceptic Timon throwing stones at those who disturbed his solitude, a ‘Platonist’ blinding himself so sight does not distract him from pure speculation, and some solitary fgures hidden in the woods who, without showing themselves, put out tablets bearing their writings. In the lateral segments are, on the left, the Indian Gymnosophists, who lived naked in the desert ‘in the act of meditation and discussion’, like the Hyperboreans shown on the right with sacks of rice and four for food. On the left, inside an octagon, is the Roman historian Cato the Elder, with the inscription QVEMADMODVM/NEGOCII SIC/ET OCII/RATIO/HABENDA (as with activity, one also needs a reason for inactivity), and in an oval Cicero with the motto OCIVM/ CVM/DIGNITATE/NEGOCIVM/SINE/PERICVLO (leisure with dignity, activity without danger). On the right, inside an octagon, is a sultan holding an epigraph with the words ANIMVM A NEGOCIO/AD OCIVM REVOCAVIT (he turned his mind from activity to leisure), believed by

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Figure 7.2 Vault of the Room of Solitude in the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, detail of Philosophers turning their backs. Source: Reproduced by permission of Direzione Generale Musei Lazio—Palazzo Farnese—Caprarola (VT).

Vasari to be ‘the portrait of the last great Turk, who took great pleasure in solitude’, hence the identifcation with Suleiman the Magnifcent (r.1520–1566). On the sail-shaped segment of the short side towards the courtyard, there is, in the centre, a tondo depicting the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic inside his barrel; on the outward-facing segment of the short side is a tondo depicting Pope Celestine V, who abdicated in 1294 in order to return to his solitary life. Then there are fgures of exemplary legislators, Numa Pompilius and Minos, of Diocletian, who stepped down as Roman emperor in AD 305 and retreated to his palace on the Dalmatian coast, and fnally, animals commonly associated with solitude, prudence and contemplation: the winged horse Pegasus, a griffn, an elephant, a pelican raising its chicks with its own blood, a snake.6

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The didactic intent of the composition, above all the juxtaposition of the central scenes, was described by Caro in his letter: In one of those in the middle, which is the main one, I would depict the principal and most praised form of solitude, which is that of our religion, which is different to that of the Gentiles; because ours came out of solitude to teach the peoples, and the Gentiles retreated from the peoples into solitude . . . In the panel opposite, I would show, by contrast, the solitude of the Gentiles and I would include various kinds of philosophers, who did not leave the desert but went into it and turned their back on the peoples. . . . I would depict Timon throwing stones at people, I would depict some who, hidden from sight, laid down tablets outside the bushes, with their writings, to teach peoples without having dealings with them.7 The central scenes appear to suggest, then, that Christian religion had turned the quest for solitude from a possible vice into a virtue. As for the ‘nations’ depicted in the triangular segments, they seem to allude to a universal dimension of the concept and practices of solitude, but their position in the vault attributes an ancillary, marginal function to them. Universalistic thought systems, religious or secular, can smooth out difference by encompassing it. But encompassment is always hierarchical, and the implicit hierarchy of cultures and individuals, with those capable of conversing in a developed language being judged positively, also informed subsequent secular discourses on solitude.8

A Stadial History of Solitude? Barbara Taylor, an early modern historian specializing in the history of subjectivity, pointedly observes that there was considerable disagreement in the early modern period, especially during the Enlightenment, about where a philosophical life should be pursued: in solitary settings or in urban ones in the company of active citizens and conversationalists. Taylor emblematizes the terms of the debate by exploring the contrasting views of David Hume (1711–1776) and JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Although thoroughly affected by the ‘disease of the learned’ all his life, Hume claimed, in Taylor’s gloss, that ‘intermittent withdrawal—for religious devotions or scholarly application—might be commendable, but a wholly sequestered existence was pathological.’9 Most signifcantly, Hume embraced the notion of solitude as a primitive, barbaric, brutish inclination unsuited to engaging with the fervid intellectual stimulus of the ‘conversible world’. This was an old Aristotelian topos that attracted fresh interest in the mid-seventeenth century, partly due to Hobbes’ portrayal of the state of nature as feral and solitary and partly as a result of the stadial theory of human development advanced by the Scottish Enlightenment, whereby, in the transition from barbaric and feudal to commercial and polite society, the increasing division of labour and the proliferation of human dealings led to the production and distribution of wealth. As civilization advanced, Hume wrote in his 1751 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: the more social men become: nor it is possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant matter, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations.10 On the other side was Rousseau, who took up Hume’s offer of refuge in England in the 1760s when he was threatened with persecution in France and Switzerland. But the gregarious Hume 106

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found it hard to deal with Rousseau’s reclusiveness, and their relationship soon soured. Hume could see nothing to recommend Rousseau’s isolationism, which he regarded as unhealthy and brutish. When their rift became public knowledge, the London Chronicle published a cartoon showing Rousseau as a savage dressed in a bearskin, which Hume thought apt. Similar charges were levelled against Rousseau by the philosophes, not least Voltaire, who, on reading his 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), accused him of ‘trying to turn us into brutes’. Rousseau’s ideal was actually the life of the so-called savages in traditional societies: l’homme naturel as a critic of urbanized society, where the creation and establishment of new needs degrades the possibilities of autarchy. But the Discourse was understood in simplistic terms and referred to as an idealized image of the solitary natural man. It was even thought of as a clarion call for a ‘return to nature’.11 Taylor concludes: It seems likely that the pathological aloneness Hume discovered in . . . Rousseau played on his own ambivalence about solitude: his often-expressed ‘passion for retreat’ vying with his disapproval of ‘monkish solitude’ and a fear that his own reclusive tendencies might make him unft for polite society, like a ‘Hottentot’ feeing civilization for brute solitude, as one letter suggested.12 The curious but signifcant caricatural reference to the solitary ‘Hottentot’ is a refection, as are Zuccari’s frescos in the Palazzo Farnese, of structures of feeling and cultural practices, including the association of Christ with white European ‘civilization’, in which cultural and racial stereotypes and prejudices were perpetuated and slowly internalized.13 And it is a reference coherent with a secular representation of the so-called Hottentots in particular—though conveniently applied to various identities assigned an inferior racial position—which sought to legitimize a dehumanization of nonreligious ‘others’ into unsocial beasts. The Hottentots were the Khoi (or Khoikhoi) peoples, who lived in South Africa and Namibia and were widely presented as having few if any redeeming features: no comprehensible speech, no religion (both signs of ineptitude in establishing either intra-human or divine-human relationships), poor hygiene and a proclivity for eating raw guts or human fesh, a trope deriving from Willem Lodewijcksz’s illustrated report of Cornelius Houtmam’s Dutch expedition to the Cape in 1595. ‘In understanding’—we read in Olfert Dapper’s 1668 famous, and ambivalent, description of Africa—‘[they] are more like beasts than men: but some by continual converse with European merchants, shew a few sparks or glimmerings of an inclination to more humanity’.14 But two different sets of undated and anonymous seventeenth-century drawings representing the aboriginal people of the Cape of Good Hope, held respectively in the Laurentian Library in Florence and in the South African Library, the latter only discovered in 1986, show that more sympathetic renditions of indigenous sociability were possible and indeed circulated across learned networks in early modern Europe (Figure 7.3). The four Florentine drawings of Khoikhoi came from a cartographer’s studio in Amsterdam and were bought for Cosimo III de’ Medici when he frst visited the Netherlands in 1667–1668. Finely executed in pen and watercolour, they do not convey the idea of a beastly and solitary people at all. Instead, they depict a group of musicians and rhythmically swaying dancers; a woman with a baby clinging to her back, rather than sucking on a teat and stretched over her bare shoulder, as in more familiar monstrous portrayals of the breastfeeding habits of African women; a young male going off to hunt; and other young men preparing for war. During the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, a steady stream of often mutually infuential books on African and Eastern travel rehashed these Florentine prototypes for the Khoikhoi in various ways.15 With the towering exception of Peter Kolb’s monumental Caput Bonae Spei Hodiernum 107

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Figure 7.3 Eijgentlijkke afbeeldinge van de Maniere van Dansen der Naturale In woonderen ofte Hottontotten, aen de Caep de Bona Esperanca, early-to-mid 17th century (Contemporary depiction of the manner of dancing of the Hottentots native to the Cape of Good Hope), Carte di Castello 79. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

(1719), a ‘picture-encyclopaedia of the Hottentots’, a cruder and less idealized version of them was routinely produced to accentuate the ‘savage’ aspect of the Hottentots. In 1746, twenty-seven years after the publication of Kolb’s work, a dramatically abridged version that inescapably tended to emphasize the outlandish aspects of Khoikhoi social life and customs appeared in a popular collection of travel narratives compiled by Thomas Astley in London, titled A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels. In the preface to this work, Astley signifcantly wrote that the ignorance or malice of most former authors had represented the Hottentots as creatures but one degree removed from the beasts, and with scarce anything human about them except the shape: ‘Whereas, in fact, they appear to be some of the most humane and virtuous (abating for a few prejudices of education) to be found among all the Race of Mankind’.16 As for the sheaf of drawings in the South African Library, they were most likely pris d’après nature, or life drawings, as the lot listing for the nineteenth-century sale that brought them back from Europe to Cape Town suggests. They show the Khoikhoi people interacting with one another and with the colonists just before their entire society fatally collapsed due to a smallpox epidemic that broke out in a ship docked at the Cape in 1713. With their emphasis on the sociability and the industriousness of the Khoikhoi—as art historian Julie Berger Hochstrasser convincingly argues— the touching humanity and ‘freshness of real life’flling this ‘most unfortunately overlooked’imagery might have directly infuenced Kolb’s work,17 whereas cultural biases might have informed Hume’s equating of Rousseau’s stubborn isolationism with the Khoikhoi’s social behaviours. 108

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Out of Place: The Traveller’s Solitude If the Abbé de Raynal (1713–1796), in his scathing indictment of European rapaciousness known as A History of the Two Indies (Histoire des deux Indes), famously and radically, at least for the late eighteenth century, took aim at the European lifestyle by exotically characterizing the ‘Hottentot’ way of life (‘Flee, unfortunate Hottentots, fee! Hide yourselves in the forest! The ferocious beasts that inhabit them are less fearsome than the monsters under whose dominance you will fall’), the ‘Age of the Enlightenment’ also saw the emergence of another tradition of paradox, that of theriophily, articulated for the most part through the forms and literary devices of fctional travel literature.18 The term theriophily (which in Greek means love of wild animals) was coined by George Boas (1891–1980) to denote the inversion of human and animal traits, the idea being that animal life offers humankind an exemplary model of conduct.19 The Travels of Henry Wanton to the Undiscovered Austral Regions and the Kingdom of the Apes and of the Cynocephali (I Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre incognite australi, ed ai Regni delle Scimie, e de’ Cinocefali), the four-volume theriophilic social critical novel by Zaccaria Seriman (1709–1784), is an emblematic case, albeit literary, utopian and moralistic, of the emotional, cognitive and refective implications of experiences of sea travel, shipwreck, exile, dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and cultural intermingling. As the main character of the novel, Enrico, did not always ft into the host culture’s conceptual system, it was deemed morally admissible to view him as a commodity and to exploit his alien status. Inevitably, the work also expresses the exile’s feelings of dissatisfaction, a combination of loneliness, nostalgia, regret and the longing to return: I learnt from experience that inconstancy is almost the distinguishing feature of man, because he is incapable of fxing his desires and, being unaware of what makes up human happiness, only those things that he lacks seem to be good; and then, once obtained, he neglects, scorns, and even regrets having desired.20 Seriman was a wealthy Venetian author of Armenian origin, whose family fed anti-Catholic persecution in Persia and arrived in Venice via Jaffa around 1694. Educated in a Jesuit college in Bologna, he became a writer, journalist and publisher. He produced the frst Italian translation of Pope’s Essay on Man. Afficted by a long illness and reduced to penury, he died in Venice on 22 October 1784 in total solitude. His frst literary exercise, Aristippe, a short poem in hendecasyllables upholding the eudaimonistic ethics propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene (whereby virtue is linked to moderate, rational pleasure), apparently had a hostile reception in Venice. In fact, he wrote,‘some fed from my company, and some avoided meeting me, in public streets, perhaps fearing that some poisonous and deadly breath exuded from my body.’21 Like Gulliver’s Travels, Enrico Wanton’s tale starts by describing his family circumstances and station in life. Having had no proper education, he is about to enter a profession he does not like, and he has a very unhappy home life. He decides to run away to sea, where he meets a young Englishman named Roberto, a merchant acting on his father’s behalf. Enrico and Roberto become friends, and the novel, littered with misogynistic remarks, is a celebration of male companionship and friendship. However, their ship is blown off course in a storm and runs aground. Enrico and Roberto manage to salvage their frearms and some books, including Montaigne’s Essays with the highly treasured Apologie de Sebond, and then make for the shore. During their long stay in this land, which they traverse as ‘spectators and as spectacle’, they encounter two highly evolved animal kingdoms, very much like European courts interested in accumulating and displaying the superfuous. If the description of Scimiopoli (Monkopolis) is an 109

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allegorical and biting account of social conventions, especially marriage, of the opulent Venetian patriciate where a young scholar is graphically referred to as ‘the picture of hunger’, the second half of the journey contains a strong utopian element, where the Kingdom of the Cynocephali (reasoning beings with human features but the head of a dog) is ruled by a benevolent despot with the help of philosopher-statesmen. In both kingdoms, they gradually acquire socially prominent positions after overcoming language barriers and, most tellingly, the fear and derision stemming from their inescapable outward diversity. In fact, as Suzanne Kiernan has noted, Seriman operates ‘a double reversal’: Henry and Robert take an alienated view of what is familiar to their author, but ‘the apes regard them as monstrous’.22 To soothe the melancholy brought about by ‘that solitude of affections in which, as in a desert, a man fnds himself when in the midst of unknown and new people’, the prudent Roberto exhorts his friend to develop a cosmopolitan attitude: Man must consider himself a citizen of the world, and should not limit his affections to the narrow confnes of a city, or of his family. We, he added, who live upon the earth, are all the children of a single Father, who is God; so all men are brothers, and any place is the homeland for he who considers himself as he is, that is, man. If you abandon the walls within which you were born, you will not for this lack an earth that embraces you, men who love you and with whom you can forge bonds of society, victuals that nourish you, or a sun that warms you. Divine goodness has not restricted its blessings to our country alone; it has distributed them to everyone, and to all living beings has given the gifts necessary for a life in abundance, and a thousand delights to make it pleasurable.23 There are shades here of the idea propounded by some natural-law theorists to the effect that humans received not only an instinct for self-preservation from God (or nature) but fellow-feeling as well, a form of sociability bringing all humans together in some sort of world community. The third book of Seriman’s Viaggi includes a small map of the Province of Philosophers, a further utopian kingdom (a journey within a journey) separated from the Kingdom of the Cynocephali by a ‘river of gold’. Although the telling name of the capital of this kingdom is Prison of Passions, the disillusionment displayed by those sages who had hoped to pursue their happiness by retreating from the world (one of them is unequivocally named Fuggimondo, or ‘world escaper’), and the more worldly experience of other philosophical practitioners, seem to suggest to Enrico and Roberto that sociality and emotions should not be sidelined by a philosopher aiming to be thoroughly human and that he should instead work towards a kind of ‘tempered hedonism’. Passions are born and will die with us; they form the essence of our heart, they are the machines of our operations. It is impossible to destroy them; and were it possible, the living person would become like a plant, to which, besides vegetation, other faculties seem not to be granted. If someone wishes to totally halt the course of a passion with the idea of destroying it, like a stream it will turn in another direction, and changing name, and path, will, thus masked, cause greater damage. . . . The true antidote consists, then, in directing it to a good end; so with natural actions they will become virtues, while, either by restricting them or by abandoning them to a blind and unreasonable path, they will turn into vices.24 Travelling to, through and from utopia might lead to disillusionment and to a sort of pathetic and inhumane isolationism. Once again, philosophical reclusiveness needs to be temporary and ultimately conducive to a renewed bond with nature, community and our inner self.

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Community in Solitude The Latin terms otium and negotium, denoting the opposition between intellectual leisure and urban affairs and which repeatedly recur in Zuccari’s frescos, were a literary topos that began with the Roman polymath Varro (116–27 BC). The contradiction was resolved, according to this tradition, by life in the ‘villa’, which offered a morally acceptable otium to offset the morally threatening urban negotium: otium was generally understood to be a period of study and refection, for which there was no time during the hustle and bustle of negotium. However, with the advent of modernity and the recurrent celebration of active life and civil conversation, this conception was not infrequently overturned, sometimes even by the same author. Academicians in particular enjoyed setting two opposing arguments against each other, identifying reasons in favour of one and then denying them to the advantage of the other. In the last few months of 1600, for example, the nobleman Cesare Crispolti (1563–1608), canon of Perugia Cathedral and a leading light of the literary and musical academies of the Insensati and the Unisoni, composed three speeches in rapid succession. In them, he frst supported,‘in disapproval of the city’, the advantages of a frugal and solitary life in the countryside, but then he went on to praise the virtues of city life, decreeing their superiority over a life spent in the ‘villa’. The dichotomy between the two settings and the lifestyles associated with them is a theme that has run through literature for centuries. Just think of the second chapter of Book 1 of Petrarch’s The Life of Solitude (De vita solitaria) where the lives of the occupatus (busy man) and the solitarius (solitary man) are compared and the superiority of the latter is then affrmed. The countryside is, on the one hand, the traditional place of rest from the incessant and pressing worries of the city; on the other, it is home to rough peasants, the uncouth and the uncivil, while the city is also the place of urbanity and fne manners.25 In English Renaissance literature, representations of solitary fgures are often intended as a warning not to shun traditional bonds, hierarchies and social commitments in the pursuit of individualism or distinction. But this alienation is not always pictured in wholly negative terms: indeed, there was a real interest in solitariness and rural retreats as something offering scope for social critique. For instance, take the anonymous work published in 1665 in Edinburgh and entitled A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment, and All Its Appendages; such as Fame, Command, Riches, Pleasures, Conversation, &c. The book was reissued in 1666 with a replacement title page containing the author’s name: George Mackenzie (1636/38–1691), a prominent Scottish lawyer and politician, who became lord advocate in 1677. Most copies of this edition were destroyed in the Great Fire of London, as is made clear in a letter from the poet Abraham Cowley—a great lover of solitude—to John Evelyn, who wrote a response to Mackenzie’s book in 1667 claiming that foregoing erudite conversation and refusing to engage in what for him was the inherently public pursuit of virtue reduced men to ‘the category of brutes’.26 Dismissed in the past as immoral or cited merely as a further example of the beatus ille tradition of retirement poetry initiated by the Roman poet Horace, Mackenzie’s work is interesting in the way it uses the retirement tradition to launch a social critique: virtue, which generally occupies a key position in humanist refutations of solitude, Evelyn’s included, becomes a private rather than a public concept. As a response to corruption, greed, factionalism and competition, Mackenzie proposes the idea of community in solitude: ‘one fees from the solitude of conficting interests in society to the solitude of community in rural retreat’.27 There is provision, then, in the classically inspired retirement genre, for a private sphere where controversial and even radical ideas can be freely contemplated in a way that would be impossible in the public, political domain without causing irreparable damage to one’s prospects. Mackenzie’s desire for withdrawal and a community within the self carries distinct overtones of Montaigne’s arrière-boutique solitude of retreating into oneself in search of what a fawed and confict-riven society cannot provide.28 But 111

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paradoxically it is a form of political engagement concealing a yearning for a lost community, and ironically for a work on solitude, the absence of genuine friendship and human engagement in the active life is lamented.29 Likewise, in In lode della villa e in biasmo della città (In Praise of the Countryside and in Censure of the City), Crispolti contrasts the confictual and violent nature of city relations—which, on the basis of a biblical tradition (Gen. 4:17), he links to Cain’s ferocious act of fratricide—with the peacefulness of the countryside, where it is possible to voluntarily isolate oneself from the world, cultivate the ‘admirable sciences’ and take part in the slow life of the rural community ‘without distinction of mine and yours’. In what was his frst academy lesson, there is a glimpse of a peculiar conception of solitude: not mere reclusion in an individual space but the aspiration towards the joint sharing of goods, lifestyles, experiences and emotions within a small and solidaristic community (he evokes the ‘happy Kingdom of Saturn’). In his second lesson, In lode della città e in biasimo della villa, Crispolti, as a pure exercise in rhetorical technique, reverses his position, and it is signifcant that the countryside, now portrayed as fraught with pitfalls for moral integrity and where the norms of civil co-existence seem to loosen, if not disappear, is scorned for ‘having everything mixed up, without distinguishing yours from mine’.30 At the heart of this fctitious controversy is a somehow subversive reconceptualization of the notion of being together with others.31 A few decades later, an Italian exile to England, the Piedmontese freethinker Alberto Radicati Count of Passerano and Cocconato (1698–1737), also had reason to wrestle with the tension between political engagement and solitary withdrawal and to ponder the appeal and humiliation of solitariness.32

Militant Solitude and Social Critique Count Radicati’s exile followed a series of embittering personal experiences. Forced into an unhappy marriage when he was 17, he soon found himself at loggerheads with his young wife and her mother, after his wife received a large donation from his elderly and possibly duped father. The rift deepened and, at the instigation of the ‘two wicked females’, he ended up spending nine months in prison in Ivrea between 1716 and 1717. In the spring of 1718, he decided to escape and wrote to his wife from Genoa, declaring that ‘as you are the sole cause of my misfortune, do not ever think to see me again’. But he did in fact return to Turin shortly afterwards, when he received news of his wife’s ill-health, and she died a few days later after giving premature birth to their third daughter. So at a very young age, he became the guardian of his three young daughters, the administrator and usufructuary of their estate and, in the eventuality of their death, the heir.33 The Radicati fefdom was one of the biggest in Piedmont, and disputes between the noble classes and the ‘communities’ that regulated the administrative life of the ‘men of the land’ were common. Alberto, the ‘frst noble to sensationally rebel against the caste mentality of the nobles’, unhesitatingly supported the ‘men of the land’ because ‘in a monarchical and absolutist government, the nobleman and the plebeian are equally subject to the King, so the King must render equal justice to both the rich man and the poor man, the noble and the peasant farmer’. Radicati’s lost community, in which ‘there is neither mine nor yours’, could only be attained by uncovering prelatic imposture and doing away with property and family, the two social institutions that had thrown the natural equality of human beings most out of kilter.34 For having become embroiled in jurisdictional disputes between the House of Savoy and Rome, Radicati attracted the attention of the Inquisition. Also stripped of royal protection, at the age of 28, he was forced to abandon his property and fee the country for good, initially to London. Personal vicissitudes and exposure to the works of English freethinkers shaped Radicati’s arguments that attacked religious 112

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conditioning in family relations and the conducting of one’s inner life and his claim that one should have the right to commit suicide when a solitary life became too burdensome.35 Barbara Taylor reports that when he was in his early twenties, Hume, who spent most of his time studying, had been medically advised to fortify himself mentally ‘with refections against death, and poverty . . . and all the other calamities of life’.36 He commented that though such daily doses of wisdom might be ‘exceeding useful, when joined with an active life . . . in solitude they serve to little other purpose, than to waste the spirits’. For his own part, Radicati, a lonely and at times suicidal fugitive, turned his own Stoic ruminations into A Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, a radical apology for suicide, which, when published in London in 1732, led to him being taken into custody together with his English translator, Joseph Morgan, and the publisher William Mears.37 An opportune consideration of the condition of the ‘Struldbrugs’, endowed with the frightening gift of not dying but without the privilege of eternal health and youth—Gulliver’s Travels had just been published—gave Radicati the inspiration to celebrate the generosity of Nature, which only grants living beings a limited lifespan. He also boldly ventured to affrm the naturalness of suicide (considering how widespread it is among animals), and the right to commit suicide in certain circumstances. Moreover, he reiterated that all men are equal in that they are all nature’s offspring:‘death alone frees us from the slavery of men, because it makes us all equal, just as nature created us when it brought us into existence’.38 What’s more, in this highly subversive solitary meditation, Radicati very deliberately claimed: A man is no more tied to be a Jew, a Christian, or a Mahometan, on account of his having been circumcised, or baptized, when he was an infant, than if his parents, or the priests, at his birth, had bound him to love (when arrived at man’s estate) a woman to whose beauties or deformities, good or bad qualities, he should be an utter stranger.39 Once again, self-inficted and deliberate loneliness appears intended to nourish social critique and change.

Conclusion Emotions are part and parcel of everyday life and are attracting increasing attention in the social sciences and humanities. In A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, Fay Bound Alberti argues that the notion of loneliness as some kind of almost completely negative social isolation emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and was closely related to the industrial, capitalist and hyper-individualistic society of the time.40 Prior to that, loneliness had typically been viewed as a deliberately chosen and usually admirable state of being alone, which brought calm and peace of mind. As this chapter has shown, this was itself a long-disputed concept, especially when the spotlight was shone on the Christian ideal of a hermit living in isolation, or the persistent claim that an excess of solitary thinking can lead to melancholy, or even the elitism of aesthetic retreats. Nonetheless, solitude was generally regarded as a non-permanent and ‘therapeutic’ period of withdrawal, often into the countryside, from which one then returned as a reinvigorated social being. It also carried with it the notion of constructing an alternative identity and even an alternative society. As Steven Shapin observed in his seminal 1991 essay on solitariness and early modern natural philosophy, most early modern solitudes only rarely denoted complete aloneness. Rather, they involved withdrawal from one type of social setting to another.41 Besides attempting a fresh look at famous debates on philosophical solitude seen through the lens of cultural labelling strategies (the contrasting renditions of the Khoikhoi’s sociability) or the beatus ille tradition of retirement poetry (Crispolti and Mackenzie’s idea of community in solitude), 113

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this chapter focused on two minor Enlightenment fgures and their travel-inspired writings, both of which are, to a certain extent, Swiftian fliations.42 Zaccaria Seriman, the Venetian author of Armenian extraction, wrote The Travels of Henry Wanton, a cross between a novel and a treatise dealing with the laborious and friendless condition of the foreigner without citizenship, while the Piedmontese freethinker Alberto Radicati di Passerano, who was driven into exile by the dangers of the Inquisition, scratched a solitary living, frst in London and then in Holland. Radicati’s Stoic refections on death and Seriman’s fctitious, fantastic tale of the misadventures of a shipwrecked man who gets taught that ‘there is no person in the world less capable of submission than a sage’43 offer poignant testimony of the philosophically and politically fertile loneliness experienced or pursued in the Enlightenment age by those who championed or were thought to advocate nonconformist ideas, to test the limits of obedience and conformity, and nourish the possibility of social critique.

Notes * This essay is based on work undertaken as part of the University of Florence Research Project ‘In Your Face’. 1 Enrico Meroni, ‘Per una genealogia del lessico della solitudine’, in Solitudine e moltitudine. Saggi sulla condizione contemporanea, ed. Giuseppe D’Acunto (Castel San Pietro Romano: ManifestoLibri, 2017), 197–212. Also see Aurelio Musi, Storia della solitudine, da Aristotele ai social networks (Vicenza: Neri Pozzi Editore, 2021). 2 See Christine Göttler’s Introduction to Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, ed. by Karl A.E. Enenkel and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 1–30. As the editors of a 2014 special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Christianity pointedly stated, ‘the collision between withdrawal and engagement is generally considered prefgured in the biblical lives of Martha and Mary as symbols of respectively vita activa (active life) and vita contemplativa (contemplative life) the hierarchical order of which is negotiated and contested throughout the Christian tradition’. See Mette Birkedal Bruun, Sven Rune Havsteen, Kristian Mejrup, Eelco Nagelsmit and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, ‘General Introduction to Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century: Four Case Studies’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity 1, no. 2 (2014): 195–205. 3 An aristocratic kind of monasticism developed though from the fourth century on the island of Lérins in Provence. Viewing the solitude of the cell as ‘the vacuum ready for divine flling’, it led to a Christianization of the ideal of the philosopher and the pagan politician: otium became a space of monastic meditation, the true philosopher was the monk and political engagement became a willingness to exercise ecclesiastical government. See Meroni,‘Per una genealogia del lessico della solitudine’, 300. Also see Johannes B. Bauer, Alle origini dell’ascetismo cristiano (Brescia: Paideia, 1983), 11–47. 4 Quoted in Rosalba Currò, ‘La malattia dei letterati: immaginazione e malinconia nel Settecento’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana 30, no. 2 (2001): 325–40, translation mine. Also see Jean Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie des origins à 1900 (Basel: J.R. Geigy, 1960). 5 See Ernst H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 7–11; Clare Robertson,‘Annibal Caro as Iconographer: Sources and Method’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 160–81; Alessandro Ricci and Carlotta Bilardi, Cartografa, arte e potere tra Riforma e Controriforma. Il Palazzo Farnese a Caprarola (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2021). 6 Alessandro Cremona,‘Stanza della Solitudine o dei Filosof in Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola’ (Rome: Sovrintendenza Roma Capitale, Project ‘Tuscia Farnese’, 2001). 7 Annibal Caro, Lettere Familiari, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957–61), III, 764, 5. 8 See Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich, Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 20–5. 9 Barbara Taylor, ‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal 89 (2020): 1–21. 10 David Hume,‘Of Refnement in the Arts’ (1760), in David Hume: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 271. 11 See Ville Lähde, ‘Rousseau’s Natural Man as the Critic of Urbanised Society’, Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (2009): 80–95.

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Falling In and Out of Place 12 Taylor,‘Philosophical Solitude’, 12. 13 See Giovanni Tarantino,‘Feeling White in the Pre-Modern Western World: Beneath and Beyond’, in The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700, ed. by Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (London: Routledge, 2019), 303–19. Also see Richard H. Popkin,‘The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 3 (1974): 245–62 and Ann Thomson,‘Thinking about the History of Africa in the 18th Century’, in Encountering Otherness. Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Guido Abbattista (Trieste: EUT, 2011), 253–66. 14 Quoted in Julie Berger Hochstrasser,‘A South African Mystery: Remarkable Studies of the Khoikhoi’, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 66, no. 1 (2016): 196–231, at 205. Also see Rowland Raven-Hart, Before van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652 (Cape Town: Struik, 1967); Gitanjali Shahani,‘Food, Filth, and the Foreign: Disgust in the Seventeenth-Century Travelogue’, in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, ed. by Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 106–23; Mariana de Campos Françozo, ‘ “Inhabitants of Rustic Parts of the World”: John Locke’s Collection of Drawings and the Dutch Empire in Ethnographic Types’, History and Anthropology 28, no. 3 (2017): 349–74. 15 See Ezio Bassani and Letizia Tedeschi,‘The Image of the Hottentot in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: An Iconographic Investigation’, Journal of the History of Collections 2, no. 2 (1990): 157–86; Angelo Cattaneo and Sabrina Corbellini, The Global Eye: Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Maps in the Collections of the Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici (Florence: Mandragora, 2020). 16 Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1746). 17 Hochstrasser,‘A South African Mystery’, 218. Also see Ernst van der Boogart,‘De Brys’ Africa’, in Staging New Worlds: De Brys’ Illustrated Travel Reports, 1590–1630, ed. Suzanna Burghartz (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), 95–155. 18 William Womack,‘Guillaume Raynal and the Eighteenth-Century Cult of the Noble Savage’, The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 26, no. 3 (1972): 98–107; Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille,‘The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity’, Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 2 (1997): 1–15; Linda Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001); Nicholas Hudson, ‘ “Hottentots” and the Evolution of European Racism’, Journal of European Studies 34, no. 4 (2004): 308–32. 19 See George Boas, The Happy Beast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933); Hester Hastings, Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, London, and Paris: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936). 20 Zaccaria Seriman, Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi, ed al Paese delle Scimie. Ne’ quali si spiegano il carattere, li costumi, le scienze, e la polizia di quegli staordinari abitanti. Tradotti da un manoscritto inglese, con fgure in rame, tome I (Naples: Alessio Pellecchia, 1756), 7. The Viaggi frst came out in a two-volume edition in Venice in 1749 and then in an expanded four-volume version printed in 1764 under the false imprint of Berne. Quotations from the Viaggi are from a four-volume edition (1756[–75]) printed in Naples and illustrated by Domenico Dell’Acerra (the original engravings were by Giorgio Fossati, a Swiss artist living in Venice); the translations are mine. On the intricate publishing vicissitudes of the Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, see Marino Parenti, Un romanzo italiano del Settecento (Zaccaria Seriman) (Florence: Sansoni, 1948) and the Appendix C to D. Maxwell White, Zaccaria Seriman, the Viaggi di Enrico Wanton: A Contribution to the Study of the Enlightenment in Italy (London: Manchester University Press, 1961). See also Gilberto Pizzamiglio’s introduction to his edition of the Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (Milan: Marzorati, 1977) and Giovanni Tarantino, ‘Othering, Mirroring, and Feeling Displaced in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, in Encounters at Sea: Paper, Objects and Sentiments in Motion across the Mediterranean: An Intellectual Journey Through the Collections of the Riccardiana Library in Florence, ed. Giovanni Tarantino, Giorgio Riello and José María Pérez Fernández (Pisa: Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 2020), 13–29. 21 [Seriman,] Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, III, 203. See also Franco Arato, ‘Zaccaria Seriman, Aristippo e la prigione delle passioni’, in Lo spazio tra prosa e lirica nella letteratura italiana: Studi in onore di Matilde Dillon Wanke, ed. Luca Bani and Marco Sirtori (Bergamo: Lubrina Editore, 2015), 15–26. 22 Suzanne Kiernan,‘The Exotic and the Normative in Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Australi Incognite by Zaccaria Seriman’, Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 28–77, at 62. 23 [Seriman,] Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, I, 11–12. 24 [Seriman,] Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, III, 198. 25 See Lorenzo Sacchini,‘Dalla solitudine della villa alla conversazione della città. Itinerari dell’ozio in una triade di lezioni accademiche secentesche di Cesare Crispolti’, Annali d’italianistica 32 (2014): 137–54. See also Carla Belloni, ‘Cesare Crispolti perugino: documenti per una biografa’, in Michelangelo da

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26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40

Caravaggio. La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Roma, 5–6 ottobre 1995), ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome: Logart Press, 1996), 136–47. See Brian Vickers, ed., Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Mackenzie-Evelyn Debate, Facsimile edn (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1986). See also Irene Basey Beesemyer, ‘Crusoe the Isolato: Daniel Defoe Wrestles with Solitude’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 10 (2004): 79–102. Robert Sayre, Solitude in Society: A Sociological Study in French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 47. In his essay ‘On Solitude’, Montaigne mentions an ‘arrière boutique’, a ‘room at the back of the shop’ where one feels free:‘We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establish there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum’. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 270. Colin S. Macdonald,‘ “Community in Solitude”: The Solitary Self, Social Critique, and Utopian Longing’ (PhD dissertation, CUNY, 2018), passim. Cesare Crispolti, In lode della villa, 59r, as quoted in Sacchini, 145. Petrarch had also, much more assuredly than Crispolti, conceived of solitary life as a means ‘for benefting all men as much as possible’. See Ugo Dotti, Petrarca civile. Alle origini dell’intellettuale moderno (Roma: Donzelli, 2001), 84. Also see Armando Maggi, ‘ “You Will Be My Solitude”: Solitude as Prophecy, De Vita Solitaria’, in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 179–96. See Franco Venturi, Saggi sull’Europa illuminista: I. Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin: UTET, 2005 [1954]) and Giuseppe Ricuperati’s extensive introduction to Alberto Radicati, Discorsi morali, istorici e politici e Il Nazareno e Licurgo messi in parallelo, ed. and annot. Duccio Canestri (Turin: Aragno, 2007). See Giovanni Tarantino, ‘Alternative Hierarchies: Manhood and Unbelief in Early Modern Europe, 1660–1750’, in Governing Masculinities: Regulating Selves and Others in the Early Modern Period, ed. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 209–25. See Piero Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi: Studi sul pensiero piemontese nel Risorgimento (Turin: Edizioni del Baretti, 1926), 14, and Tomaso Cavallo’s introduction to Alberto Radicati, Dissertazione flosofca sulla morte (Pisa: ETS, 2003), 9–63, at 31. In Nazarenus et Licurgos mis en parallele par Lucius Sempronius neophyte—the ffth of his writings, collected together by the author in the Recueil de pieces curieuses sur les matieres les plus interessantes and published in Rotterdam in 1736—Jesus of Nazareth is boldly compared to antiquity’s best-known legislator. Both are presented as champions of a ‘perfect democracy in which there is neither mine nor yours, or superiority of any kind’. In 1737, he died alone in The Hague, where he had been living under the false name of Albert Barin. Radicati, to whom we owe the frst French translation of Swift’s Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Benefcial to the Publick. (1729), was also conscious of the extraordinary rhetorical effectiveness of satirical hyperbole and of apologues featuring animals. In 1734, his novelized autobiography (printed frst in 1730) was republished, with a few small variations and additions, in London, this time with the derisory title A Comical and true Account of the Religion of all the modern Canibals, by Osmin true Believer. The cannibals, of course, were the Catholics. Published together with this text was The Story of Stories. Taken from the Canibal’s Chronicle. This was an adaptation of the ‘Fable of the Bees’ in the Voyages et aventures de Jacques Massé, the famous Spinozist initiation novel published anonymously in 1714 by the Huguenot dissident Simon Tyssot de Patot, in which the Catholic prelates are represented as insidious and ruthless hornets: ‘These crafty hornets are continually flling the heads of the silly bees. . . . All they have to do is to invent some thing to terrify the bees’. See Venturi, Alberto Radicati di Passerano and Ricuperati’s introduction to the 2007 edition of Radicati’s Discorsi. Taylor,‘Philosophical Solitude’, 6. On the polymath Joseph Morgan, see Venturi,‘Alberto Radicati di Passerano’, 157n27, 159–60 and Ann Thomson,‘Joseph Morgan et le monde islamique’, Dix-huitième Siècle 27 (1995): 351–63. Alberto Radicati, A Philosophical Dissertation upon Death (London, 1732), 27–38. Ibid., 89. Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Also see Andreas Rydberg, ‘Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Therapeutics of Solitude in the German Enlightenment’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 5, no. 2 (2021): 259–78.

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Falling In and Out of Place 41 Steven Shapin,‘ “The Mind Is Its Own Place”: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England’, Science in Context 4, no. 1 (1991): 191–218. 42 On Seriman and Swift, see Paolo Quaglia, ‘Struttura unitaria e caratteri swiftiani nei Viaggi di Enrico Wanton’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 160 (1983): 481–505. 43 [Seriman,] Viaggi di Enrico Wanton, III, 187–8.

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8 ‘HERE IN MY LONELINESS, I SUFFER’ Illness, Isolation and Loneliness in the Diaries of Kirsti Teräsvuori (1899–1988) Karoliina Sjö

Loneliness is one of the central themes in the diaries of Kirsti Teräsvuori (1899–1988), a hitherto publicly unknown Finnish diarist who died lonely, ill, poor, and isolated in her old age.1 For Teräsvuori, loneliness was something she possessed when she had almost nothing else left, whether she wanted it or not. When associated with creativity and writing, it was perhaps something inevitable, a necessity to be faced. In this, loneliness, for her, was a lifelong contradiction.2 Teräsvuori was an ambitious, talented and passionate writer but never published her work. She started to keep her diary at the age of seventeen in the autumn of 1916 and continued until her death seven decades later.3 Through her diaries, which are stored in the Literature Archive of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS KIA) in Helsinki, it is possible to engage closely with one lived life, described in millions of words over tens of thousands of pages. Teräsvuori wrote in Finnish, and so it is important to emphasize that the Finnish word yksinäisyys translates both as ‘loneliness’ and ‘solitude’. The concept manifests the emotions of loneliness, but at the same time, it can refer to being alone or being with oneself. In addition, it can mean a lack of (meaningful) social connections. This chapter explores Kirsti Teräsvuori’s growing and changing experiences of loneliness as a young woman. It focuses on the frst part of Teräsvuori’s diary series, which she wrote from 1916 to 1923. Altogether this consists of around 10,000 pages (there are page numbers on every page) of handwritten diary text, as she wrote almost every day. Teräsvuori’s diary entries followed the traditions of journal intime, the form of diary-writing, which developed and became established especially in connection with French tradition during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 In her diaries, she wrote about herself, her experiences, her thoughts and emotions, the so-called inner world. But she also wrote about everyday life, relationships, weather, nature, and her surroundings. She described different social events and circumstances and wanted to document historical events, too. In the end, the form of her diaries was diverse.5 The focus in this chapter is on the ways in which she wrote about her loneliness and how the experience of loneliness developed alongside her experience of illness and isolation. Here, the diaries are approached as a form of autobiographical writing, as a part of the feld of life writing in their historical, social, cultural and textual context. Teräsvuori’s diary offered her a place where she could write and deal with the emotions and experiences of loneliness. It functioned as comfort and company, as well as a way to execute her literary ambition (Figure 8.1). At the same time, as a practice of private 118

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-10

‘Here in My Loneliness, I Suffer’

Figure 8.1 Teräsvuori’s second diary cover. Source: Photo by SKS/Milla Eräsaari. Teräsvuori wrote altogether tens of thousands of pages of diary text in her life. The cover of Teräsvuori’s second diary is beautifully decorated. The rest of her diaries are mainly squared notebooks without special covers.

writing, it may have furthered her experiences of loneliness and separateness.6 Loneliness, here, is understood as an emotion, shaped, experienced (both mentally and bodily) and expressed in a historical, cultural and social context. Thus, its meanings change in time and place. It also should be acknowledged as a complex, contradictory emotional experience, which has not just negative connotations and attributions but is more nuanced.7

Diarist in the Middle of Turbulent Circumstances Kirsti Teräsvuori was born in Kuopio, Finland, in 1899 to the family of Ståhlberg, which belonged to the educated classes and consisted of a long line of priests and civil servants. She grew up in Helsinki. Her father, Henrik Gabriel Ståhlberg (1855–1923), was a customs offcer, and her 119

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mother, Beda Ståhlberg, née Jack (1855–1932), was one of the Swedish-speaking, educated women who joined and acted in many Fennoman-related societies and movements, which aimed to improve the position of women and help poor children, as well as increase the use of the Finnish language at all levels of society.8 Finland had been under Swedish rule until the Finnish war in 1808–1809, when it became part of the Russian Empire. The tsarist authorities of Russia provided autonomy to Finland, and it was during this period that many (intellectual elite) people in Finland started to emphasize and forward, following general European trends, the idea of an independent Finnish nation-state, and the signifcance of Finnish language, culture and identity. The Fennoman movement, which was the name of the Finnish nationalist movement, was predominantly fostered amongst a progressive middle and educated class, who were also largely supportive of girl’s and women’s education and expanding women’s roles in society, although the most important place for women was still seen as at home.9 The signifcance of ‘folk’ and domestic political and cultural issues were in the centre of the movement’s issues. Many of its members were writers, artists and folk culture collectors, for example. In Teräsvuori’s family and home Fennoman ideas also prevailed.10 Finland gained independence in 1917, after which there was a civil war in 1918.11 Thus, these were diffcult and turbulent times in Finnish society. All of these circumstances, as well as the family’s social position and her experiences as a young woman in a modernizing society, had an effect on Teräsvuori’s thoughts, emotions, experiences, possibilities and diary writings. Teräsvuori never married, nor had she children. She suffered from an unspecifed chronic illness that left her weak and frequently ill, although the main reason for her numerous symptoms, typical of the era, was considered to be her ‘bad nerves’. She was unable to fnish her studies or have a salaried job outside her home. She was in the mental hospital, against her own will, for several years in the 1940s and ended up poor and abandoned. In the end, her diary-keeping was, perhaps, the most valuable thing in her life. Teräsvuori died in Helsinki in 1988, after a long, isolated and lonely life.12

Dropping Out of School, Illness and Deepening Loneliness Teräsvuori fell ill and dropped out of girls’ school at the age of 16 in 1916, which marks the beginning, or perhaps continuum, of social isolation and ever-deepening loneliness in her life. Even though Teräsvuori had been very talented at school, the top of her class, she found the place terrible. At the beginning of her frst diary, which is a black memo book, she wrote that ‘the school took all my strengths, desires, hobbies, time; it took even more, my joy of life and youth’. She continued, ‘the school made me a withdrawn, vicious strange person that others did not understand’. ‘I did not relate to my school friends’, she pointed out, and she wrote that she was an outsider and felt lonely. In addition, she felt that some of her teachers treated her and her fellow students badly. The worst year of all was her fnal year of school, 1915–16, before she dropped out, when not a single day went by without crying. ‘And those were not any small cries!’, she wrote miserably in her diary.13 She felt that she lost her health in school and when her debility fnally reached an unbearable state, she left, apparently, in the middle of a spring term, and never looked back.14 In the autumn of 1916, Teräsvuori was sent to the countryside to rest and take care of herself and her health. She lived in the rectory of Ristiina for several months, where there had been other ‘frail girls’, (heikkoja tyttöjä) before.15 Nature was considered a source of health, well-being and mental equipoise, and spending time in the countryside was something her doctor, Karolina Eskelin, the frst woman in Finland who defended her doctoral thesis, had recommended. Eskelin had been ‘at least the fourteenth doctor, who I have been visited in Helsinki’, Teräsvuori told her diary:‘She was the frst doctor, who really understood me correctly.’16 120

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This use of the term ‘frail girls’ was part of a broader Western context of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where girls and women, in particular, were easily defned as fragile and weak in health or physiology. It was a culturally and socially defned norm, especially for women in the middle and upper classes, occasionally to withdraw from society because of different kinds of pain and ‘women’s ailments’. Hysteria and neurasthenia, or in other words, nervousness, were easily adapted to this picture of the times. If this was the case, the ideal of the fragile woman was complex, especially in Finland and other Nordic countries, where diligence and work were usually seen as the foundation of normative womanhood.17 In her diary, Teräsvuori worried that she was perhaps too fragile and ill to do her duties, like cooking, cleaning and knitting: ‘I wish I had the strength and will and possibility to work today.’18 When she was too distressed and could not do all her duties, she wrote how she had to ease her conscience by at least darning pairs of socks to be useful.19 This tension between the fragile, ill and hardworking woman, runs through the writings of Teräsvuori, a frequent theme in her diaries.20 After Teräsvuori returned home to Helsinki in 1917, she did not go back to her previous seat of learning but stayed mainly at home. The diaries indicate that this was woeful for Teräsvuori’s parents, and especially for her mother, as the family placed great emphasis on education. Teräsvuori herself was greatly relieved that she did not have to go to school anymore. Now she could try to take care of her health and continue what she had, fnally, started in Ristiina last autumn—to write a diary.21 However, staying at home, being ill, diary-keeping and growing experiences of loneliness intertwined. Teräsvuori’s illness and all of her symptoms made her feel sad and alone. Her illness increased her experience of loneliness and by writing in her diary she also reinforced and formed her experiences and emotions.22 In the summer of 1919, she wrote,‘I was weak and sad. Time goes by so slowly here in my loneliness’.23 She wrote almost every day about different and numerous symptoms and pains she had had during the day and night. According to her entries she suffered, for instance, from stomach ache, rheumatism, headache, diffcult period pain (which she called an illness), coldness, migraine, anaemia and lumbago.24 Typical of the era, the main reasons for her different kinds of pain and symptoms seemed to be her ‘bad nerves’ and her ‘nervousness’, which caused general debility and enormous tiredness as well.25 Almost every day she wrote of how weak and tired she was and how bad her nerves were. On 30 September 1918, she wrote, ‘I am never healthy, because I am always awfully tired.’26 Then again, she remarked on how she had great diffculty in sleeping and how her insomnia was ‘famous all over the country’.27 In her opinion, it was precisely this combination of insomnia and tiredness that were the main factors behind her illness, weakness and fragility—and also her loneliness.28 She commented on this as she transcribed her diaries:‘[1930. Oh, poor Kirsti! You have been without sleep for almost all of your life].’29 On the other hand, her precise and regular diary-keeping kept her awake in the evenings and nights. That is, writing caused, at least partly, her insomnia and not the other way around. ‘Could I be wise and go to sleep now’,30 she wrote impatiently, as she was again still awake, writing, even though it was already late. Her mother also worried that she stayed up too late, but Teräsvuori did not say anything about her diary-keeping and pretended to be asleep.31 Teräsvuori had complicated relationships with her family members that left her feeling lonely and rejected. There were a lot of arguments in the family. She also felt, and heard from others as well, that she was close to losing her mind. ‘Insanity is getting closer’, she wrote. When her family members told her how insane she was and that she should be put in a mental hospital, and when she did not act properly but yelled to express her emotions, for instance, she wrote,‘I knew I was acting crazy, even though my mind was clear.’32 Sometimes she even wrote about her desire to die: ‘My life felt so dark, again, so I wished, as so many times before: “Oh, let me die!”’33 In darkness, despair and suffering she was afraid of loneliness and longed for company:‘I was thinking again 121

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today that it would be easier to bear these mental and other sufferings if somebody could come to me.’34 At the same time, in the middle of pain, illness, loneliness and suffering, she looked for comfort and meaning from her diaries and felt passionate about writing whenever possible. Historically, pain, suffering, illness and the approach of death have been connected to women’s desires to fnd privacy and solitude and, through that, to fnd time to write.35 Within patriarchal societies, women’s desires for privacy and independence have been seen, also, as features of illness and insanity.36 This was, at least partly, the case with Teräsvuori as well, as she stayed home because of her illness and found, fnally, time to write her diary. But as she stayed at home and did not follow cultural and social norms, such as getting married and having children or a ‘proper’ job or acting ‘sweet’ and cheerful, and as expected, she was condemned as insane. This was also, in a sense, the way she caused her loneliness: staying home, being ill, increasing experiences of loneliness and separateness and writing a diary were constantly combined with each other. For her, loneliness was a lived emotion and condition but also one that she continuously reproduced in her diary texts and acts of writing.

Growing Sense of Not Belonging In the middle of her pain, sadness, and suffering, Teräsvuori tried to think about what to do with her life but failing to do so increased her loneliness. Her diary suggests that she felt pressure from those around her—family, relatives and even neighbours—to identify a future ‘line of work’.37 Her mother said she would be a great nurse, one of the suitable duties for women, but Teräsvuori disagreed.38 She thought she could not support herself in any way and wrote in her diary in 1919 about how she got a sick note from the doctor, which proved she was incapable of work.39 After that, though, she still tried to get massage training in 1920, but she had to drop out, as she felt too tired, weak and ill to fnish the course. Her teacher told her she could not become a professional masseuse ‘because of her physique and nervous system’, even though her massage was otherwise good.40 She was frustrated and felt more ill. As she watched her brothers frst graduating from universities and then making successful careers, the pages of her diaries flled with pain and sorrow for the fact that her possibilities, and those of girls and women in general, seemed to be so narrow.41 As there seemed to be no place for her, her experiences of loneliness increased. Another challenge she had to confront in life was the expectation that she would marry. Teräsvuori had decided at a young age that she would never marry, and whether intentionally or not, she kept to this her whole life. She sometimes seemed to deny all love in her life. In entries from 1916 and 1920, she wrote how she thought she could never love anyone (romantically), and that no one could ever love her.42 But then there were also times when she was full of love towards other humans and things. On 28 January 1919, she wrote,‘Oh, how can I love fowers— not to mention people!’43 Christian religion was part of her life, as it was for most people in Finland at the time;44 she commented in her diary that one of her guiding principles in life was, following the Bible, to ‘love your neighbour as yourself ’.45 She would have wanted to spread her love and compassion to others, and there are some clear and conventional but compulsive and one-sided love plots in her early diaries.46 But as years passed by and her life got lonelier and the experiences of (mental) illness became worse it seems, her comments ‘from the future’ suggest that she lost almost all of her faith in love and life.47 Annotations made to the diaries in 1937, when she was transcribing were bleak: she wrote that later in her life she was completely alone and just ‘a pile of rubble, without life and rules of life’. She felt like ‘a withered tree with an axe at its base for a long time’.48 The increasing awareness of lack of (romantic) love or companionship made Teräsvuori’s experiences of loneliness stronger because Finnish society expected her to have a spouse or, 122

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following the history and language of romantic ideals, some romantic ‘ever after’ affair. Expectations increased the sense of loss.49 She wrote in her diary how she felt and how, from a very young age, she had heard from others that there was something wrong with her. This was why, in her opinion, she did not have the right to be loved.50 At this point in time there was a strong belief in the importance of heredity to health, as well as the utility of eugenics, and people with mental health problems or other disabilities were seen as a ‘threat’ to the idea of a strong, independent nation and its ‘healthy’ inhabitants.51 This belief strongly guided Teräsvuori’s thinking when she considered the possibilities of a marriage. In the end, she believed that the role of an old maid was the only option for her—she could not dare to imagine any other alternatives.52 While conventional and normative romance and marriage were generally expected in bourgeois society, contemporary thinking around eugenics also determined who had the right to love and get married.53 It was diffcult, therefore, for Teräsvuori to live both with and outside these very complex and contradictory expectations and norms. It greatly affected her changing experiences of loneliness and growing isolation. Teräsvuori did have some thoughts of what she really wanted to do in her life, but she knew it was something that would not provide a living.54 Her thoughts very likely pointed to (literary) writing, which was something she wanted to focus on, presumably professionally as well, if she could.55 But people—including herself—could not imagine she could use her talent and ambition professionally because of her gender and the lack of self-esteem, and it seems that her diary became a suitable form to fulfl her literary aims.56 The belief that she could not write professionally or have any other satisfying options for the future reinforced her constantly growing sense of not belonging and led her deeper into her own private and isolated life, full of various and increasing symptoms of illness, pain and suffering. As time passed, her loneliness became chronic, not only linked to episodic, short-term life events, and she ended up more and more alone and isolated.57 ‘I have been alone for all of my life and will be in the end of it’,58 she wrote in her diary:‘Left alone, abandoned, reproached, ill.’59

Fading Friendships and Other Encounters The boundaries between solitude and loneliness in Teräsvuori’s life and in her diary-writing were unstable. There was a confict between the need to be alone, to write in solitude, and often dark and sad feelings of loneliness, the longing to be part of society and connected with others. She had one dear friend, Iris, who was the only person, to whom she could tell everything. However, their friendship was a complex one. Teräsvuori craved the company and attention of her social and popular friend, but sometimes she wrote that she could not stand her, or her manners.60 When the girls did not see each other, Teräsvuori missed Iris, and the loneliness that followed was often hard to bear:‘Here I am, all alone, until Iris comes’,61 she wrote miserably in 1918. On the other hand, being alone or being with herself was something she needed to be herself:‘When I am with other people, I am always in pain; I cannot be myself until I am alone.’62 Being alone was also something she needed in order to be able to write. On 12 January 1920, she wrote, ‘I should write, but I can’t because I do not have a chance to be alone.’63 She craved the time alone because she did not want anyone to know about her diary-keeping, although sometimes she read her writing aloud—for example, to Iris.64 On 6 February 1918, she wrote how she fnally had the chance to be alone,‘alone in my own dear room’,65 and it was wonderful because she could write her diary in privacy. The questions of private, intimate and public have varied throughout the history of diary-writing. For example, in the early modern period, it had been common to read diaries aloud for others, as they functioned, among other things, as means of religious practice, learning to read and write and sharing knowledge collectively. The modern 123

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form of diary-keeping emphasized a private form of writing, and in the twentieth century, locks, for example, appeared to symbolize the private nature of diaries.66 For Teräsvuori, who needed to keep her diary-writing private and yet, on the other hand, share her writings with others, such as Iris, this was complex. Besides the conficts between private and public, and the writings about her friendship with Iris, there are other encounters in her diaries as well. The frst part of her diary series, which Teräsvuori wrote while still living with her family, is actually quite full of people, as it was common for the middle and upper class to live a sociable life and frequently visit each other. Visiting culture had a long tradition in Europe, and in Finland, visits were controlled by conventions and customs of sociability. Being polite was of primary importance. It was common for visits to be both agreed in advance and made spontaneously, and there could be several visits per day.67 For Teräsvuori, it was important to mark down the names of the people who paid visits to her family and the other way around. Although she sometimes felt very grateful that people made the effort to visit, she remarked in her diary on how it was diffcult for her to socialize, to visit other people or to bear all those people in her home. On 25 October 1917, she wrote:‘It is wonderful that people come to visit us and feel at ease’,68 and she felt especially refreshed if Iris came to visit. More often, though, she felt that she lacked the strength or ability to be good company and a good enough conversationalist to be the ideal young woman of the era; conversely, she felt embarrassed if she was too happy and overly wild with joy, which made her speak, or ‘blabber’, too much. It all was very stressful for her, as she thought she could not be polite enough and fulfl social standards for sociability.69 She also wanted to write down into her diary the names of those people she met in concerts or saw while walking in the streets, because it was a custom in her family to tell each other whom they saw and met—even if she did not greet or talk to those people. And unfortunately, usually, people just passed her by, which made her feel ugly or invisible.70 Walking outdoors, in general, was an important practice, as well as a way to manage her health, yet Teräsvuori was often sad as she had to walk alone, without any company. On 28 March 1918, she wrote: I walked in front of the church and let the sun warm me. I was little bit sad as I did not have any company. [15.4.1930. Where to fnd company? ‘I am so alone, so alone . . .’ I have no other company than my destructive thoughts. No strength to go outside,— only illness and weakness].71 On 15 June 1921, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, how alone am I!’, as she had, as usual, no one to go out with.72 ‘I am the kind that even magpies fear and laugh and avoid me’, she wrote as she was jealous of people who were walking outside together, in pairs.73 If Teräsvuori had to go outside alone, it was usually quite crowded inside her family home— sometimes even overcrowded. As historian David Vincent has written, walking alone has been one of the ways to escape, especially overcrowded domestic interiors.74 For Teräsvuori, going out alone might have been one way to escape company and her overcrowded home, too. While still living with her family, many subtenants also lived at their home (they were living as rentals in central Helsinki), as her family rented extra rooms to students who came to study in Helsinki.75 Therefore, the apartment was usually full of family members, visitors and subtenants, as well as all the noise they made. There were deep, cutting silences, too, especially after the death of Teräsvuori’s father in 1923.76 At one point, Iris lived at their home and the two young women shared a room. While that mostly brought Teräsvuori great joy, she craved her own time and space. But even if Teräsvuori was in the middle of people, she often felt very lonely.77 ‘Nobody knows me right’, she wrote, as she was sad about the misunderstandings 124

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between her and others and as she felt she did not belong to this world.78 Many of her significant relationships failed over time, including her relationship with Iris. In March 1918, she wrote in the comment ‘from the future’, made in 1930, how Iris had left her a long time ago.79 Unfortunately, diaries do not reveal more accurately what happened between the two. In all, good social skills and contacts were generally highly appreciated in culture and in society. Thus, the lack of good social skills and contacts caused Teräsvuori shame and a sense of personal failure. This was in connection to her increasing emotions and experiences of loneliness and isolation.80 On the other hand, in Teräsvuori’s life, there was a continuous confict and vicious circle between sociability and loneliness.

Diary-Keeping as Comfort and Separation As Teräsvuori’s life became lonelier, her diary served in many respects as a kind of comforting lifelong partner. When no one was nearby, it listened, received everything without condemnation and acted as a means of taking care of herself.81 Diary-keeping produced a sense of meaning: it was a daily task that held on to life and kept her and her writing self alive. At the same time, writing in a private form and alone increased her sense of separateness (Figure 8.2). As cultural historian Fay Bound Alberti has argued, for lonely people, material objects can function in some way as anthropomorphic entities, taking on forms and characteristics typical of humans, offering a certain kind of comfort.82 Similarly, a diary can take the form of something

Figure 8.2 Writing the diaries. Source: Photo by SKS/Milla Eräsaari. For Teräsvuori, her diaries brought comfort and company. She made clean copies of her original diary writings, and her handwriting is easy to read. She brought her frst diaries to the archive by herself and wanted to leave her diaries to be read and researched.

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or someone who provides comfort and company. For example, Finnish writer Helvi Hämäläinen (1907–1998) described in one of her diary entries from the 1950s, how ‘lonely people need a dog or a diary to be able to speak’.83 In The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis, 1947), one of the best known diaries of our times, Anne Frank (1929–1945) wrote, in her very frst entry on 12 June 1942, that she hoped her diary would be a great source of support and comfort. For her, the diary was a dear, trusted friend. This was also the case for Kirsti Teräsvuori: her diary connected her to the world, others and herself and was something, or someone, a friend, with whom to handle loneliness in an ever more isolated life.84 Paradoxically, though, loneliness was present in her life, and her diary-writing also produced her loneliness. With a diary as meaningful company, Teräsvuori also chose, intentionally or not, to rebel against strict, normative forms, defnitions and expectations of society and the people in it and to make literary art through her writings—even though that meant growing isolation and loneliness in her life. Thus, maybe it was her environment that gave her no other options than to rebel, fall ill and make her life bearable by blending into the world of her diaries. On 1 October 1921, she wrote: My life and my achievements do not satisfy me and that is why I am ill. If I could only write and make clean copies of my diaries, I would be happy. But who benefts from them?! [21.9.1950. I do. Even now, I could not bear to live without this job. My tenancy agreement has been cancelled with disgrace, and without funds and as an ill person, it is impossible to get a new place. There is an awful housing shortage everywhere. I am treated very badly and there is no one to whom to unburden my heart.]85 As the comment ‘from the future’ for her ‘earlier self ’ shows, it was her diaries and diary-keeping which gave Teräsvuori comfort, support and company in diffcult times. Over time, the diaries increased their meaning as beloved company and comfort in Teräsvuori’s life. She became lonelier and more isolated as years passed by, and as her comments indicate, she was homeless for a long time at one period of her life. That increased her fundamental sense of not belonging.86 For several years, she lived in mental hospitals, sanatoriums, shelters or other people’s houses.87 Comments she made on her diary entries when she transcribed her earlier entries tell how both the mental and physical limits of loneliness and isolation broadened in her life. Writings from ‘the future’, which she marked inside square brackets, draw a picture of an abandoned, lonely woman in pain, frightened to be totally left alone and forgotten. Sometimes there are even clear cries for help, such as the one in this entry: [1930 in Hattula. I am sad and miserable to death. This family in Häme does not care that I, an ill person, suffer here in my loneliness. I have been in pain here in Häme for seven months now.]88 Her annotations indicate that by 1956 she fnally got her own home. This was great news, although loneliness and sadness followed her there as well. In the 15 February 1922 entry, there is the following comment: [It is 15 September 1956 now. ‘. . . no information about the apartment’ would ft as the motto of almost of my whole life. Now, I fnally live at my own home in North-Haaga, where I moved on 28 August 1956. But as I need to be alone and ill, I am not able to be happy. I now continue my writings which were interrupted while I was staying in Veikkola.]89 126

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In the middle of the sadness, loneliness, suffering and pain described in previous entries, her diaries brought her comfort and company. She wrote very diligently, too much even she felt sometimes. Occasionally, it seems like her whole being in the world depended on her writing. In some of her diary entries, she described how it was not healthy anymore, the way and the amount she wrote.90 That is, she acknowledged the paradoxical role diary-keeping had in her life. At times she wrote how she questioned the whole meaning of her writing. In the end, though, as she noted, writing and making clean copies of her original writings brought her joy and meaning like nothing else and calmed her down, especially when she felt nervous, depressed and lonely.91 ‘After all, however, I have one good friend, my “Poems”’, she wrote in her diary.92 Here ‘the wonderful loneliness of the throne’ of hers, both in its sad, painful cruelty and poetic beauty is beautifully captured.93

Conclusions This chapter has investigated Kirsti Teräsvuori’s growing and changing experiences of loneliness, which she described on the pages of her diaries written between 1916 and 1923. The focus has been on the ways in which she wrote about her loneliness and how the experiences of loneliness developed together with her experiences of illness and isolation. Furthermore, this chapter has explored the connections between her illness and suffering, perceived isolation, experiences of loneliness and diary-keeping. Teräsvuori did not ft the norms of society and her surroundings. In the end, her life got poorer, lonelier and more isolated as the years passed. She was terrifed of being completely left alone, in her loneliness and isolation, to be forgotten, which she was in many ways. Her diaries and diary-keeping gave her a strong sense of meaning and kept her active and alive, although it is possible that her (compulsory) writing and strong obsession to tell her own story were also trapping her. Writing a diary itself produced and strengthened her experiences of loneliness. But in the end, isolation, solitude and loneliness were what she needed to bring herself to write. Thus, loneliness was also productive, something that gave her a chance and a motive to write this remarkable literary legacy she left behind. Writing a diary (in loneliness) was an essential act, and Teräsvuori was a diary writer par excellence.

Notes 1 Her diaries are not published, and before my research on them, they have never been studied before. 2 For more, see Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 14 and passim. She writes of loneliness as a complex emotion and which, when linked to art and creativity, can be both a gift and a burden. 3 In the beginning of her frst diary, there is an around thirty-page introduction, where Teräsvuori describes the events from the previous summer. After that she writes that her actual diary starts from that point. The frst actual entry is dated 4 September 1916. The last diary remarks are from the 1980s. 4 On journal intime see, for example, Alain Girard, Le Journal intime et la notion de personne (Paris: Thèse pour le doctorat ès Letters, 1963). 5 Soon after beginning to write her diaries, Teräsvuori started her ‘poems’ as she often called them, in shorthand. From the 1920s and continuing in following decades, she also made clean copies of her diaries and commented on her original writings using square brackets. She brought her frst transcribed diaries from the years 1916–34 to the archive by herself in 1974. Her niece delivered the rest after her death. 6 On diaries, autobiographical writing and historical research, see Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Karoliina Sjö and Liisa Lalu, eds, Päiväkirjojen jäljillä. Historiantutkimus ja omasta elämästä kirjoittaminen (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2020); Batsheva and Dan Ben-Amos, eds, The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020).

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Karoliina Sjö 7 See Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 5–7. On the history of emotions, see also Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 8 On Fennoman feminism, see Marja Jalava, Minä ja maailman henki. Moderni subjekti kristillis-idealistisessa kansallisajattelussa ja Rolf Lagerborgin kulttuuriradikalismissa n. 1800–1914 (Helsinki: SKS, 2005), 212–14. 9 On the intertwining of girl’s and women’s education, home and Fennoman ideas, see Elina Katainen, Tiina Kinnunen, Eva Packalén and Saara Tuomaala, eds, ‘Naiset historiankirjoittajina. Akateeminen marginaali ja uuden tiedon tuottaminen’, in Oma pöytä. Naiset historiankirjoittajina Suomessa, ed. Elina Katainen, Tiina Kinnunen, Eva Packalen and Saara Tuomaala (Helsinki: SKS 2005), 11–49 (12). 10 See Erkki Kinnunen, Olla Teräsvuori 1888–1953. Kansansivistäjä, runoilija, tutkija (Joensuu: Aino ja Olla Teräsvuoren säätiö, 1997), 7–11. 11 Teräsvuori was related to the frst president of independent Finland, Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, who was selected as president in 1919. 12 See Karoliina Sjö, ‘Päiväkirjakertomus (sairaasta) itsestä ja elämästä—Kirsti Teräsvuoren vuosien 1916– 1918 päiväkirjojen äärellä’, in Päiväkirjojen jäljillä. Historiantutkimus ja omasta elämästä kirjoittaminen, ed. Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Karoliina Sjö and Liisa Lalu (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2020), 137–52 (137–8). 13 The diary of Kirsti Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 1–4, the Archive of Kirsti Teräsvuori, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (SKS KIA). All the English translations of the diaries of Kirsti Teräsvuori are my own. Hereafter Teräsvuori, followed by the volume number. 14 Ibid.; 46: 7 Dec. 1920, 5165. 15 Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 4–10. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 134–7; Karin Johannisson, Den mörka kontinenten. Kvinnan, medicinen och fn-de-siècle (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1994), 74, 125–8; Minna Uimonen, Hermostumisen aikakausi. Neuroosit 1800- ja 1900-lukujen vaihteen suomalaisessa lääketieteessä (Helsinki: SHS, 1999), passim and especially 75–80; Jutta Ahlbeck-Rehn and Kirsi Tuohela,‘Att läka kvinnors själar—Om klass, det sunda arbetet och invalidismens kult’, RIG—Kulturhistorisk tidskrift, 91, no. 2 (2008): 65–84 (68–9). See also Sjö,‘Päiväkirjakertomus’, 143–4. 18 Teräsvuori 123: 19 Mar. 1923, 9469. 19 Teräsvuori 3: 31 Mar. 1917, 534. 20 See also Sjö,‘Päiväkirjakertomus’, 144. 21 Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 1–30. On women’s autobiographical life writing and illness, see G. Thomas Couser, ‘Autopathography: Women, Illness and Life-Writing’, in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, ed. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 95–100. 22 See Karin Johannisson, Nostalgia. En känslas historia (Smedjebacken: Fälth & Hässler 2001), 15–17. 23 Teräsvuori 17: 22 June 1919, 2296. 24 See Teräsvuori 1: 9 Sept. 1916, 35; 7: 30 Apr. 1918, 1207; 10: 28 Aug. 1918, 1535–6; 11: 30 Sept. 1918, 1634; 12: 17 Nov. 1918, 1768; 44: 24 Nov. 1920, 5084–86; 100: 6 June 1922, 8199; 105: 2 Aug. 1922, 8497; 110: 14 Oct. 1922, 8758. 25 See Teräsvuori 105: 1 Aug. 1922, 8494–5. 26 Teräsvuori 11: 30 Sept. 1918, 1634. 27 Teräsvuori 4: 30 Nov. 1917, 847. 28 See Teräsvuori 6: 13 Mar. 1918, 1070; 7: 5 May 1918, 1221. 29 Teräsvuori 7: 5 May 1918, 1121. 30 Teräsvuori 16: 21 May 1919, 2202. 31 E.g. Teräsvuori 11: 2 Oct. 1918, 1636. 32 Teräsvuori 4: 21 Nov. 1917, 828; 63: 25 May 1921, 6139. See further 7: 7 May 1918, 1228–9; 7: 15 May 1918, 1246; 8: 10 July 1918, 1378; 14: 11 Feb. 1919, 2038; 78: 15 Oct. 1921, 6986. On autobiographical writings of mental illness, see Kirsi Tuohela,‘The Ordeal of the Soul: Ordinary People’s Autobiographies of Mental Illness in Finland 1870–1935’, in Writing the Self: Essays on Autobiography and Autofction, ed. Kerstin W. Shands, Giulia Grillo Mikrut, Dipti R. Pattanaik and Karen Ferreira-Meyers (Södertörn: Södertörns högskola 2015), 219–29. 33 Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 1; 1: 24 Oct. 1916, 138. See Teräsvuori 2: 11 Dec. 1916, 255; 16: 3 May 1919, 2186. 34 Teräsvuori 112: 11 Nov. 1922, 8875. 35 See David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polite Press, 2020), 104–11. 36 See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, 134.

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45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

E.g. Teräsvuori 38: 15 Sept. 1920, 4712. Teräsvuori 4: 30 Nov. 1917, 845. Teräsvuori 16: 4 June 1919, 2254. Teräsvuori 57: 26 Mar. 1921, 5799. On frustration of (middle-class) women wasting their talents and time mainly in domestic practices, see also David Vincent, A History of Solitude, 74–5. See Teräsvuori 1: 5 Oct. 1916, 66; 25: 9 Mar. 1920, 3206–7. Teräsvuori 14: 28 Jan. 1919, 1996. For example, more than 98 per cent of people living in Finland belonged to the church in 1917. Most of them (c. 98.1 per cent) belonged to the Evangelical Lutheran Church. There were also, for example, Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants. Suomen tilastollinen vuosikirja 1919. Annuaire statistique de Finlande 1919, accessed 26 Oct. 2021, www.doria.f/handle/10024/69235. The Freedom of Religion Act came into effect in Finland in 1923. Teräsvuori 33: 16 July 1920, 4145. See Teräsvuori 97: 1 May 1922, 8008; 126: 21 Apr. 1923, 9624–5. On romance and romantic love plots in diaries, see Vappu Kannas, ‘The Forlorn Heroine of a Terribly Sad Life Story’: Romance in the Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2015). See Teräsvuori 30: 30 May 1920, 3737, and the comment made in 1935. Also, she wrote in 1921,‘The love I have felt towards my family members has been killed in the course of time’, as she felt mistreated by them. She continues, though, that she should not have these kinds of thoughts. Teräsvuori 71: 31 July 1921, 6601. Teräsvuori 33: 16 July 1920, 4145. Later comments made alongside transcribing on 26 Mar. 1937. On the tropes of a soulmate and romantic love in Western culture and their connection to loneliness, see Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 12, 61–82. See Teräsvuori 2: 6 Jan. 1917, 290; 7: 15 May 1918, 1246. See Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2005). See Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 27; 25: 9 Mar. 1920, 3206–7. Arja-Liisa Räisänen, Onnellisen avioliiton ehdot. Sukupuolijärjestelmän muodostumisprosessi suomalaisissa avioliitto- ja seksuaalivalistusoppaissa 1865–1920 (Helsinki: SHS, 1995). Teräsvuori 6: 28 Mar. 1918, 1100. Teräsvuori 1: introduction, 27; 5 Oct. 1916, 66; 5: 17 Jan. 1918, 955; 6: 28 Mar. 1918, 1100; 8: 8 June 1918, 1301. See also Sjö,‘Päiväkirjakertomus’, 138. See Sjö,‘Päiväkirjakertomus’, 138–43, 146–9. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 42–3, notes, exploring the chronic loneliness of Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)—who struggled to make friends and who felt something of a misft too—that it is important to acknowledge how time intersects with loneliness, as there are differences between chronic and episodic loneliness. Teräsvuori 122: 11 Mar. 1923, 9419. Teräsvuori 123: 18 Mar. 1923, 9468. See, for example, Teräsvuori 123: passim. Teräsvuori 10: 19 Aug. 1918, 1522–3. Teräsvuori 7: 17 Apr. 1918, 1175. Teräsvuori 22: 14 Jan. 1920, 2942. E.g. Teräsvuori 12: 10 Dec. 1918, 1834. Teräsvuori 5: 6 Feb. 1918, 1012. Suzanne L. Bunkers, ‘Diaries: Public and Private Records of Women’s Lives’, Legacy 7, no. 2 (1990): 17–26 (17 and passim); Philippe Lejeune,‘Le journal au seuil de l’intimité’, Itinéraires 4 (2009): 75–90. See Topi Artukka, Tanssiva kaupunki. Turun seurapiiri sosiaalisena näyttämönä 1810-luvulla (Helsinki: Suomen Tiedeseura, 2021), passim. Also Vincent, A History of Solitude, 72. Teräsvuori 4: 25 Oct. 1917, 765. See Teräsvuori 2: 30 Jan. 1917, 347; 4: 25 Oct. 1917, 765; 5: 16 Feb. 1918, 1026; 14: 20 Jan. 1919, 1963–64; 108: 10 Sept. 1922, 8646–864. Teräsvuori 12: 9 Dec. 1918, 1831; 39: 7 Oct. 1920, 4823; 85: 3 Jan. 1922, 7363–4; 109: 29 Sept. 1922, 8710–12. Teräsvuori 6: 28 Mar. 1918. On a history of walking for health and female pedestrians see, for example, Marjo Kaartinen, ‘ “A Busy Day with Me, or at Least with My Feet & My Stockings”: Walking for

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Health and the Female Pedestrian’s Spaces in Eighteenth-Century British Towns’, in Gendering Spaces in European Towns, 1500–1914, ed. Elaine Chalus and Marjo Kaartinen (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 32–45. Teräsvuori 65: 15 June 1921, 6230. Teräsvuori 28: 6 June 1920, 3596. Vincent, A History of Solitude, 34, 69. On history of solitude, loneliness and walking more widely see 31–70. Teräsvuori 119: 15 Feb. 1923, 9276–7. Teräsvuori 118: 2 Feb. 1923, 9215–16. Teräsvuori 77: 30 Sept. 1921, 6914. Teräsvuori 6: 27 Mar. 1918, 1095. Ibid.: 28 Mar. 1918, 1100. The comment is made alongside transcribing in 1930. See also Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 6. On a diary as a means of taking care of oneself and the world, see, for example, Päivä Kosonen,‘Päiväkirja itsestä ja maailmasta huolehtimisen välineenä’, in Päiväkirjojen jäljillä. Historiantutkimus ja omasta elämästä kirjoittaminen, ed. Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Karoliina Sjö and Liisa Lalu (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2020), 39–54. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 46. Helvi Hämäläinen, Päiväkirjat 1955–1988, ed. Ritva Haavikko (Helsinki: WSOY, 1994), 2–4 Feb. 1957, 70. See Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 14; Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1961), preface. Teräsvuori 77: 1 Oct. 1921, 6925–6. On connections between homelessness, loneliness and isolation, see Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 163–77. See, for example, Teräsvuori 35: 7 Aug. 1920, 4336; 41: 20 Oct. 1920, 4889; 23 Oct. 1920, 4912–13; 26 Oct. 1920, 4918; 50: 25 Jan. 1921, 5371; 77: 1 Oct. 1921, 6925–6; 78: 15 Oct. 1921, 6985; 89: 15 Feb. 1922, 7570–1. Teräsvuori 6: 28 Mar. 1918, 1102. Teräsvuori 89: 15 Feb. 1922, 7571. This apartment in North-Haaga, Helsinki, was apparently the same where she lived until her death in 1988. Teräsvuori 4: 10 Jan. 1918, 924–5; 34: 23 July 1920, 4186. Teräsvuori 34: 27 July 1920, 4214; 77: 1 Oct. 1921, 6925–6; 110: 8 Oct. 1922, 8738–9. Teräsvuori 89: 19 Feb. 1922, 7601. Teräsvuori named her diaries often as poems. ‘The wonderful loneliness of the throne’ refers to a poem ‘Loneliness’, Ensamhet, by Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran (1892–1923).

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9 TIME, SPACE AND LONELINESS IN BENGALI AND MARATHI POETRY Ananya Chakravarti

It feels So Easy To be One In a billion. That’s just statistic For you And for me Poetry Dilip Chitre,‘End Note’1 We live in a lonely age. It is one of the many paradoxes of both our times and of the nature of loneliness. The human species, having successfully rid itself of most pathogens and predators that might otherwise naturally cull the numbers of this most dangerous of mammals, took a mere two hundred years to grow in number from one to seven billion. In those two hundred years, technological and political changes have rendered us ever more connected, a phenomenon we describe as globalization. Yet as trading ships and undersea cables have connected ever more of us to each other, as the printing-press and social media have expanded our abilities to communicate with each other, humans are stricken with a new affiction: we are lonely. That loneliness is an affiction is no exaggeration: the psychologist Julianna Holt-Lundstad has famously and sensationally compared the physical risks of loneliness to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.2 Loneliness, the new science shows, can kill you.3 To describe it in epidemiological terms does not merely capture its startling effects on morbidity and mortality but also its widespread distribution: one recent study found that more than a ffth of adults in the United States (22 per cent) and the United Kingdom (23 per cent), as well as 9 per cent of Japanese adults feel lonely often or always.4 The disease may even be spreading beyond the confnes of the developed world: in 2004, the National Sample Survey Organization of India reported that nearly fve million elderly Indians suffered from loneliness.5 And it is not only the elderly, left behind by the times or migrating family members, who are lonely: a survey conducted in 2016 of 6,122 youths across 19 Indian states found that 8 per cent of youths between the age of 15 and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-11

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34 reported feeling lonely very often. Loneliness was one of the key factors affecting the 7 per cent of youths in India suffering from high levels of emotional distress.6 If the hikikomori of Japan, the homeless of the United States and the urban youth of India share this affiction, is loneliness, then, something fundamental to the human condition? At least one strand of scientifc research, which ultimately seeks the roots of loneliness in evolution, would suggest so, locating, for example, its pain in an adaptive response to social rejection.7 Phylogenetic studies comparing primates and humans in this regard would thus suggest a periodization for the history of loneliness that spans millennia. Yet the very few historians of emotions to have considered it have shown that loneliness as a socially recognized condition has instead a far shorter genealogy: Fay Bound Alberti’s pioneering work, drawn primarily from British sources, has shown that loneliness as we might understand it today, as a recognizable human experience and cultural phenomenon in the English-speaking world, may be dated back to the beginnings of the nineteenth century.8 It is not till this late date that loneliness, or ‘oneliness’, went from a physical description of the state of being alone to describing an emotional state characterized by the acute and painful sense of one’s own aloneness. Indeed, even as solitude has become less prevalent as a culturally recognized domain of conscious human practice (e.g., with the decline of ascetic religious traditions), loneliness has increased. Thus, on the one hand, the contagion of loneliness has spread across the world, from the streets of Calcutta to the council houses of Britain, making loneliness itself a global phenomenon. On the other, Bound Alberti’s work suggests that this affiction is both historically conditioned and culturally bound. Since loneliness is complex and multidimensional—an emotional cluster rather than a singular sentiment, in Bound Alberti’s terms—it is all the more important to consider the varying historical and cultural conditions in which it is produced.9 More subtly, for a historian, the emergence of loneliness, as a modern phenomenon, may serve as a marker for a certain kind of historical transition in different parts of the world. In this light, excavating other genealogies beyond the English-speaking West is necessary for a comprehensive—and non-Eurocentric— history of a global affiction. This chapter is an attempt to address this problem by exploring two traditions of vernacular language poetry in South Asia. This is not to project anachronistically the existence of loneliness, as well as the cultural presuppositions surrounding the nature of personhood and the self that it implies, on to pre-modern South Asia. Rather, it is to excavate a genealogy for some of the strands within the emotional cluster of loneliness that may have longer pasts than loneliness itself—and which have found their way into modern expressions of loneliness in the region. Among the complex emotions whose interplay we experience as loneliness is a fundamental sense of painful estrangement and a longing for some form of remedy. It is in this bedrock that I hope to locate a meaningful genealogy for a history of loneliness in South Asia. The pre-modern poetic traditions this essay explores are an outgrowth of a religious movement in South Asia known as bhakti. Bhakti as a devotional and literary tradition, originating in Tamil south India in the latter half of the frst millennium of the Common Era, had spread throughout northern India by the ffteenth century. This process occurred without centralized institutional organization. Rather, the transmission of the religious love poetry of poet-saints drawn from all strata of society was key to its circulation. Bhakti sants (saints) could be male or female, from all castes; they could even hail from Muslim families, and Christians too adapted the idiom. More importantly, bhakti poets did not write solely in Sanskrit, the traditional preserve of brahminical religious knowledge, but in the vernacular languages, in which quotidian concerns and mundane realities could be expressed. Indeed, bhakti was fundamentally characterized by a tension, as Karen Prentiss has put it, between intellection and emotion, between the path of knowledge (jñāna), dominated by scholarly elites, and of devotion (bhakti).10 The bhakta, or devotee, 132

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could circumvent the strictures of religious authority arbitrated by the logic of caste hierarchy, through the cultivation of an intense and personal relationship with the deity and through participation in the broader community of bhaktas. To this extent, bhakti provides a rich archive for the history of emotions and of expressions of the self in South Asia. This is particularly true for loneliness, given the tradition’s preoccupation with the bhakta’s search for union with god as a remedy for estrangement from the divine and within the mundane. Yet despite its remarkable spread as a pan–South Asian tradition, bhakti, too, is marked by signifcant cultural variation. To locate a South Asian genealogy of loneliness in bhakti, it is necessary to contend with its internal variation and this chapter does so by comparing two different traditions: the frst in Bengali and the second in Marathi. This chapter is divided into three sections. The frst explores the experience of estrangement as the agony of separation (viraha) in the tradition of Bengali poetry. While viraha has traditionally been discussed in the context of histories of love in South Asia, I want to suggest that, in the acute grief of separation that it encodes,one may also read into it a potential genealogy of loneliness.11 The second section focuses on the archive of experiences of separation or viyoga in Marathi poetry, focusing particularly on the ways in which marginalization along caste or gender lines was expressed as an acute sense of isolation. The last section considers work by twentieth-century poets of Bengal and Maharashtra to show the subterranean ways in which these tropes continue to be present in contemporary poetry—as well as the radically different modes in which loneliness is fgured in these languages today. The chapter concludes by considering how history of emotions may be used as a tool for periodization in historical analysis, as well as the ethical and analytical pitfalls of seeking pre-modern genealogies for (post)colonial phenomena like loneliness.

‘The Sweet Spring Night Torments My Loneliness’: Viraha in Bengali To trace a history of emotions in Bengali poetry, one must begin with the overwhelming thematic and aesthetic infuence of two twelfth-century poets who predated the rise of vernacular literature proper in Bengali and who were integral to the development of lyric love poetry in the language: Jayadeva, whose Sanskrit lyric poem, Gītagovinda, marked a poetic and religious tradition of thought centred on the complexities of divine and human love, and Vidyāpati, whose Old Maithili model was cultivated as a literary linguistic form called Brajabuli (literally, the ‘speech of Braj’) in Bengal.12 This tradition centred on Kṛṣṇa’s courtship, abandonment of and ecstatic reconciliation with the cowherdess Rādhā. The mercurial states of erotic love, oscillating between the immersive ecstasies of (sexual) union (saṃbhoga) and the agonies of separation (viraha), allegorically refected the vicissitudes of the devotee’s spiritual path towards union with god. In particular, the paradigmatic experience of Rādhā’s agony over her separation from Kṛṣṇa emerged as a central philosophical and aesthetic concern in later vernacular poetry. It is in viraha—a state of separation that causes acute pain and a sense of disillusionment—that one may locate a genealogy of some aspects of loneliness in Bengali. The locus classicus of the emotive expression of viraha is present in the Gīta Govinda. It is a ‘desolating fre’ that leaves the sufferer so raw that ‘even a garland strikes at the heart of [her] fragile body’. The sufferer waits for her lover as ‘the sweet spring night torments [her] loneliness’, wracked by envy at the possibility of her lover’s infdelity or fear that he is roaming blindly in the forest, his anguished mind entangling the path so that he cannot reach their meeting point.13 Here, we fnd key and lasting tropes of this affiction of viraha. Firstly, it is deeply embodied, in which the person bereft of the presence of the lover experiences physical sensations of pain, specifcally a feeling of burning.14 Secondly, it has a location: viraha is experienced in a state removed from civilization. The forest, whose ‘sweet swamp reeds’ had once shaded the lovers in union 133

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from view, becomes, in separation, a thicket impossible to traverse, which further isolates the subject in her abandonment. Thirdly, viraha may evoke emotions beyond grief or longing: envy, for example, besieges Rādhā’s mind as she speculates why Kṛṣṇa might have abandoned her; furthermore, it is not uncommon for the afficted to be moved to anger at the cruelty of the absent lover. Lastly, as the refrain ‘whom can I seek for refuge here?’ suggests, viraha as a fatal affiction demands remedy that must be sought elsewhere. Consider, for example, this passage from Śkṛikṛṣṇakīrtana, the second oldest extant example of Bengali literature, the earliest textual layers of which date back to the latter half of the fourteenth century. Attributed to Baḍu Caṇḍidās,the text comprises some 400 padas,or verses,and interspersed with Sanskrit ślokas, divided into 13 khaṇdas. The most famous of these is the fnal untitled section known popularly as Rādhā Biraha, or Radha’s separation.15 Here, Rādhā confdes in Barayi, Kṛṣṇa’s grandaunt who serves as a go-between for the lovers, about her emotional affiction: Barayi, the breeze blows gently under the kadamba tree towards Mathura; My bed of fowers is made and I call out, over and over, to Kānhāi. Please, bring Kānhāi back to me . . . The sea of my separation is unfathomably deep. How will I cross this ocean? If Kānhāi helps me cross these waters on the buoyant boats of my breasts Then only will I fnd peace. Barayi, this Vrindāvan only burns me . . . I shall die of this separation. I have searched every nook and cranny of this Vrindāvan But could fnd no trace of him.16 Here, one of the intriguing spatial dynamics of viraha as a condition becomes apparent. While the conditions of saṃbhoga isolate the lovers in a particular place and moment, viraha expands the boundaries of the subject beyond the limits of the embodied self. As Thibaut d’Hubert describes it: To sum up the views of the tradition on this subject, let us just say that poetically and spiritually, sambhoga does not allow for the idea of the all-pervasiveness of the beloved as much as viraha does. Because of its spatial and temporal unity—the lovers meet in a given place at a specifc time—sambhoga does not invite the lover to interact with Creation as a whole as it does when he is moved by viraha.Viraha gives the world its measure in human experience, whereas sambhoga tends to isolate the lovers from worldly things and the unity of existence.17 This dynamic is amply exemplifed in Caṇḍidās’ poem: though Rādha remains in the forests of Vrindāvan, her longing eventually reaches the distant town of Mathurā, where Kṛṣṇa has gone, carried there by her go-between, Barayi. Indeed, this is another key characteristic of viraha: the state occurs even when the subject is not technically alone. Barayi, as confdante, serves as witness to Rādhā’s suffering, though her presence cannot ameliorate her radical state of estrangement. Moreover, separation from the beloved has rendered Rādhā utterly estranged from the physical location of her embodied self: home burns and becomes unbearable in the state of viraha, as the absence of the hidden beloved renders it fundamentally alien and ruined. More importantly, it is an absence that empties out space itself. The idea is also present in Vidyāpati’s famous pada: 134

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Now Mādhav has gone to Mathura-town. Who stole the jewel of Gokul? Gokul wails, overfowing with grief. Look how the tears fow like rivers. The temple is empty, the town is empty. Empty are the ten directions, empty is the sea. How can I go to the Yamuna’s bank? How could I bear the hut [kuti]18 in the dell [kunj]? I laid the fower garden with my companions [sahachari]. How could I bear it now? Vidyāpati says: pay attention. Kṛṣṇa is hiding there as a joke.19 Though the trope of the virahiṇi is often feminized, men, too, are susceptible to this peculiar affiction in Bengal. In Krittibās Ojhā’s ffteenth-century retelling of the Rāmāyana, for example, when Rāma learns of Sitā’s kidnapping, he is stricken with viraha. The symptoms are familiar: encountering the empty room where there had once been a fulsome home in the forest, Rāma nearly faints with grief. He calls for her over and over again. At the sight of his eyes drowning, the forest’s animals and birds are themselves moved to tears. Losing his capacity to face the reality of her loss, Rāma tells his brother Lakṣmaṇ hopefully: To gauge my mind, I think, Jānakī Has hidden herself, look Lakṣman! With the wife of some mendicant, Jānakī Has wandered off without informing me. On the banks of the Godavari there is a thicket of lotuses There my lotus-faced [Sītā] is wandering, The lotus-garlanded lotus-faced [Goddess Lakṣmī] having found her Has kept her, hidden amidst the forest of lotuses. Or perhaps the ever-parched Rahu to quench his thirst, Thinking her to be the crescent moon, has he swallowed her? Upon seeing me deprived of my kingdom and worried [for her own throne], has the Earth swallowed her own daughter? I may have lost my kingdom, But the kingdom’s Lakṣmī was always near me. Now I have lost the queen in the forest And Kaikeyī’s desires have fnally been fulflled. Just as the lightning hides in the clouds, So has Jānakī hidden herself in the forest. The daughter of Jānak was like a golden creeper. She was in the forest—who uprooted her? Though the sun, moon and the lamplit stars Dispel the darkness day and night, The stars cannot dispel my darkness Without that one Sītā, all is dark. Without apprehending Sītā [Sītā adarsanē], I see emptiness in all ten directions. Without Sītā, I can think of nothing else. 135

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Sītā is dhyāna, Sītā is jñāna, Sītā is the chintāmani Without her, I’m like a cobra that has lost the jewel in its hood. Look Lakṣmaṇ, therefore make a search. Save my body and life by bringing Sītā.20 Here, it is Rāma who is the bereft devotee and his quest for Sīta is cast not as a matter of restoring patriarchal honour but as a spiritual imperative: Sītā embodies the spiritual practice of meditation (dhyāna) and knowledge (jñāna). She is described as the wish-fulflling jewel chintāmani, which in Buddhist thought especially, which had old roots in Bengal, illuminates the ultimate truth. Thus, the tradition by no means invariably feminizes the incomplete human while rendering the divine masculine. The longevity and reach of viraha in Bengali are startling, traversing the boundaries of sects and cults to suffuse the poetic tradition over time. Lālon Sāi, the nineteenth-century Bāul poet, for example, expressed many of the same tropes of viraha described earlier in a radically different literary and even theological register.21 Bāul thought is an inheritor of a synthesis of early medieval Tantric schools, the Buddhist Sahajiyas and the Vaiṣṇava bhakti tradition that gained pre-eminence with Caitanya in the sixteenth century.22 Furthermore, given its rich theology of embodiment and sexuality, viraha fnds conceptually congenial ground in this tradition.23 In the following famous song, Lālon feminizes himself as a dāśī longing to be united with his master’s feet, a master who, like the cruel but playful trickster Kṛṣṇa of the bhaktī tradition, has hidden himself/herself: In how many days Will I be united with the person (mānuś)24 of my mind? Night and day like the monsoon bird I long for the black moon. Tell me I will be the slave (dāsi) at his feetBut that is not my fate. Like the fash of lightning Vanishing into the cloud whence it came I saw my Lord in that mirror Before he disappeared. When I remember his form I lose all fear of dishonor Lalon Fokir says, only He who loves constantly, knows. The metaphor Lālon uses, of lightning vanishing into a cloud, is strikingly similar to that used by Krittibās in describing Sītā’s disappearance. Indeed, these tricks played by the divine on the human senses are central to the ways in which the subject in the state of viraha can transcend the mundane constraints of space and time and thus apprehend the divine. Here, another of Lālon’s most famous songs demonstrates the peculiarities of spatiality inherent in viraha: A city of mirrors near my home, There my neighbor lives— I have not seen her even once.25

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Beyond the village, fathomless waters. Neither shore, nor boats for crossing. Though I long to see her How will I go to her village? What can I say about that neighbor? She has neither hands nor feet, nor even a head. One moment she foats above the emptiness (śūnyer) In the next, she foats in the deep. If my neighbor ever touched me All the pains of death would go far away She and Lālon live in the same place Separated by a hundred thousand leagues. The theme of emptiness, of space hollowed out by the beloved’s absence, is present in the earlier poets cited too. It points us to a profound stream within Bengali religious thought that fgures god as void, or Śūnya, a notion that is widespread in eastern India more generally and a legacy of the Buddhist infuences in the region.26 Viraha, as the poets repeatedly tell us, empties all ten directions. The material world, lying in ruins, fades, as the subject of viraha experiences the absence, the void which is divinity itself. In the echoing emptiness of this isolation, we fnd intriguing reverberations of modern expressions of loneliness, as we will see in the following section.

‘Just as the Child Searches for Her Missing Mother’: Viyoga in Marathi If the intertwining of sexual and divine love in Bengali constructions of estrangement is its most striking emotional texture, in Marathi by contrast, the experience of separation is largely devoid of eroticism. As Christian Novetzke points out in his discussion of the Tīrthāvaḷī, a seventeenth-century biographical text attributed within the Vārkarī tradition to the sant Nāmdev: [T]he word ‘viraha’ does not appear in the text of the Tīrthāvaḷī, and indeed is almost never used in any of Nāmdev’s songs. Instead, one fnds viyoga, or ‘disjunction’, and bheda, or ‘distinction’, used to designate separation. The emotional vocabulary of separation found elsewhere in relation to Krishna—the agony of parting and the bliss of reunion—is present in this text but drained of any erotic content . . . The choice of descriptive terminology both in the Tīrthāvaḷī and in scholarship about it might indicate a deliberate dissociation of the Vārkarī tradition from the erotic devotionalism or madhura bhakti of other Krishna traditions, while still aligning itself with the theology of separation.27 Despite this fundamental difference, in Marathi bhakti poetry the experience of separation is the fundament from which we might elaborate a genealogy of loneliness in Marathi. Reading this corpus in this light reveals the ways in which social position, particularly caste and gender, are vital to understanding the social history of loneliness in South Asia. In Marathi, the experience of separation from the divine is cast in familial terms, that is as separation from home and kin. In the Tīrthāvaḷī, as Novetkze points out, this pain is expressed not through the social relationship of romantic love, but through that of a separated mother and

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child. Returning from pilgrimage, Nāmdev addresses the deity, choking with emotion and tearyeyed. He acknowledged that Viṭhobā had made him wander in order to remove his ignorance, but upon his return, Nāmdev has understood the pointlessness of pilgrimage, for he could not perceive god’s home in the sacred sites he visited, nor see anyone who worshipped him there. Instead, his heart was drawn back to the shores of the Chandrabhāga, the river besides the Viṭṭhaḷ temple of Pāṇḍharpūr, their shared home. As in Bengali, estrangement is thus indexed as an alienation from the home. This alienation was not merely spatial; it could arise from the profoundly painful forms of marginalization and quotidian violence that occurred in the confnes of the home itself. This poetic trope, particularly in the words of female sants, have the texture of social description, not religious allegory or metaphor. Indeed, estrangement is often expressed as the pain arising not only from the separation of mother and child but from the daughter’s alienation from her maternal home through marriage. Take, for example, the autobiographical abhaṅgs of the seventeenth-century poet Bahīnābai, who describes the suffocating and hypocritical atmosphere of a brahmin home from which she sought refuge in god. She was given away in marriage as a child to a thirty-year-old man who had been previously married.28 She soon discovered he was a man of fery temper, which she compared to Jamdagni, suggesting his possessiveness and jealousy with regard to his wife.29 She, in turn, lived ‘in perpetual terror’ of him, having ‘not had a moment’s joy’ in her ‘eleven years’ of life, and it was only when she discovered the world of bhakti saints that she found respite.30 Her poems provide a vivid depiction of domestic violence, including a time when her husband beat the eleven-year-old girl for grieving the death of a pet calf.31 His cruelty and violence only increased as her piety caught the attention of others, as he openly wished her dead.32 In particular, he was incensed that his brahmin wife should be visited by dreams of the śudra sant Tukārām.33 She was struck by his hypocrisy for, even though he earned his living as a brahmin through the Vedas, he had no love for god or bhakti.34 Trapped, she gave way to suicidal thoughts.35 Her alienation stemmed from the lack of worship in her home, as well as a sense of estrangement from both the pleasures of the world and those around her, both enemies and friends, who were preoccupied by mundane desires.36 It was only through seeking refuge in god that Bahīnābai found a remedy for her condition, which she likened to that of a calf without its mother.37 If the home was a site of profound alienation for brahmin women, the low-caste sant Janābai expresses the double alienation of womanhood and caste. Her corpus, itself preserved as almost marginalia to the works of Nāmdev, describes her standing always in the doorway of her master’s home, while he remains engrossed in his own children and wife. By contrast, god creates an ideal home, in which all the sants, regardless of caste or gender, are welcomed as his children: My Vīṭho is a father (leṃkurvālḁ̄ ) with a gathering (melḁ̄ ) of children. Nivrtti sits on his shoulder, while he holds Sopān’s hand. Jñāneśvar walks ahead while beautiful Muktābai is behind. The potter Gorā sits on his lap, and in his heart [jīvā] Cokhā Vãkā is at his hip, Nāma holds his thumb. Janī says, Gopālā gathers the bhaktās in festivity (sōhaḷā).38 Only within the idealized poetic tradition to which Janābai aspires can brahmins like Jñāneśvar and a poet from an untouchable community like Cokhāmela be kin, the children of a loving god. In reality, many of Janābai’s poems express her isolation, standing forever on the threshold of society, with only god for company. Caste, as much as gender, materially conditioned both experience and its poetic expression. Unlike the circumscribed world of Bahīnābai’s brahminical

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home, for a caste oppressed sant like Janī, her experience of isolation often occurred out in the world leading to an almost suicidal world-weariness: Jani has had enough of mundane life— But how will I repay this favor? Discard your grandeur To grind grain with me. Hari, become a woman Bathing me and washing my dirty clothes. You carry the water with pride And gather dung with your own two hands . . .39 In this profound state of alienation caused by the grind of labour, poverty and social marginality, poetry and devotion are the only refuge. God offers her the solace of company: when she asks him where he went to fll his stomach, Jani beseeches him, ‘Slowly, slowly Pānduranga / Why do you leave me alone (nihsanga)?’40 It is his divine company and her belonging within the fold of bhakti that allows her to transcend the lowliness—and loneliness—of her social position.

‘History Is Dust’: Time, Loneliness and the Self in Postcolonial Poetry The performative context of bhakti is, by defnition, a communal affair, in which the collective recitation of these poetic traditions is central both to the constitution of these religious communities and the continual reinvigoration of the poetic tradition itself. Moreover, even as the bhaktas gather to sing of their longing, in that collectivity itself, their separation from divinity is dissolved, transforming absence into a co-created communal experience of presence. As Aditya Behl puts it,‘Bhakti religiosity, as a devotional idiom, is strongly weighted towards presence: the presence of the Lord, the bearing witness to this presence on the part of the devotee, the actualization of this presence in the company of good people, the sangat of believers.’41 The kīrtan, as these collective performances are called, is thus an unlikely site for solitude, let alone loneliness, and expressions of viraha or viyoga in these contexts cannot be equated to the articulation of modern loneliness. Indeed, the lonely often seek out precisely this kind of collective religious experience and community as a cure. In contrast to the emotional community constituted by bhakti poetry transmitted through collective performance, the printing press, introduced under colonialism, allowed the development of other types of emotional communities mediated by very different modalities of texts and textual practices. To take one example, consider the emotional communities constituted by vernacular newspapers. In a striking ethnography, Matthew Rosen notes that what drew readers to a vāchanālaya or footpath library in Pune ‘was the increasingly familiar modern desire to be alone, but not alone’.42 Here was a place for readers to perform stithyapragya, a kind of urbane and balanced detachment amid the bustle of a city, and to signal their status as members of a literate community of Marathi speakers in a city full of migrants. Undoubtedly, the kind of casual, routinized sociality the vernacular newspaper can engender in this space is still reminiscent of pre-literate cultural practices and forms,‘such as kattā and pār, the local names for outdoor gathering places where people could meet at their leisure for a gappa session—that is, to chat, exchange information, or discuss the news’. Yet the act of reading alone, which is constitutive of the modern urban vāchanālaya, marks it as

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a very different kind of emotional space from these popular forebears, and the emphatically communal kīrtan. Regardless of the wide varieties of emotional communities constituted by the printed word in India today, loneliness as an explicit leitmotif, echoed in the experience of solitary reading, is deeply familiar for the reader of modern Indian poetry. If viraha or viyoga both encode an experience, which allows the subject to expand beyond the boundaries of both the physical world and of personhood, loneliness in contemporary Marathi and Bengali poetry is located frmly within the bounds of the individual self. Moreover, this self is isolated both in space-time and from other monadic selves. Let us compare two poems from the twentieth-century canon of Bengali love poetry. The frst, perhaps the most famous of all love songs in the modern language, was composed by Jibanananda Das (1899–1954), fnding publication in the December 1935 issue of Kavitā. It is worth reproducing the poem in full to show the complex ways in which the spatial dynamics of viraha fnd modern expression: For a thousand years, I have wandered the paths of this earth. From the seas of Ceylon, in the dark of night, to the Malay ocean, much have I roamed. In the grey world of Asoka and Bimbisara, I was there; further still, in the dark, in the city of Vidharba. A tired soul, I, surrounded by the foaming ocean of life— for a moment, she gave me peace: Banalata Sen, of Natore. Her hair was like the ancient darkness of Vidisha’s night, Her face, the artisanship of Sravasti. Far out at sea, His rudder broken, drifting directionless, like a boatman who has sighted the green land of a cinnamon isle— that is how I saw her in the dark. She says,‘Where were you all this while?’ raising her eyes like the nest of birds—Banalata Sen, of Natore. At day’s end, like the sound of dew, The evening falls. The hawk has wiped the perfume of sunlight from its wings. When all the earth’s colors have dimmed and a pale design is sketched, the story is flled with the glimmering colors of frefies. All the birds come home to roost, all rivers, all the give and take of life come to an end. There remains only the darkness, as I sit, face to face, with Banalata Sen. Despite the urbane, world-weary tone, ftting for a poem composed in Calcutta during the interwar years, Das nonetheless displays the spatial and temporal dynamics of viraha that hearken back to a much older literary tradition. In separation, the subject’s consciousness is unbounded in time and space, free to wander the ashen world of antiquity, or to sail unmoored, like a boatman cast out at sea, through the rivers of time and memory. In union, by contrast, his subjectivity telescopes into the humdrum evening of the small town of Natore in Rajshahi, as he sits, face to face, with his beloved. The expansiveness afforded by absence, which is the mark of viraha, in contrast to the acute particularity of saṃbhoga, is central to the poem, though divested here of the spiritual connotations of the earlier tradition. Yet in this starkly secular expression of love, one of the key dynamics of the older tradition is lost: whereas the latter held open the possibility of the dissolution of the self into a higher union

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with the object of devotion, the subject of Das’ poem remains, even in the moment of union, resolutely separate from Banalata Sen. They are two individuals who met, briefy, and were then sundered by the vagaries of distance and time. It is a love story so common as to be banal in our times, encoding a peculiarly modern social arrangement that the geographer Adrian S. Franklin describes as ‘until further notice’ relationships. Though such social arrangements undoubtedly afford both the freedom and choice that the modern individual aspires to, they are also precisely the cause Franklin posits for more frequent and sustained experiences of loneliness in the contemporary world.43 In a similar vein, Anjali Das (b. 1957), though she titles her poem Biraha, expresses instead a distinctly different emotional state, situated neither in time nor space but in a self, an ‘I’ who feels the chill of modern love’s loneliness. She describes the darkness descending as if wrapped in a cloak of moody shadows while the sleepless night sculpts an idol from shards of the moon. Despite the religious reference, like ‘Banalata Sen’, this poem too belongs to a disenchanted age: the narrator is aggrieved at the casual leave-taking of her beloved, standing bereft while ‘the breeze is still shaped around his void (śūnya)’. She lies in the dark, as the light burns under her closed and sleepless eyelids. The poem ends elliptically, as loneliness yawns ahead: Cold fre, yet it’s still no good, I feel cold . . . By stripping these concepts of the redemptive theology which underpinned them in pre-modern poetic traditions, Das upends the trope of the fre of love in separation (viraha), as well as the notion of the void (śūnya). Das’ poem expresses instead an emotional cluster that a contemporary speaker of Bengali might label nihsangatā (literally, aloneness). Even the old metaphor of fre as an index of pain is transformed: the fre of loneliness is cold; it burns differently from those earlier fames of viraha. This is loneliness as we might recognize it today, an intense and inward experience of an isolated self in a disenchanted world. Among contemporary Marathi poets too, one can see both the subterranean infuence of earlier poetic traditions, as well as the expression of a distinctly new emotion. Take, for example, the oeuvre of Dilip Chitre (1938–2009), marked by his mastery of both his native Marathi and English.44 A key fgure of the Marathi ‘little magazine’ modernist literary movement of the 1960s, Chitre also attended the famed Iowa Writers Workshop in 1975. Apart from his many volumes of original poetry in Marathi and English, Chitre was also a prolifc translator, rendering into English both the works of sants like Tukārām and Jñāndev and of contemporary Marathi poets like Namdeo Dhasal and Hemant Divate. Indeed, Chitre might very well have been describing himself when he wrote that avant-garde Marathi poets like B.S. Mardhekar were products of a ‘cross-pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture’, who ‘began to approach the seven-century old tradition and to see in it a gestalt of its own choice’.45 In his engagement with this tradition, Chitre’s most personal and profound literary relationship was forged with Tukārām. In a lecture entitled ‘Life on the Bridge’, which Chitre delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1998 and then published as an appendix to his ravishing translation of Tukārām’s abhaṅgs, Chitre explained the profundity of the act of translation for a postcolonial writer like himself. He was compelled, he explained, to translate his poetry because his bilingualism left him no choice. As he described his own poetic practice, Chitre had been ‘working in a haunted workshop rattled and shaken by the spirits of other literatures unknown to my ancestors’. Thus, he had to build a bridge within himself, lest he should become ‘a fragmented person’. The act of translating Tukārām then served to suture the wounds inficted by

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colonialism, the ruptures it engendered within vernacular traditions and (elite English-speaking) contemporary South Asians who are their conficted inheritors. Chitre expressed this in a late poem, originally composed in English, ‘Tukaram in Heaven, Chitre in Hell’, in which the two poets ‘sing the same song/centuries apart’. Despite the separation of centuries, their bones are wrought from the same stone idol of the central deity of Marathi Varkari bhakti standing in Pandharpur.46 Though he writes in English, Chitre self-consciously adopts the mantle of the long tradition of Marathi sants and their poetry, dissolving the violence and ruptures of historical time: as he puts it,‘history is dust’, burnt away by the everlasting truth of a god-created universe. In this timeless reality, Tukaram’s joy and Chitre’s pain become two faces of the same coin, one divine and the other counterfeit. Separated by the gulf of modernity, Tukaram in heaven and Chitre in hell nonetheless reverberate to the same truth, participate in the same dance to the same devotional music, in the same place. Chitre encodes in English a model of time and space that is integral to the performance of the Marathi kīrtan. As a spiritual technology, the kīrtan allows devotees to telescope time and space so that the singing congregation might join the company of saints, themselves held apart by centuries of historical time and yet brought together within the panoply of bhakti tradition. (Janābai’s poem, quoted earlier, which imagines the poets of the tradition, separated in historical time by generations, as god’s children, plays much the same literary trick as Chitre.) Yet even as Chitre asserts his ‘sameness’ in the company of sants, the estrangement which spurs Chitre towards this form of spiritual remedy has all the elements of loneliness. The modern poet-sant is a disillusioned lover who has given himself over to the despair of addiction and suicide, as the needle ‘expertly’ fnds the vein of his pain: I go out forever On a faceless spree. In the wintry light of a cold sun, the narrator bequeaths his own skeleton, all ‘what’s left of love’, as he goes to join the saint’s ‘immortal choir’. The estrangement here is not from the cruelties of the mundane world that led the sants to seek refuge in god but from oneself, the ‘innermost stranger’ that lives at the heart of the modern ‘I’. The pain here, raw and suicidal, is precisely the kind of pain that makes loneliness a silent killer today. To the love that has abandoned him, Chitre leaves this suicide note, bequeathing his bones and his books of poems, his ‘fossil’ and his ‘dossier’, as he joins the sants. Loneliness has a landscape. Ironically, it is not, Chitre tells us, to be found in the desolate hills of Pandharpur. There, in the ‘uncivilized places’, in a village wrought by the collective voices of the poets which the modern English reader of Chitre’s poem has never visited, god resides ‘in silent huts’. Referring to the austere economy that is characteristic of Marathi poetic expression, Chitre reminds the reader that the best poems of this tradition are ‘as bald as facts’, as bald, in fact, as the stony hills of Pandharpur. In these ‘uncivilized places’, in its stony hills, one can see refected the company of saints like a mirror of time. It is instead in the throngs of civilization, Chitre tells us, that true loneliness resides. A poem describing his father’s return home on the commuter trains of modern Mumbai expresses the profound loneliness of urban India. As ‘suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes’, Chitre imagines his father’s eyes as they ‘dimmed by age/fade homeward’. Yet home, too, offers no respite from this loneliness. Leaving the train ‘like a word dropped from a long sentence’, he fnds none of the comfort of conversation that domesticity should afford, as his sullen children hide their jokes and secrets from him. Instead, he enters the toilet ‘to contemplate / man’s estrangement from a manmade world’. Chitre imagines him falling asleep, listening to the static on the radio and dreaming: 142

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Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.47 Isolated amid the static of modern electricity, Chitre’s father dreams of two types of time, both encoded in brahminical ideas of genealogy and time. In the frst, he dreams of connection: like the śendī, the tuft of hair which connects an orthodox male to his paternal line like a patrilinear umbilical cord, Chitre’s father dreams of a time in which man takes his place in the unbroken lines of genealogy.48 On the other hand, he dreams, too, of a moment of historical origin, the fateful moment when Aryan nomads entered South Asia, bringing with them the brahminical culture which persists even in modern Mumbai. It is a time from which the contemporary self, both reduced and monadic in its autonomy and individuality, is a refugee. In other words, this yearning for a past is the temporal equivalent for homesickness, an imagined salve for the loneliness of modern estrangement in a postcolonial key.49 Yet this nostalgia for the past is itself steeped in the institution of caste—and in marked contrast to the self-conscious and revolutionary modernity of contemporary Dalit poetry.50 The loneliness of commuter trains, the ennui of middle-class homes is fundamentally different from that of the public spaces of the nocturnal city captured by the Dalit Panther and Marxist poet Namdeo Dhasal (1949–2014). In the incendiarily titled Gāndubagīchā (Arse-fucker’s Park), Dhasal depicts a barren landscape, sterile and watered by tears, on which nothing grows. This sad ‘mimicry’ of nature is the backdrop for militarized drills, political speeches, festivities. But Dhasal’s keen eye sees not just the supposedly respectable—the politician (who is also a pederast) and the ‘all-India women’s conferences’—but the marginalized, the criminalized and the forgotten: pimps ‘confessing’ to sex-workers as ‘politicized crows’ observe them, addicts, pickpockets and thieves. What is striking here is that Dhasal writes not as an ethnographic or journalistic observer but as a participant who feels fully the pain of the denizens of this ‘mortal forest’ in his wounded heart. He shares with them the stigma of hidden love and the inferno of love in separation, the anxiety, the ‘magic’ of fear. In ‘the graveyard of compassion’, he knows their ‘extreme loneliness’.51 The ‘extreme loneliness’ of Dhasal’s underworld is not constituted by solitude but rather by marginalization. It is the loneliness felt by pimps and sex workers, addicts and petty criminals, by the poor and the caste-oppressed denizens of the mundane landscape of modern urban India. Yet for all the strident modernity of Dhasal’s idiom, mixing urban slang and surrealistic imagery, it is a theme with literary precedent in Marathi. Compare the ‘inferno of lover’s separation’ of Dhasal’s Bombay to Janabai walking in the bazaar of Pandharpur: Slipping off the veil of shame from my shoulders, I walk into the thronging marketplace. Carrying cymbals in my hand and a veena on my shoulder, Who would come to forbid me? In Pandharpur’s market I set up trade as a whore. On my wrist you poured oil. Jani says, Lord I have become a slut to reach your house.52 Undoubtedly, much like Janābai, Dhasal identifes in the social marginalization of caste and poverty the estrangement that is the fundament of all loneliness. Yet herein lies the ethical conundrum 143

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of seeking pre-modern genealogies for postcolonial phenomena, for to draw a straight uncritical line between Janābai and Dhasal is to do violence to the emancipatory project of Dalit poetry. If Janī saw in the social indignities of sex work the redemptive possibility of an erotic relationship with the divine, Dhasal, as the bard of ‘these slaves of the bed’ utterly rejects the possibility of recourse through tradition—quite the opposite. Unlike his own translator, Chitre, who dances to the same tune as the historical sants, Dhasal is out of step, dancing as a ‘wretched derelict’ to the ‘corrupted words in a saint’s festival’. For Dhasal, bhakti tradition can offer ‘neither slogans nor shrieks of pain’, and its compassion is veiled as if in shame. Dhasal’s indictment is historically grounded:as Christian Novetzke has brilliantly shown, bhakti allowed brahmins to continue to maintain caste even as they professed to transcend it.53 In contrast to the pieties of bhakti, Dhasal’s work instead is a stark and unrelenting accusation: You are allowing your downtrodden life to swim In the hell-water of self-alienation. Instead of ‘scratching the armpits of bygone times’, Dhasal seeks to ‘plaster the cracks in the sky of contemporary anguish’. Moreover, self-alienation is not a vague spiritual affiction, for which seeking communion with the congregation of saints might provide a salve, but a refection of the material conditions of the world, transformed by capitalist accumulation and labour relations. The hell-water of loneliness is the sewer of a caste- and class-ridden society in which the downtrodden must resist drowning. It is a savage indictment of the violence of poetry in South Asia that Dhasal’s price of entry into the Marathi literary frmament was to serve as a native informant and guide to upper-caste writers like Vijay Tendulkar, who wanted to go on safari in the world of the slum that Dhasal both inhabited and memorialized.54 In this context, as Juned Sheikh persuasively argues, we cannot separate poetic expression from the material conditions that produced it: the modern city of Bombay and Dalit literature are inextricably intertwined, far more so than Dalit literature and pre-modern traditions of Marathi bhakti poetry. It is a point worth remembering for historians of loneliness of the need to attend to the material conditions of a society that produces en masse this particular and peculiarly modern emotion. As Juned Shaikh has shown, Dhasal is by no means unique in rejecting the burden of (casteridden) tradition among modern Dalit writers in Marathi.55 Thus, to project pre-modern pasts uncritically onto such modern phenomena as loneliness runs the risk not only of anachronism, but more importantly, of an ethical violation against those for whom postcolonial modernity has been a refuge from violence undergirded by ‘tradition’. As the fever dreams of Chitre’s father and Hindu nationalists might suggest, brahminical constructions of the past often seek to draw an unbroken line from antiquity to the present, like a never-ending tuft of the śendi.56 It is thus doubly imperative for the historian to attend to the Dalit insistence on the rupture of modernity instead of imposing a pre-modern genealogy on Dalit literature in the name of historicization. In other words, in reading Janābai and Dhasal together, it matters less what they have in common than how comparing them allows us to chart the fundamental transformations of poetry, politics and emotion from the bhakti past to the Dalit present.

Conclusion For a historian of pre-modern South Asia, the history of loneliness presents a unique challenge, as well as an opportunity. On the one hand, given the complex of emotions that make up the emotional cluster of loneliness, it is possible to fnd genealogies of aspects of loneliness that predate the 144

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advent of modernity, thus allowing us to view continuities in the emotional and cultural order of the subcontinent that transcend colonialism. This chapter did so by locating a genealogy for the painful sense of separation from others that characterizes loneliness in viraha/viyoga in Bengali and Marathi bhakti poetry. While Bengali expressions of this state are eroticized, Marathi instead dramatizes this state as an alienation from home and kin, and from society itself in familial terms. In both cases, the remedy for this estrangement is religious. In Bengali, the state of estrangement that is viraha eventually allows the sufferer to recognize the divine in the void of emptiness she feels. In Marathi the poet, isolated by the strictures of caste, patriarchy and poverty, fnds in god and the saintly tradition the solace of company as a remedy for her sense of viyoga. Yet as even a cursory survey of modern Bengali and Marathi poetry suggests, these premodern traditions are not straightforward antecedents of loneliness in contemporary South Asia. Modern poets of Bengal and Maharashtra locate loneliness, much as their counterparts around the world do, in a sense of an individual and isolated self. While many of the tropes of the pre-modern tradition are invoked by these poets, these tropes are deployed in new ways, to express the loneliness of modern love and ‘until further notice’ relationships or the peculiar alienation of South Asia’s megacities. Moreover, these invocations serve radically different political ends, ranging from postcolonial nostalgia for a vernacular past untouched by the intrusion of English to the savage rejection of ‘tradition’ and the social exclusions and violence it undergirds. For a historian of pre-modern parts of the world that has undergone similar historical processes of colonialism, loneliness may well provide a novel mechanism for periodization. In places where the advent of modernity is coincidental with the coming of European colonizers, the question of where one draws the line between the modern and the pre-modern is fraught, both politically and conceptually. As the South Asian case suggests, loneliness not only provides a locus for the rupture of modernity, but it also allows us to view the continuity of pre-colonial cultural orders. The history of emotions therefore may well serve as a novel entry-point to address the debate at the heart of much of South Asian historiography since the 1990s. The genealogy of loneliness sketched out here puts into doubt the radical disjuncture posited by postcolonial scholars, who see in colonialism a temporal wall so high that the pre-modern can no longer peep through to the present. While modernity undoubtedly brings profoundly new modes of being, older emotional regimes continue, like subterranean rivers, to water the wells of our present existence. By the same token, it impels us to consider the analytical and ethical implications of such historicization, to avoid uncritically projecting the unwanted shadow of the past onto the present—and vice versa.

Notes 1 One of the great Marathi poet’s fnal poems, originally written in English, Chitre posted this on his website: http://planetchitre.tripod.com/poetrycorner.html. In what follows, translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. My thanks to the participants of the Columbia University’s International History workshop, the students in my graduate seminar and the editors for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I dedicate this chapter to Rajeev Kozhikkattuthodi. 2 Loneliness and social isolation are linked to around a 30 per cent increase in risk of having a stroke or developing coronary artery disease. See N.K. Valtorta, M. Kanaan, S. Gilbody et al., ‘Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Observational Studies’, Heart 102 (2016): 100916. On other health effects of perceived social isolation or loneliness, especially executive and cognitive function, see John T. Cacioppo and Stephanie Cacioppo, ‘Social Relationships and Health: The Toxic Effects of Perceived Social Isolation’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 8, no. 2 (2014): 58–72; John T. Cacioppo and Stephanie Cacioppo,‘Older Adults Reporting Social Isolation or Loneliness Show Poorer Cognitive Function 4 Years Later’, Evidence-Based Nursing 17, no. 2 (2014): 59–60.

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Ananya Chakravarti 3 Julianna Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith and J. Bradley Layton, ‘Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review’, PLOS Medicine 7, no. 7 (2010): e1000316. 4 Bianca DiJulio, Liz Hamel, Cailey Muñana and Mollyann Brodie, Loneliness and Social Isolation in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan: An International Survey (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). https://www.kff.org/other/report/loneliness-and-social-isolation-in-the-united-states-the-unitedkingdom-and-japan-an-international-survey/, accessed 10 October 2022. A meta-analysis of over 70 studies of loneliness, of which 10 per cent were conducted in Asia and over 80 per cent in Europe and North America, found that the mortality risks of loneliness were consistent across world regions. Julanne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker et al., ‘Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 2 (2015): 227–37. 5 Morbidity, Health Care and the Condition of the Aged—NSS 60th Round (January—June), National Sample Survey Organization, Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, Government of India, Report No. 507. 6 Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Konrad Adenauer Stiiftung, Attitudes, Anxieties and Aspirations of India’s Youth: Changing Patterns, 2017. 7 This view has been primarily popularized by the work of the late social neuroscientist John R. Cacioppo. See John R. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo and Dorret I. Boomsma, ‘Evolutionary Mechanisms for Loneliness’, Cognition and Emotion 28 (2014): 3–21; John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, John P. Capitanio and Steven W. Cole,‘The Neuroendocrinology of Social Isolation’, Annual Review of Psychology 66, no. 9 (2015): 1–35; John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, Steven W. Cole, John P. Capitanio, Luc Goossens and Dorret I. Boomsma,‘Loneliness across Phylogeny and a Call for Comparative Studies and Animal Models’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 2 (2015): 202–12; John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo and John P. Capitanio, ‘Toward a Neurology of Loneliness’, Psychological Bulletin 140, no. 6 (2014): 1464–504. 8 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 9 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 242–54. 10 Karen Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–8. 11 Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as Exemplifed in the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 C.E., ed. William M. Reddy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 223–90. 12 Sukumar Sen, Bāngālā sāhityer itihās (Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1940), 1: 204–6. 13 Jayadeva, Gita Govinda, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), 98. 14 This burning within bhakti tradition is parallel to the heat generated by ascetic meditation, the energy of tapas, in which the ascetic burns away their emotional and material attachment to the world in an act of inner sacrifce. See June McDaniel,‘Emotion in Bengali Religious Thought: Substance and Metaphor’, in Emotions in Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 45. 15 Sukumar Sen speculates that this may have been an independent text, as the genre of this song was known to have become extremely popular in its own right by the sixteenth century. Sukumar Sen, Chandidas (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1971), 35. 16 Caṇḍidās, Śkṛikṛṣṇakīrtana, ed. Basantaranjan Roy Bidyadyallabh (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1914, 6th reprint 1957), 138. 17 Thibaut d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 114. 18 The kuti is often associated with forest-dwelling ascetics, suggesting that the site of sexual union with the beloved is also simultaneously the ascetic abode of the spiritual seeker. 19 Vidyapati, Vidyāpati Thākurer Padābalī, ed. Srī Nagendranath Guptu (Calcutta: Sāradā Charan Mitra, 1909), 377. 20 Krittibās Rāmāyana, ed. Benimadhab Sil (Calcutta: Akshaya Library, 1954), Aranyakanda, Ch. 18. 21 Lālon is popularly believed to have been born sometime in the late eighteenth century, though, as with many folk poets, dating his work more precisely is diffcult. 22 On the medieval and early modern traditions in question, see Edward C. Dimock, The Place of the Hidden Moon: Eroticism and Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago,

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23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

1969); Shashibushan Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, as a Background to Bengali Literature (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946); Ramakantha Chakrabarty, Vaisnavism in Bengal, 1486–1900 (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985). On Bāul tradition, see Upendranāth Bhattāchārya, Bānglār Bāul o Bāul Gān (Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1959). June McDaniel, ‘The Embodiment of God among the Bāuls of Bengal’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 8, no. 2 (1982): 27–39. I render this as ‘person’ in order to preserve the ambiguities of identity in the original, which is key to Lālon’s conceptualization of the divine: the perfect being who inhabits the realm of Lālon’s mind is shorn not only of distinctions of gender but of caste too, a theme that recurs throughout his oeuvre. Note that the gender of the pronoun here in the original Bengali is undetermined. I have chosen to render it in the feminine in English. The feminine in Bāul thought is considered complete and, therefore, autonomous and superior, and it is therefore more appropriate to cast the autonomous divine object of longing that is capable of transcending the ordinary bounds of space and time in this mode. Lālon as a male authorial voice experiencing this longing is cast, by contrast, as inherently limited. See Jeanne Oppenshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. For example, in the Dharma Thākur cult, Brahma in his guise as Dharmarāj is described as empty (śūnya) in Rāmāi Pandit’s medieval Śūnya Purān. As Upendranath Bhattacharya’s authoritative work shows, the roots of the Bāul cult lie partly in Buddhist Sahajīya and the preoccupation with śūnyata in Lālon is refective of that. Christian Novetzke,‘A Family Affair: Krishna Comes to Pandharpur and Makes Himself at Home’, in Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity, ed. Guy L. Beck (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005), 127–8. Bahinabai, Sant Bahīnābāicī Gāthā, ed. Viśvanāth Nārāyaṇ Kolhārkar (Pune: Citraśālā Press, 1926), 2, verse 6.2. Ibid., 27, verse 58.2. The legendary sage few into a vengeful rage when his otherwise devoted wife was momentarily tempted by divine beings. Ibid., 27, verses 58.1, 58.3. Ibid., 6, verse 15.10–13, 16. Ibid., 11, verse 31.2–3. Ibid., 11, verse 32.1. Ibid., 17, verse 59.1–2. Ibid., 27, verse 60.2. Ibid., 27, verse 60.3. Ibid., 28, verse 61.2. Nanamaharaj Sākhare, ed., Sakaḷa Saṅta Gāthā, vol. 1 (Pune: Śri Vāṅmai Prakaśan Mandir, 1967), 427, no. 30. Ibid., 435, no. 123. Ibid., 428, no. 48. Aditya Behl, ‘Presence and Absence in Bhakti: An Afterword’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, no. 3 (2007): 319. Matthew Rosen, ‘Ethnographies of Reading: Beyond Literacy and Books’, Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2015): 1067. Adrian S. Franklin, ‘On Loneliness’, Geografska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 91, no. 4 (2009): 343–54. To see his profound if ironic engagement with the anxiety of infuence of both Western and South Asian ‘classical’ artistic traditions, compare ‘The Fifth Breakfast: To the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach’ to ‘The Sixteenth Breakfast: Remembering Kalidasa’. Acknowledging Bach’s greatness, Chitre nonetheless tells him to leave him alone to eat his breakfast, of which at least he is lord: ‘Please be a good boy, Johann. Don’t be so fercely religious / About yourself ’. By the same token, Chitre accuses his ‘ancestor, Kalidasa’ of being ‘a poet / Basking in his own classical libido’, while Chitre is condemned to read of the latest American atrocities in Vietnam. Dilip Chitre, As Is, Where Is: Selected English Poems, 1964–2007 (Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2007), 22, 37. Dilip Chitre,‘Introduction’, An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945–1965), reproduced in ‘Key Document: From Introduction to An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1967)’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, no. 1–2 (2017): 84. Dilip Chitre,‘Tukaram in Heaven, Chitre in Hell’, Indian Literature 53, no. 6 (2009): 17–21. Dilip Chitre,‘Father Returning Home’, Indian Literature 53, no. 6 (2009): 21–2.

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Ananya Chakravarti 48 On the śikhā, see Axel Michaels, Hinduism: Past and Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 86–7. 49 Contrast this modern individuated self to the model of personhood within orthodox brahminism, in which the brahmin achieves full personhood through the sublimation of his individuality, not through its assertion. See Alexis Sanderson,‘Purity and Power among the Brāhmans of Kashmir’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 190–216. 50 K. Satyanarayana,‘The Political and Aesthetic Signifcance of Contemporary Dalit literature’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 1 (2017): 9–24. 51 Namdeo Dhasal,‘Arsefucker’s Park I’, in Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld: Poems 1972–2006, trans. Dilip Chitre (New Delhi: Navayana, 2007), 94. 52 Nanamaharaj Sākhare, ed., Sakaḷa Saṅta Gāthā, vol. 1 (Pune: Śri Vāṅmai Prakaśan Mandir, 1967), 445, no. 224. 53 Christian Novetzke, ‘The Brahmin Double: The Brahminical Construction of Anti-Brahminism and Anti-Caste Sentiment in the Religious Cultures of Precolonial Maharashtra’, in Religious Cultures in Early Modern India, ed. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook (London: Routledge, 2012), 100–20. 54 Ibid., 165–7. 55 Ibid. 56 A recent example attracted global attention: at the Indian Science Congress in 2015, several speakers asserted Vedic roots for modern phenomena such as airplanes. Despite the widespread derision of the international scientifc community, these views were upheld by representatives of the highest echelons of government present at the conference, including the then minister of science and technology, Harsh Vardhan. Rama Lakshmi, ‘Indians Invented Planes 7,000 Years Ago: And Other Startling Claims at the Science Congress’, The Washington Post, 4 Jan. 2015. On the Hindu nationalist project of the Vedic sciences and scientifc Vedas to yoke an ideal brahminical past to contemporary technologies, see Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

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10 IN SOLITARY PURSUIT Loneliness and the Quest for Love in Modern Britain Zoe Strimpel

The histories of loneliness and the quest for intimacy by commercial means have been intertwined since the late nineteenth century, particularly in narratives of the city. Yet accounts of courtship and the woes of solitary living have often been considered separately. In exploring them in tandem, this chapter uses loneliness as a lens for considering the reciprocities between the modern history of British matchmaking and new emotional perils and uncertainties attendant on urban living in the twentieth century. Loneliness as a heuristic extends our understanding of the emotional underwiring of the quest for intimacy by drawing the focus to lifeworlds: where people lived and the rhythms and the perceived deprivations of modern life. This chapter begins by setting in place the historical context in which the matchmaking industry—or matrimonial press—took root. Rising numbers of single people in London helped fuel a growing interest in urban loneliness, unrootedness and alienation. Symptomatic of this unmoored, impersonal urban landscape, they were seen as being in desperate need of social assistance. Having sketched this context, the chapter will track the matchmaking industry through to the decades to the post-1970 period, an acute moment of change for the romantic self and, with its own themes of urban alienation and concern about the loneliness facing young people in the city, a fruitful counterpoint to the earlier period. In this period, however, rapidly reforming social norms and loosening strictures around sex, family and relationships reordered the romantic sphere, putting new forms of pressure on the quest for love (and sex) and amplifying feelings of loneliness and failure in those unable to fnd partners.

Loneliness and the Quest for Company in the Nineteenth-Century City Since the late nineteenth century, loneliness has recurred as a problem seen by turns (and sometimes contradictorily) as pathological, universal, atemporal and social—a more emotional form of the sociological concept of alienation. Looking back over the century, scholars today present loneliness as one of the defning features of the last hundred years, locating the ‘epidemic’ in its ‘cultural products, popular discourse and in everyday life, as urbanisation, community erosion, family breakdown and the individualistic ethos of capitalist modernity’.1 By the 1880s, London had been established as a nexus of loneliness, a ‘city of dreadful solitude’, in the words of W.T. Stead in a defence of the matrimonial bureau.2 This was a motif that would recur over the course of the century, reaching into the advertising literature of dating agencies DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-12

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through the 1990s. This lonely London was entirely bereft of any of the glamour associated with cities; the suffering of solitude was not that of lost souls who caroused by night and worked by day but of ‘the depressing pictures of life in lodgings’.3 As Harry Cocks has shown, the late Victorian and Edwardian periods saw a surge in the relocation of young people from the country and provinces to London, part of a new demographic of lower-middle-class workers that included clerks, shopworkers, civil servants and teachers. Their number increased tenfold after 1850, reaching up to 10 per cent of the working population of the biggest cities.4 Associated with declining marriage rates, the urban clerk class was cut off from home networks and traditional modes of meeting spouses. Their infux therefore fuelled the expansion of the matrimonial press—and gave focus to portraits of urban disconnectedness and the loneliness it entailed. At least twenty-two matrimonial newspapers appeared between 1880 and 1914, and with this burgeoning industry, a body of commentary and parodic fction and drama appeared that parodied its clientele.5 The customers of the matrimonial agent were portrayed as ‘colourless clerks in dusty suburbs’.6 Concern for the loneliness of the young new infux, and their failure to achieve the wholesome infuence of a family fuelled support for matrimonial services. Annie Swan’s magazine, The Woman at Home, received letters from single clerks which, she said, revealed a life ‘which in no sense can be described as home life’.7 Salvation Army general William Booth, a strong proponent of the matrimonial agency, was concerned by the ‘thousands of young men and young women, who are living in lodgings’ and who ‘are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other sex!’8 Hopelessly and artifcially sequestered in comfortless domiciles, this was a group that not only ran a high risk of actual isolation but also of a social and cultural discombobulation that worried their associates. Lacking a clear class identity, they could not be trusted to keep to the codes of respectability without a clear set of parameters. As Geoffrey Crossick has pointed out, as well as widespread behavioural guides written to ward off the ever-present threat of unprofessionalism, some employers had salary limits under which clerks—the archetype of the new lower-middleclass urban bachelor—were not allowed to marry ‘because they would not be allowed to live like gentlemen’.9 Etiquette guides for the lower-middle classes proliferated, suggesting the constant proximity of grave social errors born of not ftting a meaningful, established social milieu.10 Commentators also questioned the clerks’ ability to conduct fruitful, wholesome and satisfying romances. Their courtships were dubious, and the success rates were reported to be low. Annie Swan wrote in 1893: We are constantly being informed by statistics which cannot be questioned, that the marriage rate is decreasing; and we know that in our own circles the number of marriageable girls and marriageable youths who for some inexplicable reason don’t marry is very great.11 More diffuse concern rested on the impact of urban living and low salaries on ‘affective relations, and especially on the seemingly inauthentic nature of young clerks’ courtship’.12 T.W.H. Crosland,‘the scourge of the suburbans’, bemoaned the transience of lower-middle-class courtship, which, he said, all too often included ‘a giggling, scantbrained boy and a calculating, pot-hearted girl’ who met, lacking respectability, in parks and other public spots, exchanging ‘meretricious glances’, followed by ‘very cheap conversation’ and an ‘appointment . . . for another meeting’.13 It was a worry that from such a feeting, low-grade exchange ‘sprang a relation which is to persist till death do them part’.14 More than loneliness, however, and the lengths to which it drove rootless young people to search out lifelong partnerships in unorthodox ways, the concern with alienation has been more 150

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explicitly linked to the concept of ‘modernity’, the focal point of sociology, and arose alongside the swelling number of solos in the city.15 The single—uprooted, at large and sexually unspoken for—was a potent fgure in the fast-changing cityscape of new freedoms and pleasures, in which women were included.16 If the late Victorian unmarrieds of the clerk class were a focal point of comedic and anxious appraisals of blurring social categories, then their quest came to be associated with something broader: personal ads in the matrimonial press were ‘one of the telling signs which enabled the interpretation and negotiation of modern urban life’.17 As commentators wrote about clerks and their attempts to fnd love, a new crop of sociologists was analysing modernity through the conditions of urban life. Georg Simmel, working at the turn of the twentieth century, pioneered the concept of alienation as a by-product of ‘modern’ urban life, writing that in the metropole, meaningful relationships, established slowly, were impossible due to anonymity and the quantity of shops and contacts: urban dwellers could best form relationships with currency and the ecology of exchange.18 For Durkheim, modernity entailed the apparent dissolution of the structures that anchored personal and sexual life. In his meditations on suicide, written in 1897, he explored the concept of anomie, resulting from the violent disruption of norms caused by sudden social and economic change. These, according to Durkheim, also disrupted the rules and limits necessary for psychological and social integration, dangerously untethering people from historical structures of meaning and limits imposed by forces outside themselves. Durkheim blamed the rise of ‘excessive individualism’—the adherence only to a personal set of values and desires and a hallmark of what he saw as the disintegration of society—for at least one form of suicide (the ‘egoistic’). For Durkheim, the fatal effects of this estrangement of self from society hit the romantically solo particularly hard, and especially men, for whom the institution of marriage provided an essential means for containing the endless itch of desire. Bachelors, experiencing unbounded freedom, would be more likely to succumb to severe depression, a function, moreover, of their moral inferiority. He was frank, too, about the consequences of spinsterhood: after a period of stability between ages thirty and ffty, when the ‘disappointments and strains caused by celibacy start to wear off ’, the ‘loneliness . . . if the old maid remains by herself ’ would set in.19 Unease about the long-term psychological and social consequences of singleness, particularly for women, changed.

Emotional Modernity Disrupted by two world wars, British emotional modernity—to the extent that it is traceable in the number, fate and perception of never-married people—swerved twice in the frst half of the twentieth century. The First World War resulted in a new demographic of unmarried women whose counterparts had died fghting, freeing them, should they either remain unmarried or go on to form new relationships, from associations with suspect personal morals.20 Meanwhile, new discourses and anxieties of sexual freedom, linked to the suffrage movement, women’s new right to vote and the legacy of their war work, appeared.21 However as Claire Langhamer, Terri Chettiar and others have shown, the aftermath of the Second World War saw a profound deviation from the century’s apparent path towards sexual individualisation and liberalisation.22 Encouraging stable marriage became the explicit goal of the post-war government, which—as Langhamer has charted—urged women to perform heavy emotional labour in the romantic sphere and charged them with upholding and preserving both the concept of love and, above all, that of marital duty and stability.23 The marriage rate peaked in 1972, marking the cresting of a period in which a lower proportion of the population than ever remained unmarried—and in which expectations of marriage rose.24 151

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In this context, loneliness as a function of romantic solitude—at least among those who had failed to marry—faded from discourse (to spike again in the 1970s). But as a social and psychological ill, it began to form a key part of social analyses and was frequently pathologized in ways that would re-emerge later in relation to romantic failure. Studies of mid-century loneliness centred, to some degree, on the elderly: the sociologist Peter Townsend, investigating the causes of social isolation, found that the ten most isolated in a study of 203 people over sixty years old were single or childless.25 In 1961, the unmarried were also found to be over-represented in NHS hospitals, homes for the elderly and psychiatric hospitals.26 More recently, scholars have found isolation and loneliness at the heart of experiences of old age and key to the picture of modern Britain.27 While old-age loneliness intensifed as a source of concern as lifespans lengthened and geographical mobility increased, by mid-century loneliness was also seen as a fundamental social problem originating at the other end of the age spectrum. It was assumed to be the leading cause of crime and delinquency in children, as well as ‘social maladjustment’ and a host of psychiatric-social problems.28 In 1954, Lord Hailsham appealed for funds for a club in central London to combat loneliness.29 Meanwhile, in step with increasing psychological interest in family and relational life, marriage became recognised as another site of loneliness, an idea that appeared in some arguments for divorce reform in 1969.30 The ups and downs of marriage, including feelings of aloneness in unhealthy unions, came under the microscope as pressure mounted for divorce reform.31 But singleness, as it once again became a prominent category in the 1970s, bore a special relationship to loneliness, and in the fnal decades of the twentieth century, images of lonely singles lost amid the impersonal lights, sounds and structures of an increasingly automated London were a mainstay of documentary investigations of the single scene.32 Were the new crop of singletons lonely and romantically solo? Or were they liberated? What new possibilities for intimacy had been opened up for them? Following decades of high marriage rates and, in the 1960s, a discourse preoccupied with the rise of permissiveness alongside key legislative reforms that made sexual liberty physically easier than ever before, the 1970s marked a key moment in the story of modern romantic selfhood and its relationship to togetherness and aloneness. The period after 1970 saw sharp growth in the number of never-married single people— as well as formerly married ones. Divorce rates tripled in the 1970s alone, from 50,000 to 150,000 per year.33 Single people in the never-married category accounted for 21 per cent of the population of England and Wales in 1970, and 30 per cent of it in 2000.34 This increase was more pronounced for unmarried women aged twenty-fve to ffty-nine, a group that increased from 18 per cent to 40 per cent of all women over the same period. In a 1992 special report focusing exclusively on single-person households, as opposed to households including unmarried cohabiting couples, Mintel, the market research frm, pinned this number down to people who were not cohabiting either. It used fgures from the Central Statistics Offce and Family Expenditure Survey to put the number of single-person households at six million in 1992.35 Crucially, it differentiated between retired and non-retired singles, and among the non-retired, between pre-family (under forty) and post-family singles (e.g. divorced, separated or widowed). It cited non-retired singles at between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of all households, with single pensioners at 14–15 per cent. The rising numbers of singles in the post-1970s period mirrored, to some extent, an earlier part of the century. As Katherine Holden has shown, in the decades leading up to 1931, only one-half of adults over ffteen were married at any one time, while over a third never married.36 The post-war years saw far higher marriage rates, adding stigma to those who remained solo, especially women. Single women in particular were liable to suffer from isolation in the post-war years in other ways, too, caught between poor pay and high rents. Men suffered less, both in terms 152

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of stigma and pay, and were more likely to be taken in as ‘bachelors’ by families—though these arrangements had their limits.37

The Pressure to Self-Actualize: Singleness After 1970 Compared to the earlier part of the century, when there were many more unmarried people, and even to the apparently alienating, mid-century hinterland for singles, the picture after 1970 looked particularly lonely for the romantically alone. For sociologists and other observers, particularly in America, a watershed moment of modernity had arrived producing an acute crisis of atomisation and loneliness. ‘Life . . . has exploded, and loneliness is one main ingredient in the fallout’, wrote the social researcher Suzanne Gordon in 1976.38 Irma Kurz, the British agony aunt and author of a book on loneliness, declared in 1983 that ‘there are characteristics of our society which exacerbate loneliness, and because we cannot hold loneliness or see it but only feel it, loneliness has become the carthorse of our misery.’39 There were more concrete indicators. In Britain in 1952, 20,000 people lived in boarding houses and hotels: of these, there were more than twice as many women as men. In 1957, the Rent Act put an end to rent control, making fats more expensive and driving more people into bedsits. By the late 1970s, self-contained social housing, including tower blocks and suburban single-occupancy retirement units with porters rather than co-lodgers and landladies, had superseded large boarding houses, with their modicum of daily human contact. More one-bedroom homes were commissioned and built, with house-building frms, public and private, keen to meet forecast demand from the rising numbers of singleperson households. Among those advertised were ‘studio fats’ and ‘starter homes’: Barratt Homes launched the Mayfair house for single householders in 1977.40 Singles magazine reported in 1980 on a ‘one room living’ stand at the Design Centre Exhibition at Haymarket. ‘Two room constructions in particular will be of interest to readers—the bachelor pad (no cooking area here) and the student’s bedsit’.41 For the many renting converted and carved-up fats in London,‘bedsitter land’ had become a reality, and single people aged sixteen to ffty-nine made up 41per cent of all privately rented furnished homes, according to Mintel and the General Household Survey. Loneliness among singles was worsened by new forms of commercialized and psychologized sexual and social pressure to pair up, and the rise of skill and ‘technique’ even in the sexual sphere, over and above older, more clear-cut values, such as shared religious outlook and class identity, as a basis for communion.42 Courtship, leading to marriage, had long been described as a ‘market’, but the post-1970s period appeared to usher into the most personal sphere new, demanding metrics of worth. New discourses from psychology, therapy, management and personal development encouraged people to see themselves as work-in-progress products, whose quality was constantly open to refnement—singles, who were literally involved in self-exchange in a marketplace of attractions, felt the effects of these discourses keenly.43 This new in-progress nature of the self was part of a wider framework of self-growth that permeated a wide spectrum of cultural activity, output and commerce. Frank Furedi has argued that the push to ‘self-actualise’ became a dominant social and cultural force in the late twentieth century, while, as Mathew Thomson has shown, the numbers of psychotherapeutic services registered in the UK rose sharply from the late 1970s onward, with 5,500 registered psychotherapists by 1999, up from 500 in 1976.44 The number of mental health professionals quadrupled between 1970 and 1995 in both the US and Britain, alongside an explosion in psychological magazines, books and a widening in discussions of psychological health that spanned medical, social, cultural and intimate spheres.45 The lucrative expansion of psychological materials and therapist businesses supports Eva Illouz’ argument that the logics of capitalism infltrated the emotional sphere with burgeoning intensity as the twentieth century wore on, spiking in its fnal decades with the rise of neoliberalism. In her analysis, 153

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few feelings and experiences associated with romance escaped either commercial or marketized framing—and this only added pressure on single people to change their state.46 Sexual and romantic felicity became a key strand in these widespread, psychologically infused understandings of self-actualisation. Langhamer has located this development at mid-century, when ‘love promised an emotional connectivity which would improve those involved by creating something more than the sum of its parts: the co-actualizing heterosexual couple’.47 The emphasis on personal growth as the goal of all life activities, but especially the spiritual domain of love relationships, grew after 1970. If at mid-century it was marriage that should add up to more than the sum of its parts, in the fnal few decades of the twentieth century the target became more capacious, extending to ‘meaningful relationships’ in general.48 Even if the 1970s brought new forms of sexual and relational freedom, an increased emphasis on ‘conjugality’ was also observable, further sharpening the feeling of failure around involuntary singleness.49 Partnership was also the chief goal, as well as the best context for that other spiritual activity: sex, as the debut of Alex Comfort’s bestselling book, The Joy of Sex, made clear.50 Singles, of course, were excluded from these avenues of growth. The emphasis on growth was refected in the terminology singles themselves used in their quest for love. Their personal ads featured words including ‘meaningful’, ‘sincere’, ‘lasting’ and ‘caring’ to such a degree that some onlookers were downright irritated.51 Indeed, according to the managers of Britain’s top lonely hearts fora (e.g., Time Out, The New Statesman, Private Eye), many advertisers used the section to ‘explore their selfhoods’. According to the ad manager of The New Statesman, refecting on the section in the 1980s: The same people also answer ads in abundance because they enjoy writing about themselves . . . each letter is a voyage of discovery. Some people write ten letters of reply over the weekend about themselves. They arrive here on Tuesdays and we send them on.52 On one hand, then, singles were under pressure to achieve just what they had not yet managed to—a loving relationship. Some, including the lonely hearts writers, saw the quest for love itself as a gateway to self-realisation. But singles were also subject to a competing set of pressures: they were free, after all, and in something of a privileged position, poised to take full advantage of the promise of the age. Indeed, the deepening individualism of the late twentieth century has been theorized as the dominant tendency of the modern era, used to explain the decline in marriage, was considered a defning aspect of the modern self.53 Within a context of prized individualism, then, the single state appeared to offer individual freedom and privilege individual wants in ways that could further the goal of self-realisation. Some singles embraced these possibilities. Writing to Singles magazine shortly after it launched, a reader wrote: I am very excited about your magazine. Isn’t it remarkable that it has taken all this time to get recognised the fact that being single is more than just not being married, that we are a positive, identifable group who need to band together so that we don’t miss out in a society tailored to married couples?54 In other letters to Singles, also urging a positive singles’ identity, defance hinted at the diffculties of going solo and the uncertainty and stigma surrounding the identity: who were singles? One reader suggested a manifesto of sorts around which Singles readers could unite and defne themselves: Articles or a permanent but open feature which aims at the clarifcation of what exactly ‘Singles’ means. Is it a person who is pragmatically against the bitter sweet trauma of the one-man-one-woman set-up, or someone who is temporarily without Mr/Mrs Right? 154

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Another point in this reader’s list called for ‘Articles on singles and other countries so that singles in Britain recognise the normality of their existence.’ The hegemony of couples should be battled, even among sexual minorities, with ‘articles critical of lesbianism and homosexuality in so far as they reproduce the couples philosophy’.55 As hinted in these defant letters, being single was not always a liberating choice. It could easily be an insecure, costly or unwanted state. The satisfaction of all those individual wants and the enjoyment of new freedoms—from casual sex to travel—was not necessarily within reach of people whose economic, cultural and gendered outlook made singleness dreary and frustrating. As it had been a century previously, in W.T. Stead’s terms, London remained a ‘city of dreadful solitude’ for young singles: bedsitter land was expensive and alienating. In Lonely Hearts, a documentary about singles in London, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee said she found her Asian newsagent the only source of comfort: ‘people gaily assume that you’ll meet people [in London] and . . . but I really don’t see how.’56 A young man who had grown up in ‘Malaya’ spoke of the terrible loneliness of retreating in the ‘evenings into our own little boxes’, while an Irish driving instructor in his twenties ate dinner daily at a local diner before going home to watch Match of the Day. ‘They say loneliness is a foretaste of death; if that’s the case, I’ve had a feast’, he told the camera.

The Ubiquity of Sex Another source of loneliness stemmed from the ubiquity of sex in culture.57 The agony aunts Marje Proops and Irma Kurtz both drew attention to the misery caused by a psychologically taxing over-emphasis on sex. As Kurtz noted, much loneliness was perceived to be caused by ‘stymied lust’ and sexual failure; she proposed to downplay the importance of sex by rephrasing ‘sexual frustration’ as plain ‘irritation’ or ‘misery’ instead. Kurtz identifed an implicit coding of abnormal/shameful in the seemingly progressive sex literature of the 1960s and 1970s— homing in on the implications for people without ready partners. She took aim at David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1969), in which the reader was told that ‘masturbation is fun . . . certainly, not as much fun as fully-fedged sexual intercourse, but the next thing to it.’ Kurtz responded: In other words, masturbation is a private confession that no partner has volunteered or been seduced into the better game. Masturbation is the “next thing” to fully-fedged sex and therefore only a notch above nothing at all. . . . Is it not shameful to exist alone in a sexual desert while everybody else is splashing around naked in the swim?58 Margaret Adams, author of the classic study Single Blessedness (1976), also pinpointed the way shame attached to fear of being socially abnormal when single. The pervasiveness of the idea that ‘sociability’ is ‘what constitutes normal and proper behaviour’, with ‘solitude’ its opposite, meant single people were frequently made to feel worse about being alone than they should. ‘Modern society’, claimed Adams,‘gives a very low rating to solitude.’59 Even if singleness could be celebrated as a supreme form of me-time, managing the act in the right way was fraught, especially for women. Single women were under widespread pressure to uphold a delicate balance. On one hand, they had to be fun and attractive—to make use of their ‘modern’ freedoms by scoffng at the need for a man—and on the other, they were not to let their single sojourn detract from the ultimate quest, which was still coupledom. Being a single woman was fne, so long as you were self-confdent, attractive and up for adventure (a ‘femme fatale’)—never losing sight of what constituted femininity.60 These contradictory rules were directed at women from a variety of media, especially women’s magazines, from Cosmopolitan to 155

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Woman’s Own. Launched in 1972 in Britain, Cosmopolitan reached a circulation of 440,000 by the middle of the decade. Women’s double bind was clear. The magazine operated under a liberatory banner, celebrating singleness, but cultivated a specifc, rather constricting image of what singleness should look like.61 It glamourized ‘permissive’ behaviour and certain types of consumption (cigarettes, holidays, fashion). Cosmo encouraged women to be ‘man-eaters’ but in a glamorous way. Actress Sarah Miles, for instance, was billed as ‘the cool man-eater’, in an article written by a man.62 More often, however, single women’s romantic unaccountability was addressed through worrying confessional stories of nymphomania—as both psychological and physical compulsion.63 Messages were persistently mixed, with back-to-back articles advocating the development of sexual skills and marriage. Readers were offered a quiz—‘How sexy are you?’—and an avowal of their sexual power (‘Girls, you and your body are driving me mad’), followed by ‘What I want in a wife’—according to ‘forty trappable bachelors.’64 Readers made an effort to present themselves within the framework offered by this discourse— emphasizing self-growth, emotional robustness and feminist confdence. ‘Now I’ve learned to love myself ’, wrote a Company reader in 1982, ‘I am confdent, and know that I can and will cope. In my opinion, self-respect is the most worthy ally any woman can have.’65 In a ‘going out alone guide’, the journalist noted that ‘unfortunately, some of us still have diffculty thinking of ourselves as independent. We’ve got stuck with the notion that it’s only OK to be seen at somebody else’s side.’66 In Woman’s Own, there was an attempt to celebrate ‘the growing number of single people’, marking a shift from a bygone age when ‘we used to be slightly sorry for single people. Of course, all they really wanted was a husband or wife to cosset and care for.’67 There was ‘research’ showing that ‘singles today are happier, healthier and more fulflled than their married friends’— happiness, health and fulflment being the cornerstones of successful selfhood. But the magazine was unable to fully condone the single life. ‘There are obvious problems about being unattached’, as an expert, psychologist Mike Gossop, added. ‘Having someone else to confde in and lean on when necessary is a very important psychological support.’68 It was implied that those without romantic partners were bereft of that support. In the end, then, despite the massive expansion of the sexual-emotional plane, advanced even in women’s magazines, a stifing binary seemed to remain in place: you were paired up and on relatively safe social and psychological ground, or you were single and never far from the developmental dangers and emotional perils of being alone. As suggested earlier, the pathologisation of loneliness was not new in the 1970s, and it continued to be treated as an acute social problem plaguing the young, old and those beset by tragedy—with a growing number of social efforts to combat it. In 1979, PALS—People Against Loneliness—was launched in Durham.69 A Mrs Phyllis Crone launched Cronies, a newsletter for the lonely, in 1971, ‘for people who are in a backwater’.70 But a burgeoning demographic, young single people, became a new focus of loneliness fears. In the Crosby by-election of 1981, from an eclectic party mix, Donald Potter—the founder of a Young Conservatives lonely hearts group called Close Encounters—wanted to install a phone line for lonely people for the Humanitarian Party.71

The Loneliness of Singles: Fascination, Pain and Pathology The emotional experience of the modern single was a source of fascination and concern, increasingly linked to interest in the expanding matchmaking landscape. Lonely Hearts, the 1977 documentary, found desperately lonely people who were signed up to numerous services; one young man belonged to three dating agencies and regularly placed personals in the London Weekly Advertiser and Time Out. Loneliness was exacerbated by the stigma of using commercial services, 156

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however much such businesses insisted they were the new normal.72 A female advertiser in Time Out said she had told nobody that she was using lonely hearts, adding a doleful note of self-doubt that starkly contradicted the confdent tone encouraged by Company and Cosmo:‘It’s all very hush hush; people think there’s something wrong with you, and perhaps there is.’73 Solos living outside the city were equally aware of being on the sharp end of contemporary freedoms, as one wrote to Singles in 1980,‘Life is more informal these days [than in the nineteenth century], and there’s no doubt we have much more freedom. Trouble is, we are free to be lonely, free to make mistakes.’74 Echoing anxieties in the Victorian and Edwardian period, the plight of the young and unmarried at large in the lonely metropolis was a source of concern.75 Services sprang up to help young singles suffering from extreme loneliness in London, such as Nexus and the London Village, which had 2,500 members in 1977 and was aimed at ‘anchoring’ people by ‘breaking down’ the metropolis into a series of local events.76 Urban loneliness had become such a rich sociological seam that in his iconic meditation on 1970s London, Jonathan Raban presaged his own observations by saying that ‘a sociologist, I suppose, would see [being ‘adrift’ and disoriented] as classic symptoms of alienation, more evidence to add to the already fat dossier on the evils of urban life.’77 In his own analysis of London, a deep form of psychic alienation from others was a key observation. ‘If a city can estrange you from yourself, how much more powerfully can it detach you from the lives of other people, and how deeply immersed you may become in the inaccessibly private community in your own head.’78 Raban homed in on singles using lonely hearts and computer-dating services as a particular indictment of contemporary London life—while they could fnd ‘solidarity’ in loneliness in ‘neatly’ stacked ‘columns of fne type’, advertising for a partner was nonetheless, ‘one of the darker freedoms of the city [in which] the individual [is] at liberty to barely exist . . . [the personals] bear witness to the stunted conception of character which the city permits as its worst’.79 Computer dating, which had begun in the late 1960s and gained in popularity in the following decades was, according to Raban, boldly exploiting ‘the shame of loneliness’ and answered to the ‘peculiarly big-city condition of sexual isolation’.80 He drew a comparison between the computer and the city, which were both ‘mysterious and impersonal’, a motif emphasized in documentaries about London’s young single population. Lonely Hearts dwelled on images of empty nocturnal streetscapes, traffc lights desolately fashing and impersonal blocks of houses marked only by the lights of strangers interspersed with footage of computer disks whirring. Within this doleful framework, the plight of the long untouched and apparently unloved tapped into psychological interest in personality types and the relationship between fxed traits and the environment. Sustained attention to lonely young singles came from Tony Lake, the in-house psychologist at Singles magazine, who, shortly after the magazine’s launch in 1977, ran a fve-part study of loneliness. Lake surveyed 1,200 singles most prone to loneliness, concluding that the worst-hit were not, in fact, older but were in their thirties and 40–60 per cent lived alone, 17 per cent with their parents and 16 per cent with their children. His fndings were delivered in a severe, heightened pathologized form in which loneliness was quickly identifed as a lethal hazard of romantic solitude. He introduced the series by stating, ‘Loneliness, in its extreme form is a killer. The feeling that nobody cares whether you live or die, whether you scream or stay silent . . . can [drain from your body] every last drop of the will to live.’81 According to Lake, victims are able to refrain from suicide only by ‘the total lack of feeling. . . . They slump into apathy, sometimes so severe as to resemble a schizophrenic state of withdrawal and detachment.’82 Lake insisted that loneliness left an indelible mark on the bodies and bearings of the worst cases, such as the case study Bernard, a man who had been trying unsuccessfully to meet someone through computer dating. ‘One only has to look at Bernard to see the disturbed nature of his 157

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body movements during communication to realise how deeply damaged he has been by [past] experiences. He takes no pride in his face.’ That face was, according to Lake, thoroughly marked by Bernard’s personal affiction. Only the mouth moves when he talks. The muscles at the side of his mouth are still and short of exercise. By the side of his eyes are equally unused muscles. . . . He tends to avoid eye contact, and keeps his head still while he talks. He does not gesture. . . . His tone of voice is monotonous.83 Lake was clear that chronic long-term romantic deprivation was worse than mere loneliness— readable in the features, which, in Bernard’s case, showed someone who had ‘never been loved . . . who wants to get married, but seems to be an entirely sexless person’. Lake espoused a theory of disuse: the cumulative effect of being unloved was an ever-decreasing likelihood of being unloved in the future. ‘In the chronic cases sexuality can become so badly damaged by ill-use or lack of use that it is permanently destroyed, and the person has no will left to live socially’, he maintained.84 There was a right and a wrong way to handle singleness. The pathetic fgure of Bernard offered one extreme of what happened when somebody got it badly wrong. Bernard’s isolation and failure had ground on so long it came to reveal, or so it seemed, something essential about him. As the discourse of self-empowerment and self-growth suggested, there was a careful relationship to be managed between singleness and loneliness: the right way to be single was to be confdent and happy. Cultivating a kind of upbeat emotional hygiene allowed one to ward off the spectre of doleful solitude. Key to this was a busy social life, plenty of spending money and the sense that singleness was a fun phase, not the life sentence it appeared to be for Bernard and the poor souls who moved aunts Irma Kurtz and Marje Proops to write so eloquently on the loneliness of the young and the old.85 In the fnal decades of the twentieth century, singleness was recast as an opportunity to be briskly managed by individuals and maximized by marketers. The increasing emphasis on ‘lifestyle’ marketing, directed toward a more affuent population of young and middle-aged professionals offered an idealized form of singleness: this was a world of luxurious steaks for one and sunny group holidays. The can-do attitude towards personal happiness—with or without a partner—was also advanced in Singles. The magazine ran a ‘successful single’ column featuring the stories each month of a single who had started a business or followed a dream. It was frm, too, on the right tack to take: To pity the lonely is to patronise them. . . . To argue that loneliness is not the fault of the lonely is equally unhelpful because it suggests that the individual can do nothing about it . . . Our policy for the problem of loneliness should be tough and practical. We should increase the self-suffciency of the lonely and help them to help themselves.86 Both men and women across the broad middle-class spectrum encountered a changing portfolio of terms and concepts encouraging them to approach their single state in the spirit of management and enterprise or—as Eva Illouz has suggested—of ‘emotional intelligence’ whereby ‘emotional management and emotional success’ are ‘explicitly’ connected.87 This message came from the media, a small crop of dating manuals and from matchmakers themselves. A Guardian journalist wrote in an article about high numbers of single women signing up at dating agencies: ‘Emotional identifcation with our working environment has led us to apply goal-oriented offce skills to fnding a mate. If you’re looking for a job, you go to an employment agency; if you want a holiday, you call a travel agent; if you want a partner, why not try a dating agency?’88 Karen 158

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Mooney, of the Sarah Eden agency, agreed:‘People don’t want to waste time . . . It’s better to put your cards on the table at the start. That way, you’re fshing where the fsh are.’89 Such imagery entrenched the sense that for the single, action and time maximisation were key; the looming spectre of loneliness, otherwise, threatened to engulf the romantically unpaired.

Conclusion Loneliness and singleness have remained in close lockstep to the present, and as the sheer volume of possible dates available to anyone with a smartphone or an internet connection has rocketed, there is that same sense of a right and a wrong way to approach singleness. With so much action to be taken, there is no excuse for not taking it or for taking it and remaining unsatisfed. The aim of Singles magazine, to help singles to help themselves, has been made good in our age. But then as now, new avenues of action and choice, and an explosion of possibilities, does not preclude the emergence and even the expansion of new forms of isolation and the loneliness that persists, or even worsens, in a context of heightened connectivity. Meanwhile, the proliferation of sexual opportunities that followed the legal, social and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, from the universalisation of birth control to the introduction of no-fault and, therefore, more accessible divorce, intensifed awareness of yet another domain of possible failure—if you were single, you were now allowed to get out there and make hay while the sun shone; if you were married and miserable, a world of opportunity waited for you just over the horizon of divorce. As the agony aunts Irma Kurtz and Marje Proops observed, those unable to fnd either the will or the willing partners in crime to turn this image into reality were often left with yet more sense of failure. Single women’s struggle was less to fnd sexual partners but rather to navigate the near-impossible balance between promiscuity and glamour or fun. Today, singleness remains a highly gendered state. It is both burden and pleasure, an open plain of possibilities and an edifce of psychological pressure that can make its objects feel like failures in a world in which the romantic ideal— heteronormative, monogamous, long-term—remains tenacious.90

Notes 1 ‘Solitude, Loneliness and Modernity’, Solitudes Past and Present, QMUL, accessed 15 Apr. 2022, www. solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/research/solitude-loneliness-and-modernity. 2 W.T. Stead,‘In the City of Dreadful Solitude: A Plea for a Matrimonial Bureau’, Review of Reviews (1887): 155. 3 Annie Swan wrote of the ‘loneliness of the lodging; the terrible silence of the room’, which caused one to escape to the streets ‘where at least there was movement and noise’. Annie Swan,‘Should We Establish a Matrimonial Bureau?’, The Woman at Home 5 (Apr. 1897): 439–44. 4 Geoffrey Crossick,‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion’, in The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (London: Routledge, 1977), 11–60. 5 Harry Cocks, ‘The Cost of Marriage and the Matrimonial Agency in Late Victorian Britain’, Social History 38, no. 1 (2013): 66. 6 Ibid., 80. 7 Swan,‘Matrimonial Bureau’. 8 William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1891), 233–4, in Cocks,‘Cost of Marriage’. For similarities in Germany, see Tyler Carrington, ‘Love, Mobility and Fate in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin’, in Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender and Migration, ed. Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian and Linda Reader (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 75–90. 9 Crossick, The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 102. 10 Mrs C.E. Humphrey, Manners for Men and Manners for Women (both 1897), in Cocks,‘Cost of Marriage’. 11 Annie Swan, Courtship and Marriage, Courtship and Marriage and the Gentle Art of Home-Making (London, 1893), 80–1. 12 Cocks,‘Cost of Marriage’, 78.

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Zoe Strimpel 13 T.W.H. Crosland, The Suburbans (London, 1905), in Cocks,‘Cost of Marriage’, 78. 14 Ibid. 15 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge, [1897] 2002); Eric Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Routledge, [1942] 2001); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, [1900] 2004); Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1997); Ronald Rolheiser, The Loneliness Factor: Its Religious and Spiritual Meaning (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1979); Ira Tanner, Loneliness: The Fear of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 16 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17 Harry Cocks, ‘Peril in the Personals: The Dangers and Pleasures of Classifed Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Media History 10, no. 1 (2004): 3–16 (1). 18 Simmel, Philosophy of Money. 19 Durkheim, Suicide, 89. 20 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out (London: Penguin, 2008). 21 Lucy Bland, Modern Woman on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: History, Feminism, Women (London: Zed Books, 2010). 22 Terri Chettiar,‘ “More Than a Contract”: The Emergence of a State-Supported Marriage Welfare Service and the Politics of Emotional Life in Post-1945 Britain’, Journal of British Studies 55, no. 3 (2016): 566–91. 23 Claire Langhamer, The English in Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 24 Claire Langhamer,‘Adultery in Post-War England’, History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (2006): 86–115. 25 Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 192. 26 1961 census, Summary Tables, table 24, ‘Institutions: Age and Marital Condition of Inmates’, cited in Katherine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 47. 27 Pat Thane and Charlotte Greenhalgh are among those who have studied ageing in the British twentieth century, a process in which loneliness features prominently. Pat Thane, ‘Social Histories of Old Age and Aging’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 93–111; Charlotte Greenhalgh, Aging in TwentiethCentury England (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). See also Berry and Foyster in this volume. 28 ‘Toc H Campaign against Loneliness’, The Times, 1 Apr. 1952. 29 ‘Combatting Social Maladjustment’, The Times, 11 May 1954. 30 Picture Post (1949), in Langhamer, The English in Love, 199. 31 ‘Let-Up in All That Togetherness?’, The Observer, 10 July 1977, 23. 32 For example, Lonely Hearts (Thames, 1977), Singles (Thames, 1992), The Love Tapes (New Decade Films, 1979). 33 ‘Divorces in England and Wales, 2010’, Offce of National Statistics, 2, accessed 15 Apr. 2022, www.ons. gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_246403.pdf. 34 Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affuence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 317, table 13.1. 35 Mintel International, Single Person Households: Single Living, Diverse Lifestyles (London, 1992). 36 Holden, Shadow of Marriage, 26. 37 Ibid., 45. 38 Suzanne Gordon, Lonely in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976). 39 Irma Kurtz, Loneliness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 4. 40 ‘Building a Legend’, marketing pamphlet (c. 2012), 10. 41 Singles 41 (1980): 7. 42 Maurice North, The Secular Priests (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 185. 43 Matthew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Eva Illouz’s discussion of ‘the penetration of economics into the machinery of desire’ in the post—permissive era in Why Love Hurts (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 58. 44 Thomson, Psychological Subjects, 252. 45 Ibid. 46 Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1997). 47 Claire Langhamer, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post: War Britain’, Cultural and Social History 9, no. 2 (2012): 277–97 (278). 48 David Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2003).

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In Solitary Pursuit 49 John Gillis, For Better of Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3. 50 Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (London: Quartet, 1974). 51 Company 1 (1978): 85. 52 John Cockburn, Lonely Hearts: Love Among the Small Ads (London: Guild, 1988), 24. 53 Jane Lewis, The End of Marriage? Individualism and Intimate Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 54 Singles 3 (1977): 23. 55 Singles 12 (1978): 5. 56 Lonely Hearts (Thames, 1977). 57 Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982). 58 Kurtz, Loneliness, 44. 59 Margaret Adams, Single Blessedness: Observations on the Single State in Married Society (London: Heinemann, 1976), 88. 60 Company Apr. 1979 and Nov. 1978. 61 Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987). 62 Sarah Miles,‘The Cool Man-Eater’, Cosmopolitan 2 (1972): 78. 63 ‘I Was a Sleep-Around Girl’, Cosmopolitan 1 (1972): 72; ‘The Sexually Obsessed Girl’, Cosmopolitan 7 (1972): 71. 64 Cosmopolitan 2 (1972): 55. 65 Company (Jan 1982): 4. 66 Ibid., 60. 67 Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines, 89. 68 Woman’s Own 10 July 1983, 24. 69 ‘Sidelines: Against Loneliness’, The Guardian, 30 Apr. 1979, 13. 70 ‘News for Cronies in Loneliness’, The Guardian, 10 Aug. 1971, 5. 71 ‘Caught in the Foot-Benn Crossfre’, The Times, 13 Nov. 1981, 2. 72 Zoe Strimpel, Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘the Single’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 98–101. 73 Lonely Hearts (Thames, 1977). 74 Singles 37 (1980), 19. 75 ‘Only the Lonely’, The Guardian, 18 Mar. 1970, 19. 76 Interviews with founders, Lonely Hearts (Thames, 1977). 77 Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Fontana, 1975), 9. 78 Ibid., 10. 79 Ibid., 150. 80 Ibid., 137. 81 Singles 1 (1977), 15. 82 Ibid. 83 Singles 4 (1977), 22. 84 Ibid., 23. 85 Marje Proops, Dear Marje (London: Coronet, 1977), 97. 86 Singles 4 (1977), 34. 87 Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 202. 88 ‘ “Our Eyes Met across a Small Column . . .” From Small Ads to Agencies, Dating Is Big Business These Days: And Young Women Are Its Keenest Customers’, The Guardian, 31 Jan. 2000, B6. 89 Ibid. 90 Sasha Roseneil, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos and Mariya Stoilova, eds, The Tenacity of the Couple: Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe (London: UCL Press, 2020).

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11 LONELINESS AS CRISIS IN BRITAIN AFTER 1950 Temporality, Modernity and the Historical Gaze Fred Cooper In his Health Report for the Year 1960, the medical offcer of health (MOH) for the borough of Ilford (Essex), Israel Gordon, made the pointed argument that ‘loneliness is not so prevalent as the press and popular opinion would have us believe.’ This was a complicated and ambiguous assertion. In the same report, in fact on the same page, he wrote about the differences between being lonely and living alone, noted that ‘one can be lonely in spirit in the midst of a crowd’, and remarked on ‘the number of old persons who occupy a room with the plaster faking from the ceiling, and with drab dirty wall paper’: I fnd them almost daily in houses where all the other rooms are bright and attractive. No wonder they feel lonely. The state of being alone caused by death or other unavoidable partings is bearable; this being rejected by one’s family is the bitter pill; the true loneliness. No Voluntary Visitor can take the place of the neglectful daughter who lives close at hand yet never calls, or the son who retires to bed without saying ‘Goodnight.’1 Reporting on the health of the borough of Redbridge nine years later, Gordon wrote that ‘people are becoming more and more conscious of the hardships, deprivations and loneliness which exist even in this Welfare State.’2 The point here is not that his summation of the extent and seriousness of loneliness necessarily changed over time. Gordon’s thinking in 1969 was consistent with much of his thinking in 1960—that is, that loneliness was a meaningful and complex problem with severe repercussions for health, and that it was rooted in social and relational causes which welfarist interventions found diffcult to prevent, mitigate or disrupt (‘no Voluntary Visitor’,‘even in this Welfare State’). And yet, in 1960 at least, there was a dissonance between the diffcult and frequent ‘reality’ of loneliness, knowledge of which Gordon made explicit professional claim (‘I fnd them almost daily’), and what he intimated to be a sensationalist public conversation about the problem. In the frst of Gordon’s reports, two imaginings of loneliness were simultaneously true. It was the manufactured focus of a journalistic moral panic, but it was also an ingrained and intractable phenomenon responsible for considerable suffering and pain.3 Without making his anxieties explicit, Gordon played with some of the bigger questions animating historians of loneliness today. In our attempts to show that loneliness has a history which is longer and deeper than the overlapping ‘crises’ in our current present, we intervene in—and, under the right circumstances, 162

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could help to shape—pressing public health debates over loneliness as an endemic or epidemic challenge. This chapter takes as its subject the framing of loneliness in post-war Britain as a distinctly modern crisis with a particular temporal resonance and urgency. It refects on how time and temporality were central to newspaper discussions of loneliness as an urgent social problem in the late 1950s and early 1960s, produced by specifc cultural, technological, ideological and environmental contexts supposedly unique to mid-century modernity; in particular, the chapter returns frequently to two essays written by the journalist (and later well-known children’s author) Susan Cooper. Whether Gordon was right about contemporary journalists infating the scale of the problem or not, newspaper depictions of loneliness certainly keyed into a striking moral and emotional register. Picture Post, to take one example, carried a piece in 1956 which observed that ‘in tightly packed London . . . thousands of men and women are lonely, skeletal beings of despair and defeat.’4 As other contributions to this volume attest, the post-war period was by no means the frst time that loneliness was fgured as a particular kind of historically contingent emergency.5 What it did, however, was help establish and reproduce a political and cultural script on loneliness as crisis which continues to hinder a clear-sighted reckoning with important histories.6 Although this chapter is predominantly a history of how loneliness was represented and thought in post-war Britain, it is also a contemporary history of similar narratives of crisis, emergency and epidemic in the twenty-frst century; what these narratives mean for historical engagements with loneliness; and what historical engagements with loneliness mean for them. Discussions of loneliness in Britain today are marked by confused and tangled histories and temporalities, with words such as ‘epidemic’ or ‘crisis’ deployed to create a sense of critical urgency, carrying as they do the forceful implication that things have never been this bad before, that we are living in a uniquely lonely time and place.7 As Fay Bound Alberti observes, this rhetorical formulation has been commonplace over the past twenty years. Although sometimes politically convenient, it isolates the present from the past in ways which actively harm understandings of how the experience of loneliness and the conditions which make it possible are historically produced and situated.8 The best exemplar of the genre remains a 2014 Guardian article written by the journalist and activist George Monbiot. He begins by wondering what term best captures the spirit of the era:‘what do we call this time?’ Discounting the information age, the digital age and the Anthropocene as either technically inaccurate or ‘fail[ing] to distinguish this century from the previous 20’, he asks his readers the following:‘What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.’9

History and Crisis Undoubtedly troubling to historians, the inherent preoccupation with the present in much (otherwise welcome) activist work on loneliness has formed a compelling backdrop for us to go looking for these discarded histories, not least because they exert an enduring infuence on the here and now. Keith Snell has charted long changes in economic behaviours, particularly around living alone, which suggest a convincing context for many lived experiences of isolation.10 David Vincent and Barbara Taylor have wrangled with past understandings, experiences and representations of solitude, turning particularly to the vexed, porous and contested borders between healthy and unhealthy ways of being alone.11 Bound Alberti has traced loneliness as a cultural, emotional and material phenomenon through a variety of different stories, using historical antecedents to trouble and confront some of the biggest modern challenges: preventing isolation in ageing populations, loneliness among young people, and the distance imposed by our use of technology.12 More recently, Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton have connected histories of loneliness in early 163

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modern Britain with the fraught and embattled position of the humanities today, suggesting interdisciplinary collaboration as a route out of academic isolation.13 And even more recently still, this volume assembles an extensive range of historical perspectives on loneliness, counterbalancing a long thematic neglect. As the editors asserted in their instructions to contributing authors, ‘it is, however, a very timely subject, as the psychological and medical implications of loneliness have recently attracted signifcant press and political attention’.14 Although we almost always write against the idea of loneliness as crisis, we as historians have to confront the ways that we beneft from this positioning. Even as we critique them—at times simply by showing how loneliness has been experienced in the past—epidemic models lend our work a leverage and capital which can be otherwise scarce. At the time of writing in the summer of 2021, the impact of COVID-19 on social and relational health adds an additional layer of complexity to discussions of loneliness, history and time. With pandemic isolation largely occupying academic, medical and political attention and resources, even relatively short histories and temporalities of loneliness are frequently swept aside.15 In 2021, even acknowledging the loneliness ‘crisis’ of the 2000s and 2010s begins to feel like a welcome engagement with historical context. While this volume as a whole is undoubtedly an antidote to this kind of episodic, crisis-driven thinking, this chapter also refects specifcally on what uses a historical gaze on loneliness can serve. Loneliness is, incontrovertibly, not new, but neither are representations of loneliness as the product of a particular age, epoch or moment. Despite post-war communities largely occupying a nostalgic place in the historical imaginaries of later panics, contemporaries mobilized a familiar language of crisis in the late 1950s and early 1960s, framing loneliness as a medical and moral epidemic with no historical precedent.

Loneliness in Post-War Britain Loneliness was a recurring and substantial feature of post-war anxieties, over childhood, old age, mental health, community, privacy, migration, gender, romance, suicide and psychological responses to the built environment.16 In some of these instances, different languages acted as proxies; the psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s much-cited and much-critiqued work on ‘maternal deprivation’, for example, can be read primarily as an exploration of infant loneliness, recast to emphasize surveillance on women’s behaviour as mothers.17 Itself framed as a crisis which threatened to consume a generation, the well-travelled connection between maternal deprivation and juvenile delinquency used childhood loneliness as a fulcrum, with rejecting (and working) mothers bringing up children ‘full of hate and mistrust.’18 For Bowlby, the pathological individualism of the teenage delinquent masked a profound, ingrained fear of abandonment and isolation. In a debate on working women for the American magazine Ladies Home Journal in 1958, he described children supposedly deprived of maternal affection as ‘lone wolves and lost souls’, their ability to form genuine relationships damaged beyond repair and revealing itself in adolescent promiscuity and theft.19 Similarly, psychiatric discourses on ‘suburban neurosis’ and the ‘new town blues’ collapsed loneliness, boredom, frustration and existential angst into a particular kind of environmental malaise, with new kinds of housing producing—and being produced by—worrying and new ideologies of individualism and privacy.20 Writing in the Liverpool Daily Post in 1958, the GP Peter Eckersley painted a vivid picture of the suburban housewife ‘pinioned in her up-to-date home by small children, hardly knowing another person in the endless, anonymous street where

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she lives.’ One of his patients implicated her neighbours’ obsession with privacy in the narrowing of her social horizons; ‘this aspect of the national character’, Eckersley refected, ‘can be a very cold thing.’ The ‘crippling loneliness’ that he discerned bubbling beneath the surface of suburban respectability erupted violently onto medical radars only when it was too late; when women had attempted or accomplished suicide, or fallen subject to ‘tremendous depressions which exclude any thought of caring for their families or themselves’, and thereby neglected or damaged their children.21 His diagnosis of ‘suburb sickness’, he claimed, was widely shared by other suburban practitioners and social workers. Again, loneliness was the crucial vector between the source of confict or stress (maternal deprivation or suburbia) and the dreaded outcome (delinquency, suicide, or intractable mental illness).

Loneliness, Suicide and Time Narratives on acute or chronic loneliness impose a particular temporal urgency, converging rhetorical models of personal and social crisis.22 Eckersley’s ‘suburb sickness’ exemplifed a common post-war discursive script. Loneliness was produced by a pathogenic aspect of modernity; it was almost entirely hidden from view; it required (and was often too late for) swift intervention, and it had the potential for the most dramatic and diffcult social and personal consequences. This script, of course, had a longer history. The work of the Peckham Experiment between 1926–1929 and 1935–1950, for example, used community health centres to counteract the ‘social encystment’ of ‘loneliness and [emotional] starvation’ among young families in south London, constructing loneliness as a potentially irreversible process of decline.23 Post-war reckonings with loneliness rehearsed this assumption—borrowed from models of chronic illness and infectious disease—that it had an identifable and predictable ‘progression’, becoming ever more severe and resistant to interference. At a conference on loneliness hosted by the Bristol Council of Social Services in 1958, the vicar of Hartcliffe, Revd R. Armstrong, raised the problem of loneliness on new housing estates. Social groups and churches, he stressed, had to embed residents into communities as soon as they joined: ‘don’t go along in two years’ time, when the people have established a habit of loneliness and when they can no longer make the effort to do anything or go anywhere.’24 Reporting on her experience of setting up a young wives’ club in the Guardian in 1961, Jill Jeffery explored this ‘habit of loneliness’ in more depth. Greeted with ‘great outpourings of pent-up loneliness’, Jeffery suggested that loneliness among young wives and mothers was ‘so engrained that it is almost an addiction.’25 Habituation, in this context, entailed a rejection of social bonds, an apathetic—or even actively hostile—inward-turning which troubled contemporary defnitions of loneliness as a thwarted need for connection.26 The most thorough public engagement with the precise problem of loneliness as a transformative, atrophying experience came in the form of a series of two essays in the Sunday Times in 1962. Written by Susan Cooper, the investigation explored the ‘trap of fear’ that constrained people with long experiences of loneliness from taking steps to improve their situation. ‘Selfpity’, she explained, accompanied ‘tortured inaction, the penalty for a life which has tightened into a hopeless circle.’27 As such, her work represented a valuable antidote to individualising narratives which placed overwhelming emphasis on personal behaviour and choice, puncturing the assumption—present, for example, in Peter Eckersley’s writing—that people who felt lonely could simply ‘take the matter into their own hands.’28 Cooper’s representation of loneliness converged with Eckersley’s, however, in their shared demarcation of time. For Cooper, ‘the man or woman desperate in loneliness’ was socially and medically invisible,‘unless he is driven to suicide;

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when, too late, it [is announced] that the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ Suicide, she argued, was an inevitably lonely act: Loneliness is a kind of death . . . if there is isolation in the moment of death, there is a far more dreadful isolation in the moment of choosing death, and our honeycomb society inficts that moment on every man who kills himself without apparent cause. Shifting her analysis to a more hopeful tone, she described the case of a young man,‘Jonathan T’, who had reached out to the (newly formed) suicide prevention organization, the Samaritans. Rather than ending his life, T had been ‘pulled back just in time’.29 Where chronic loneliness was understood as a long process of attenuation, situating acute loneliness in the narrative arc of suicide saturated it in the exigency of mortal danger; the temporal speed of intervention, in this context, was crucial. Cooper joined a chorus of voices connecting loneliness with suicide, as part of what David Cannadine describes as the ‘massive outpouring’ of suicidological writing after the Second World War.30 Writing in 1953 for the lay magazine of the British Medical Association, Family Doctor, Dr T. Traherne reasoned that ‘all potential suicides are essentially lonely people.’ While suicide was complex and could be predicated on a range of interlocking causative factors, many could have avoided harm if they had been ‘helped to feel themselves part of the social picture’.31 Likewise, a physician in the Department of Psychological Medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, E.B. Strauss, framed suicide as a means of ‘converting social death into the real thing.’ In a wide-ranging article on suicide for the British Medical Journal in 1956, Strauss argued that people took their lives when they experienced what he termed ‘subjective excommunication’, prevalent among older adults who felt that they had outlived their usefulness, refugees and migrants who were ‘culturally isolated’, and ‘sensitive, civilised homosexuals’ who, when outed, were ‘forced to live in a social vacuum, which spells death.’32 Sensationalized explorations of high suicide rates in London boroughs and large towns invited readers into largely manufactured ‘life or death’ dilemmas, exploring the lives of people who, as a 1958 article in the Empire News put it, were ‘PERCHED PERILOUSLY ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE OF SUICIDE’. The subject of the piece,‘the girl who lives on a razor’s edge’, was one of the many ‘living dead’ inhabiting single rooms in the ‘dormitory’ borough of Hampstead. Of her many suicide attempts, the article quotes ‘her own doctor’ as follows: ‘One of these days we’ll be too late, and all I will be able to do for her is write her death certifcate.’33 This particular lens on suicide subverted the usual practice of reading backwards after the act, heightening apprehensions of danger and crisis.34 Confronting readers with the vicarious horror of a situation implicitly still underway, it played on notions of medical helplessness to render a moral emergency immediate, visceral and personal. When Susan Cooper wrote that ‘loneliness is a kind of death’, she was drawing deep from the same rhetorical imaginary:‘living dead’,‘social death’, death in life.35 This imaginary performed two overlapping kinds of work. As a means of making the experience of loneliness explicable, the language of living death connoted a life of suffering and pain, with everything vital, joyful or good stripped away. Although a genealogy of this concept is far beyond the scope of this article, the trope recurs in a considerable variety of places and times, from lovesickness and madness in medieval France to experiences of vision loss in Niger in the 2010s.36 The living dead haunt both their own lives and—implicitly—the people around them, a point made in Cooper’s striking description of ‘the bleak sensation of walking alone through a world of other people’s friends.’37 Loneliness, here, draws a veil between the sufferer and the social world; they are always on the outside, looking in. Tangled around this, the language of living death collapses 166

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temporalities around death and dying, as the ‘social’ death of loneliness prefgures and foreshadows the ‘real’ death by suicide.38

Modernity and Disease Picture Post’s evocation of ‘thousands of . . . skeletal beings of despair and defeat’, in this context, can be read as a similar incitement to imagine loneliness as a signifer of death protruding through the body.39 Other attempts to enumerate loneliness or estimate its scale and rate of growth relied on loose appeals to professional expertise, category slippage (such as leaning on numbers for suicides or single-person households) and, in some cases, the straightforward guesswork of campaigners and activists.40 For example, the self-described ‘loneliness crusader’, Armand Georges, claimed to have been in receipt of over 40,000 letters from people in England, Scotland and Wales but placed the number of ‘lonely souls’ in Britain at over three million, both in his interviews with journalists and his own pamphleteering.41 Although Susan Cooper avoided the trope—already becoming well-established—of opening her essays with a note on uncovering an outpouring of hitherto unseen suffering and grief, she later spoke about her research process at a lecture on children’s literature in Vermont in 1990. Having placed a ‘small ad’ in the Sunday Times, reading something similar to ‘writer studying loneliness would be grateful for any opinions or information’ (as she recalled it), the department of the paper dealing with advertisements was ‘staggered by the amount of mail that came in to this box number’: There were mailbags full of letters, and some of the letters were very fat and long. I had hundreds and hundreds of them, so many that in the end we had to send out a circularised note of thanks as their only reply. For twenty-fve years I’ve been haunted by feelings of guilt about these unanswered correspondents, because of course each of them was lonely, suffering from a feeling of estrangement from other people or simply from life. And each one of them was responding, with hope and often an outpouring of emotion, to this unknown person who had said to them, talk to me.42 Working from these letters, Cooper had painstakingly constructed a picture of a silent epidemic. Her frst article began with an observation and a veiled reprimand: ‘you don’t notice them’. Loneliness, she continued: is a disease without physical symptoms . . . you don’t notice them, but there are more of them now than there have ever been. The number of lonely people in Britain has been rising steadily for the last twenty years. Today, general practitioners, psychiatrists and social workers recognise it as an alarming iceberg of social malaise, in a country which is becoming steadily more impersonal as its mobility grows.43 Key to the contemporary framing of loneliness as crisis, Cooper’s assumption that the experience was ‘rising steadily’ was a recurring conceit in similar work, even when longer histories were acknowledged. A 1961 item in the Social Service Bulletin, for example, contended that ‘loneliness has been a problem since the beginning of time, but it has never been such a problem as in our day and age’.44 Cooper returned to this claim several times, noting the ‘alarming increase’ in people ‘born vulnerable to the dark tuberculosis of the spirit that is loneliness.’ Alighting on a series of anxieties around the pace and tenor of post-war life (‘new towns, television, speed’) and collapsing them into a moralistic critique of the seeming decline of neighbourliness and communication, her journalism situated loneliness squarely as an emergent pathology of modernity. 167

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Shared by her contemporaries, Cooper’s certainty that loneliness was on the rise sits in instructive contrast with some of her other statements on evidence, both contemporaneously and in her later refection. Framing the issue as politically neglected and invisible, she wrote in 1962 that ‘loneliness is not an offcial problem, it has no statistics and no champions’.45 Without imposing damaging hierarchies of evidence (the systemic privileging of quantitative over qualitative methodologies has been severely limiting to loneliness research over the past ffty years), it is important to note that the kind of mature statistical information which could have provided a reasonable basis for claims about increasing loneliness in the 1950s and 1960s was very much absent, a point also true of the ‘loneliness crisis’ of the 2000s and 2010s.46 Recalling her approach thirty years later, Cooper framed her solicitation of letters from readers as a necessary measure—not just in terms of bringing the experiences of real people to light, but because of an existing dearth of knowledge on loneliness. ‘This was a subject’, she observed, ‘which defed most formal methods of research.’47 With no historical lens on loneliness, journalists (and sometimes doctors) came to the problem with a discoverer’s subjectivity. The unknowable question is whether engagements with loneliness in the press, or the letters from the public they inspired and drew upon, really captured a historically contingent ‘modern scourge’, or whether long, substantial and endemic experiences of loneliness were being made visible at that specifc time for reasons that had more to do with contemporary moral and medical anxieties over the dislocating and alienating rhythms of modern life.48 Each of these different temporal scripts on loneliness converged in the metaphorical confation of loneliness with disease, perhaps most memorably exemplifed in Cooper’s ‘dark tuberculosis of the spirit.’ Indeed, one of the bold print taglines for her frst piece promised readers insight into the ‘disease at the heart of our modern honeycomb society.’49 Disease metaphors were a frequent rhetorical fourish in post-war loneliness journalism, setting in motion an intractable and ahistorical imaginary of loneliness as a perpetual epidemic. Other notable examples include a 1956 article in the News Chronicle which discussed loneliness as the symptom of a pervasive and sinister ‘hardening of our moral arteries’, a visceral invocation of the body politic which reached towards the condition of arteriosclerosis, an initially symptomless disease with diverse and potentially fatal consequences over time.50 Writing in the Manchester Evening News in 1957, Dorothy Critchlow described loneliness as a ‘modern scourge . . . a threat to our mental health no less than disease is to our physical’, demanding that it be ‘cut out at last from the social life of our country, like the cancer which it is’.51 The metaphor of loneliness as cancer is striking, carrying connotations of terminal danger arrested only by aggressive intervention.52 In this specifc historical case, little can be said to have been resolved in the intervening sixty years. Writers and reformers across the second half of the twentieth century continued to frame loneliness as ‘constantly on the increase in this country’, with a characteristic ebb and fow of journalistic attention accompanying an observable proliferation of academic work on the subject, mostly in the discipline of psychology.53 With suicide increasingly attached to depression as a causative story, the stakes were raised by new associations between loneliness, heart disease and increased mortality risk, particularly after the publication of the psychologist James Lynch’s 1977 book, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness.54 Cumulative research on the impact of loneliness on premature death is responsible for the frequently repeated (and almost universally miscomprehended) assertion that loneliness is ‘as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day’.55 As a vital aspect of post-war debates around work, motherhood, modernity, health and balance in women’s lives, discourses on domestic loneliness did contribute signifcantly to a political and cultural reckoning with gender roles in the 1950s and 1960s.56 Although the identity of ‘housewife’ was increasingly associated with a complex nexus of loneliness, boredom, frustration 168

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and fatigue, forming an important basis for feminist discourses on health, gender and society, it is unclear whether accompanying changes in working patterns, marital relationships or systems of parenting materially affected loneliness for the better.57 Indeed, new expectations for balanced work and family lives created their own profoundly gendered stresses, and rarely made space for leisure or socializing.58 Sheila Rowbotham, for example, uses the example of an early morning cleaner labouring alone in a vast building to refute the assumption that work necessarily functions as a connecting force.59 A ffth of the way through the twenty-frst century, post-war epidemic languages are instantly recognisable—not just in present-day journalistic work on loneliness,which,competing for attention with a thousand other sources, frequently sets out to heighten drama and raise the stakesbut in academic scholarship engaged with critical questions of what loneliness is, where it comes from, and how it works.60 Edited by the anthropologists Chikako Ozawa-de Silva and Michelle Parsons, a recent special issue of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry takes sight at loneliness in diverse cultural contexts. In their introduction to the articles they curate, Ozawa-de Silva and Parsons argue that resisting narratives of loneliness as pathology ‘does not mean that we should or can do nothing to address the spreading pandemic . . . which is as real a threat to human happiness and fourishing as any infectious disease.’61 Although they position themselves against an increasing and pervasive medicalization of loneliness, in this framing at least, their words do the opposite. In post-war Britain and today, the language of disease imposes a medical lens on loneliness, opening it up for particular kinds of scrutiny, measurement, and intervention. Far from neutral or value-free, this language is profoundly politically charged.62 The representation of loneliness as disease or epidemic also has signifcant consequences for temporal and historical thinking. As Charles Rosenberg put it in 1989,‘the intent is clear enough: to clothe certain undesirable yet blandly tolerated social phenomena in the emotional urgency associated with a “real” epidemic.’63 Diseases progress, they debilitate and deteriorate, they have diagnoses and—perhaps more importantly—distinct, temporally marked prognoses.64 Epidemics emerge and retreat, even if they rarely cleanly end. We can—at least imaginatively, and with signifcant exceptions and caveats—fx ‘real’ historical epidemics relatively securely in time, even if our pandemic present has no foreseeable conclusion.65 Perhaps counterintuitively, the additional challenge to relational health posed by COVID-19 further necessitates a shift away from epidemic thinking. Almost every aspect of the pandemic has been simultaneously old and new, with neglected histories intruding violently into the present.66

The Historical Gaze Historical research works against the language of crisis, revealing hidden depths and dimensions to problems frequently framed as new. This chapter has begun to fll in a partial history of the conceptual model of loneliness-as-crisis; this is a model which continues to isolate scholars, policymakers and publics from important histories, even as it helps to direct research and resources towards the phenomenon. As historians, the work that we do contests misleading imaginings of epidemic loneliness, and begins to compensate for the long neglect of the subject in our discipline. The burden is on us, however, to demonstrate not just how ahistorical or counter-historical narratives misrepresent and misunderstand historical temporalities, but how that misrepresentation distorts attempts to reckon meaningfully with loneliness in the present. There is far more at stake here than disciplinary isolation or invisibility to policymakers, at least on their own terms; a full-throated assertion of the use and value of history has to contend that research or policymaking which refuses to engage with histories of loneliness can only ever be gravely fawed, posing the wrong questions and looking for answers in the wrong places. 169

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Framing loneliness as a crisis of the present or the very recent past inevitably pulls focus to short-term cultural, social, political, economic and technological shifts. Some of these—such as austerity policies and their role in dismantling vital community services, resources and infrastructures—are undoubtedly salient, but narratives which use loneliness as a means of critiquing austerity, neoliberalism or capitalism could be further enriched and deepened with sustained attention to historical contexts and processes.67 Others, such as recurring apprehensions over the ambivalent gifts of technologies of (dis)connection, are meaningfully troubled by histories which situate their present iterations in the perspective of a longer timeline. In this vein, histories of the radio as an object of anxiety in post-war discourses on loneliness become of use. One social psychologist, for example, cautioned in 1956 that radio listening could become addictive, standing in for relational and social goods it could never adequately replace:‘the fear of loneliness might lead to people being unable to exist without the permanent dripping shower of sound.’68 Rather than minimizing current concerns over loneliness and social media or automated companion technologies, historical questioning reframes the problem in the deeper context of fraught and contested dialogues between relational needs and mediating or compensatory technological innovations. In her work on the ‘historical gaze’, the sociologist of education Carol Bertram asks what sets history apart as a discipline, what ways of seeing—aside from the obvious focus on the past— allow it to make a distinct and specifc contribution.69 Every perspective on loneliness imposes different overarching narratives on what it is, how it works and where it comes from, shaping and constructing loneliness as an object—sometimes inadvertently—through disciplinary processes of research, analysis and representation. A journalistic lens on loneliness asserts itself through the constructed act of uncovering, of bringing a hidden crisis or outrage to light. Concerned with personal histories, psychological literatures often work from an idea of time which focuses primarily on the individual life cycle, even when social or cultural histories are factored in. Sociological, philosophical, geographical, anthropological, educational, literary, medical and psychiatric research on loneliness can also claim—compellingly—to contribute uniquely to a complex and multifaceted problem which requires extensive interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue to even begin to untangle. Without engaging substantively with historical research, these perspectives still introduce and sustain distinct temporal imaginaries of loneliness. As Virginia Berridge argues in her 2008 article on the role that history and historians play in health policy, however, histories without historians risk neglecting insight and expertise from a vibrant feld of study.70 Although she described a policy environment (the mid-to-late 2000s) where historians were largely excluded from conversations on health, there has since been increasing recognition of historical methodologies as indispensable in global public health and social medicine, aided by an emphasis on cultural and historical contexts and complexities at the WHO Regional Offce for Europe.71 For Berridge, historians ‘offer a form of analysis which in its ability to segment and analyse the issues comprehensively and dispassionately over time, is matched by no other discipline.’72 In their recent essay on temporality and climate change, Tamson Pietsch and Frances Flanagan argue explicitly against dispassionate histories; historicity brings certain advantages, such as ‘an embrace of embeddedness, complexity and the possibility of social change’, but historians make active political choices in whether and how they ‘turn their special focus to the kinds of questions our times demand’.73 Through a ‘historical lens’, the authors suggest, factors and processes inimical to human thriving ‘appear powerful, but also re-makeable’.74 Histories of loneliness offer precisely this; they excavate the deep and long historical roots of the problem, at the same time as demonstrating that they are neither inevitable nor immutable. For all of its rhetorical urgency and dire prognostications, the crisis model offers a way of witnessing loneliness which is fundamentally more comfortable than historicity. Historical research suggests that loneliness has 170

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been a profound source of suffering for longer than anyone today has been alive, that the effort and ingenuity of past generations has not resulted in effective and lasting solutions, and that it may be the product of ways of ordering relationships and society which require vast efforts to alter or reverse. In comparison, the concept of crisis—as a moment or series of moments charged with the potential for danger but also transformation and resolution—simultaneously alarms and reassures.75 In her 2008 study, Berridge reproduces the words of one interviewee, an ‘informant in the policy feld’. Supportive of increased historical involvement in policy, they observe that ‘historians are better than other disciplines—they tend to write clearly and don’t purport to tell us what to do. They are different and useful . . . historians are not threatening but can be enlightening.’76 Histories of loneliness run counter to this unambitious imagining. They have the potential to enlighten and inform, guiding knowledge and interventions on loneliness in the present day, but they can also threaten, unsettle and disrupt. Pietsch and Flanagan ask the following: Do historians see themselves as part of that conversation? Do they speak to their various audiences confdent that their discipline has something vital to convey, assured that it offers an orientation that is the very kind of orientation our times need?77 By leading a broader movement away from epidemic thinking, historians can help shift loneliness into crisis. Transformative work has to begin from an understanding of loneliness which is historically infected and robust; only then can we address the long and systemic barriers which stand in the way of solidarity and care.

Notes 1 Israel Gordon, Borough of Ilford: Health Report for the Year 1960 (1960), 30. 2 Israel Gordon, Annual Report of the Medical Offcer of Health for 1969, Borough of Redbridge (1969), 152. 3 For a longer treatment of moral panics in the twentieth century, see Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (Oxford: Routledge, 2005). 4 Anon.,‘Loneliness in London’, Picture Post, 3 Mar. 1956. 5 See, for example, Violett in this volume. 6 Janet Batsleer and James Duggan, ‘Young, Lonely and Stigmatised: We Need a New Approach to Youth Loneliness’, Transforming Society blog, last modifed 9 Oct. 2020, www.transformingsociety. co.uk/2020/10/09/young-lonely-and-stigmatised-we-need-a-new-approach-to-youth-loneliness/. 7 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018), 242–54. 8 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 9 George Monbiot,‘The Age of Loneliness Is Killing Us’, Guardian, 14 Oct. 2014. 10 K.D.M. Snell,‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living’, Open Psychology Journal 8 (2015): 61–70. 11 David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020); Barbara Taylor,‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal 89 (2020): 1–21. 12 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness. 13 Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, ‘ “Thrust from the Society of Many Dear Friends”: Loneliness in Early Modern Britain and in the Humanities Today’, Lancet Psychiatry 8, no. 8 (2021), https://doi. org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00245-5. 14 See introduction to this volume for similar sentiments. 15 Fred Cooper, ‘COVID-19 and the Loneliness Crisis’, Pathologies of Solitude blog, last modifed 2 Apr. 2020, https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/covid-19-and-the-loneliness-crisis/. 16 Fred Cooper, ‘Health, Balance, and Women’s “Dual Role” in Britain, 1945–1963” (PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2018); Vincent, A History of Solitude; Rhodri Hayward, The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880–1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 82–4; see, for example, Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife: Conficts of Housebound Mothers (Oxford: Routledge, 1966); Samuel Selvon, The

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Lonely Londoners (Harlow: Longman, 1956); Jeremy Tunstall, Old & Alone: A Sociological Study of Old People (Oxford: Routledge, 1966). John Bowlby, ‘Special Problems: Problem Families, Neglectful Parents, the Broken Home, Illegitimacy’ (speech), in The Family: Report of the British National Conference on Social Work at Bedford College for Women, London (London, 1953), 21–9. John Bowlby,‘The Mother Who Stays at Home Gives Her Children a Better Chance’, News Chronicle, 23 Apr. 1952. Anon.,‘Should Mothers of Young Children Work?’, Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1958): 154. Rhodri Hayward,‘Desperate Housewives and Model Amoebae: The Invention of Suburban Neurosis in Inter-War Britain’, in Health and the Modern Home, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), 42–62; Hayward, The Transformation of the Psyche, 62. Peter Eckersley,‘Wives Can Fight Back Against the Ache of Suburban Wilderness’, Liverpool Daily Post, 7 Oct. 1958. S. Kay Toombs, ‘The Temporality of Illness: Four Levels of Experience’, Theoretical Medicine 11 (1990): 227–41. Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker, The Peckham Experiment: A Study in the Living Structure of Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 248; Jane Lewis and Barbara Brookes, ‘A Reassessment of the Work of the Peckham Health Centre, 1926–1951’, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1983): 307–50. Anon.,‘The Problem of Loneliness: University of Bristol Conference’, Western Daily Press, 13 Mar. 1958. Jill Jeffery,‘The Habit of Loneliness’, Guardian, 15 Nov. 1961. Janet Younger,‘The Alienation of the Sufferer’, Advances in Nursing Science 17, no. 4 (1995): 53–72. Susan Cooper,‘Loneliness 2: The Trap of Fear’, The Sunday Times, 3 June 1962, 26. Eckersley,‘Wives Can Fight Back’. Cooper,‘Loneliness 2’, 26. David Cannadine, History in Our Time (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1998), 121. T. Traherne,‘Need These Lives be Lost?’, Family Doctor 3, no. 8 (1953), 423–4. E.B. Strauss,‘Suicide’, The British Medical Journal 2, no. 4996 (1956): 818–20. Eric Sewell,‘The Girl Who Lives on a Razor’s Edge’, Empire News, 23 Nov. 1958. Mercedes Fernández-Cabana, Francisco Ceballos-Espinoza, Raimundo Mateos, María Teresa AlvesPérez and Alejandro Alberto García-Caballero, ‘Suicide Notes: Clinical and Linguistic Analysis from the Perspective of the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide’, European Journal of Psychiatry 29, no. 4 (2015): 293–308. Susan Cooper,‘Loneliness’, The Sunday Times, 27 May 1962, 25. Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephanie L. Palmer, Kate Winskell, Amy E. Patterson, Kadri Boubacar, Fatahou Ibrahim, Ibrahim Namata, Tahirou Oungoila, Mohamed Salissou Kané, Adamou Sabo Hassan, Aryc W. Mosher, Donald R. Hopkins and Paul M. Emerson,‘ “A Living Death”: A Qualitative Assessment of Quality of Life among Women with Trichiasis in Rural Niger’, International Health 6, no. 4 (2014): 291–7. Cooper,‘Loneliness’, 25. Martin O’Brien, ‘You Are My Death: The Shattered Temporalities of Zombie Time’, Wellcome Open Research 5, no. 135 (2020), https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15966.1. Anon.,‘Loneliness in London’. John Crowley, ‘Loneliness’, Catholic Gazette (March 1972); Harold Atkins, ‘Those Who Go Home to a Gas Ring’, Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1961. Anon., ‘Loneliness a “Social evil”’, Derby Evening Telegraph 11 Feb. 1958; Armand Georges, Crusade against Loneliness: Issued as a Contribution against an Ever Increasing Social Evil (London: Self-Published, 1958). Susan Cooper, ‘Moving on’, for Homecoming, Children’s Literature New England, Vermont, August 1990. Personal communication with Susan Cooper. Cooper,‘Loneliness’, 25. John Bisley,‘The Belgrave Club’, Social Service Bulletin 26 (September 1961): 9; Georges, Crusade against Loneliness. Cooper,‘Loneliness’, 25. Christina R. Victor and Ann Bowling,‘A Longitudinal Analysis of Loneliness Among Older People in Great Britain’, Journal of Psychology 146, no. 3 (2012): 313, 31. Cooper,‘Moving On’.

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Loneliness as Crisis in Britain 48 Dorothy Critchlow,‘They’ll Say Good-Bye to Loneliness’, Manchester Evening News 17 Jan. 1957; Claude S. Fischer, Lurching toward Happiness in America (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2014), 19–28. 49 Cooper,‘Loneliness’, 25. 50 Anon.,‘Loneliness’, News Chronicle, 10 Nov. 1956. 51 Critchlow,‘They’ll Say Good-Bye to Loneliness’. 52 Amanda Potts and Elena Semino,‘Cancer as a Metaphor’, Metaphor and Symbol 34, no. 2 (2019): 81–95. 53 Crowley,‘Loneliness’. 54 James J. Lynch, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (New York: Basic Books, 1977); see, for example, Elaine Potter,‘Killed by Loneliness’, Sunday Times, 17 July 1977, 12. 55 Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith and J. Bradley Layton, ‘Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review’, PLoS Med 7, no. 7 (2010); Campaign to End Loneliness,‘The Facts on Loneliness’, last accessed 6 Sept. 2021, www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/the-facts-on-loneliness/. 56 Frederick Cooper, ‘Medical Feminism, Working Mothers, and the Limits of Home: Finding a Balance between Self-Care and Other-Care in Cross-Cultural Debates about Health and Lifestyle, 1952–1956’, Palgrave Communications 2, no. 16042 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.42; Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 57 Ali Haggett, Desperate Housewives: Neuroses and the Domestic Environment, 1945–1970 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). 58 Yvonne Tobitt,‘It’s a Woman’s World’, Family Doctor 11, no. 3 (1961): 103; Sara Arber, G. Nigel Gilbert, Angela Dale, ‘Paid Employment and Women’s Health: A Beneft or a Source of Role Strain?’, Sociology of Health and Illness 7, no. 3 (1985): 375–400. 59 Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London: Verso, 1973), 67–80. 60 See, for example, Sophie McBain, ‘How Loneliness Became an Epidemic: Social Isolation Is a Growing Modern Phenomenon: But Can We Treat It as a Disease?’, New Statesman, 11 Dec. 2019, www. newstatesman.com/politics/2019/12/how-loneliness-became-an-epidemic; Lisa Niven-Phillips,‘Loneliness Has Reached Crisis Point, But What’s Being Done to Tackle it?’, Harper’s Bazaar, 2 Feb. 2020, www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/beauty/mind-body/a30725373/loneliness-epidemic-how-to-cope/; Mark Easton, ‘How Should We Tackle the Loneliness Epidemic?’, BBC News, last modifed 11 Feb. 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42887932. 61 Chikako Ozawa-de Silva and Michelle Parsons, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 613–22. 62 Amy K. McLennan and Stanley J. Ulijaszek, ‘Beware the Medicalisation of Loneliness’, Lancet 391 (14 Apr. 2018): 1480. 63 Charles E. Rosenberg,‘What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective’, Daedalus 118, no. 2 (1989): 1–17. 64 Charles Rosenberg,‘Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History’, in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xiii–xxvi. 65 Jeremy Greene and Dora Vargha, ‘Ends of Epidemics’, in COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Confict, Competition, and Cooperation, ed. Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 23–39. 66 Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose, Shame and Covid-19: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming); Martyn Pickersgill and Matt Smith,‘Expertise from the Humanities and Social Sciences Is Essential for Governmental Responses to COVID-19’, Journal of Global Health 11, no. 03081 (2021), https://dx.doi.org/10.7189%2Fjogh.11.03081. 67 Alison Stenning and Sarah Marie Hall, ‘On the Frontline: Loneliness and the Politics of Austerity’, Discover Society blog, last modifed 6 Nov. 2018, https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/11/06/ on-the-frontline-loneliness-and-the-politics-of-austerity/; Colette Shade, ‘Capitalism Is Making You Lonely’, Tribune, 20 Aug. 2021, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/capitalism-is-making-you-lonely. 68 Anon.,‘Mental Health: Conferences in Berlin’, The British Medical Journal 2, no. 4992 (1956): 599–600. 69 Carol Bertram, ‘Exploring an Historical Gaze: A Language of Description for the Practice of School History’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 44 (2012): 429–42. 70 Virginia Berridge,‘History Matters? History’s Role in Health Policy Making’, Medical History 52 (2008): 311–26. 71 Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Alexander Medcalf and Aliko Ahmed,‘Humanities, Criticality and Transparency: Global Health Histories and the Foundations of Intersectoral Partnerships for the Democratisation of

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Knowledge’, Humanities and Social Science Communications 7, no. 6 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41599-020-0491-7; Michelle Pentecost, Vincanne Adams, Rama Baru, Carlo Caduff, Jeremy A. Greene, Helena Hansen, David S. Jones, Junko Kitanaka and Francisco Ortega, ‘Revitalising Global Social Medicine’, Lancet Art of Medicine 398, 10300 (2021): 573–4. Berridge,‘History Matters?’, 326. Tamson Pietsch and Frances Flanagan, ‘Here We Stand: Temporal Thinking in Urgent Times’, History Australia 17, no. 2 (2020): 252–71. Pietsch and Flanagan, ‘Here We Stand’, 260; Catherine Haddon, Joe Devanny, Charles Forsdick and Andrew Thompson, What Is the Value of History in Policymaking? (Arts and Humanities Research Council/ Institute for Government, 2015), 9. Mark Jackson, ‘Introduction’, in Midlife Conversations, ed. Mark Jackson and Fred Cooper (London: WCCEH, 2021), 1–5, https://wcceh.org/themes/life-course/mid-life-conversations/ Berridge,‘History Matters?’, 324. Pietsch and Flanagan,‘Here we Stand’, 262.

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PART 2

Household and Communities

12 LONELINESS AND FOOD IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Lisa Wynne Smith

Does loneliness have a taste? The Sabor de Soledad snack eaten by 30 Rock character Liz Lemon (‘Subway Hero’, season 2, episode 12) was ‘very hot and affectionate’. It is relatively rare, though, to fnd descriptions of loneliness in terms of taste. More often, we associate emotions like loneliness or sadness with comfort eating rather than specifc favours. Although comfort foods can be soft or creamy, sweet or salty, their taste cannot be generalized; they are idiosyncratic evocations of childhood favourites or memories of loved ones, which bring us a sense of well-being during times of celebration and loneliness. They vary according to gender, culture and time. Today’s popular North American comfort foods of ice cream, chocolate and pizza/pasta would have been luxury foods eaten primarily by the middling and upper sorts in early modern Europe.1 Early modern food history, moreover, does not deal with loneliness specifcally. Modern historians have been interested in culinary nostalgia and homesickness, but early modernists tend to think of food and recipes in terms of sociability.2 Such an approach is largely source-driven, particularly for the early modern period. Documents like diaries or letters and recipe or account books, were typically created or used in wealthy, literate households, often recorded social information about events, networks and memorable foods. To further complicate the question, loneliness itself is a nebulous concept when applied to the early modern period. It often referred to spaces far from society that brought vulnerability and danger rather than an emotion.3 But one might also choose solitude, a state of ‘oneliness’ that was enjoyable.4 Excessive solitariness, however, was a category of melancholy, being a decision to cut oneself off from society. At frst it might be pleasurable, a continuation of idleness in which one could ‘build castles in the air’ or spend all day in bed until one began to dwell on fear and suspicion; eventually,‘these wretches do frequently degenerate from men, and of social creatures become beasts, monsters, inhumane, ugly to behold’.5 Physicians were also aware that nostalgia or homesickness could affect one’s health and appetite, proving fatal in the worst cases. However, before the 20th century, this was seen primarily in terms of missing the land and the customs and the foods of one’s homeland rather than one’s family and friends.6 To be sociable was to partake in sharing food and drink. For those who had solitariness forced upon them, such as gentlemen rusticating in the countryside, the choice was to entertain lavishly or to visit local taverns and alehouses; they might be separated from their usual companions, but sociability remained important.7 But when it came to melancholy or homesickness, a lack of appetite was a symptom of one’s separation from society. Just as meals eaten alone do not necessarily equate to loneliness, a meal in a crowded setting might DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-15

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also elicit a sense of separation from loved ones. While food might forge connections across time and place, specifc favours could also evoke memories of loss and aloneness—rosemary, famously, for remembrance.8 Food and loneliness, then, were uneasily paired in the past, and the absence of ways for thinking about them together remains today. This chapter considers how we might develop a methodology for thinking about food and loneliness by building on ideas of lonely spaces and homesickness. Drawing on the concepts of liminality and modern taste profles, it examines moments of transition associated with aloneness and the foods eaten during those times. It considers a series of liminal moments—grief, illness, quarantine and imagined cannibalism—to argue that loneliness did indeed have a taste in early modern England. The taste was far more complex than ‘hot and affectionate’; it had a pungent, bitter, earthy and woody profle, dominated by mace, rosemary and vinegar.

Methodology It is easier to identify the relationship between people and food at liminal (or ‘betwixt and between’) times that were marked by one’s separation from regular life or loved ones—occasions when we might expect to feel lonely today.9 The concept of liminality emerged from anthropology to describe transitions from one stage to another, initially focused on rites of passage. The ‘threshold person’ exists temporarily between leaving the previous state of being while not yet being attached to the next stage; they are on the threshold (limen in Latin).10 Liminality’s inherent fexibility has resulted in its widespread adoption to analyse a range of transitional spaces and times, such as grieving, illness or shipwreck. These moments can also all be linked to an early modern understanding of what we might call loneliness today. Grief and solitude were considered species of melancholy, while illness and shipwreck were times when individuals were removed from their regular life—or even society altogether.11 Early modern grief rituals, for example, emphasized the liminality of the deceased and the changing status of the family. For the recently widowed, loneliness was recognized as part of the transition, as was the changing status of the bereaved which could bring both legal authority and fnancial vulnerability.12 A series of events marked the transition from life to death, from the ritual wake and funeral procession to the funeral feast. Even after burial, the dead were not considered immediately separated from the living but underwent gradual detachment; popular practices, such as English funerals that paralleled weddings for unmarried girls or criminals, were intended to appease the dead in order to prevent them from returning to their families.13 Grief came from anticipation (before death) and shock (at moment of death) while mourning included stages of numbness or disbelief, longing and preoccupation with the loved one, and apathy or depression, followed by readjustment—in other words, several stages of loneliness. Customs included marking times, such as the month after a death, the anniversary of the death and All Souls Day, or wearing specifc colours to mark the stages of mourning: full (black) or half (lilac or grey) mourning for those who could afford new clothes, or even just a black ribbon for poor women.14 Illness, too, was marked by betwixt and between. An ill person was confned to the sickroom or to the bed. Visitors traversed the boundaries of the space, but within the space, there were specifc behaviours expected. For example, religious literature exhorted the healthy to visit the ill, bringing company, prayers and gifts; this does not suggest ‘loneliness’, but it does hint at separation from regular sociability and daily life. Sick roles required sufferers to behave in certain ways, too, such as remaining in bed or their room, allowing others to provide care, taking their physique.15 Even outbreaks of epidemic disease were states between normality and post-plague, which changed the space and behaviours of people: urban areas sounded and smelled different, 178

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while people avoided each other on the streets and as much as possible in marketplaces.16 This fts with Victor Turner’s consideration of liminality within the context of communitas, specifcally the separation of the threshold person from their usual group (family, friends, community), as power and relationships shifted. The concept of liminality, then, offers a way to examine the moments when people experienced a sense of separation from daily life and usual companionship. Such moments were also marked by specifc foods, such as funeral cakes, sick dishes, or plague preventatives. Liminality can reveal the experience of food during moments of separateness. Given that liminal moments were accompanied by identifable foods, it is possible to consider whether each moment—or even loneliness overall—had a distinctive sabor de soledad. Certainly, clusters of ingredients did appear regularly in foods associated with liminal moments, such as vinegar, rosemary, or mace, but that is not the same as being able to point immediately to a particular profle for loneliness. It is possible, however, to identify overlaps among the foods. Over the past two decades, sensory wheels have been created to describe the favours, textures or scents of foods like wine, chocolate, and spices. The resulting taste profles classify favours and scents by considering the chemical and qualitative similarities across foods, with the goal of providing a standardized vocabulary for products and commodities.17 The McCormick Spice Wheel is the original wheel for herbs and spices; its most recent version accounts for the sensory qualities of individual spices, which includes ‘feeling factor’ (from pungent to astringent), basic favours (salty, sweet, sour, bitter), mouth feel (e.g. fatty, soapy, medicinal) or other characteristics (e.g. terpene, woody, fruity).18 Although there is no equivalent early modern classifcation system, herbals and pharmacopoeia sometimes describe the scents, tastes and textures of materia medica (including foodstuffs). It is possible, to some extent, to map early modern descriptions onto the McCormick spice lexicon, enabling the identifcation of taste profles for types of food. Take, for example, William Lewis’ 1753 descriptions of mace and nutmeg. Mace, he wrote, was similar to nutmeg, though less astringent, while nutmeg was unctuous and lightly bitter.19 The McCormick lexicon also points to similarities between mace and nutmeg, with both being described in terms of sassafras, pine, foral, musty, soapy and woody. Nutmeg, however, has a more menthol favour, while mace is slightly more bitter.20 The menthol taste and coolness is presumably the hint of astringency in nutmeg that Lewis identifed, which (for modern people) would mask bitterness in comparison to nutmeg.21 Placing early modern descriptions alongside the McCormick spice wheel makes it possible to identify favour profles for ingredients in foods eaten by people during liminal moments—and to consider whether there was a distinct taste of loneliness in early modern England.

Grief As repositories of family history and continuation, recipe books were continually written and rewritten in the shadow of loss or anticipatory grief: the separation from beloved family members, whether through marriage or death. Although early modernists have drawn extensively on manuscript recipe books to study science, medicine and food, the default has been to think about recipes in relation to sociability rather than loss. This approach makes a lot of sense in that thinking about food, not just eating it, was an important part of daily social interactions. Recipes were a social currency in early modern Europe, being shared, collected and used in a variety of ways. There were a growing range of published books, typically aimed at middling-sort women or literate servants, with recipes being regularly published in newspapers. The papers of gentle families reveal even more about the social processes behind sharing and collecting on recipes, with manuscripts revealing family connections through the inclusion of donors’ names that pointed 179

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to intimate family relationships and wider social networks.22 Recipes appear in family papers as scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, notes in books, or entries in a family’s recipebook.23 There are tantalizing hints of the oral transmission and memorization of recipes, as well as clear evidence of copying or blurred boundaries between print and manuscript recipes.24 Recipe books were intentional compilations of a family’s memory, as traced through their imagined relationship to food, which can tell us much about their owners’ social contexts. However, when considered within the wider context of loneliness—specifcally the elements of nostalgia and homesickness that can be bound up in grief—recipe books might also tell us about compilers’ preparations for partings from loved ones or anticipatory grief.25 Sara Pennell and Elaine Leong, for example, have discussed the ways that manuscript recipe books might be created as starter collections. Their focus is on the intergenerational and interfamilial transmission of knowledge, but a starter book that prepared a daughter for marriage simultaneously readied her to leave her birth family.26 Passed down through the generations, recipe books were often archives of family birth and death dates or the family’s knowledge or intellectual lives.27 The Johnson family’s book, for example, shows signs of a potential struggle for ownership as it passed through the family. The book was initially signed Elizabeth Phillips 1694, then ‘Eliz Johnson ye gift of her Mother Johnson’, followed by a crossed-out line that cannot be read. The next line resumes:‘Maurice Johnson of Spalding in Lincolnshire claims this Family Book as right it belongs to him’—even though it had come into the family through his stepmother.28 Under Maurice’s ownership, however, the book did indeed become a family book, with several compilers working on the book collaboratively.29 Recipe-collecting—or thinking about family foods, as well as eating them—occurred within a web of shared history, not just fxed in one time; where recipes served to preserve foods or health, then the recipe books themselves preserved family memory.30 Recipe-sharing occurred within and across the generations, with compilers knowing and trusting the family recipes in two ways: not only because the compiler had already tried the recipes out at family events but also because of a close relationship with the family member.31 Take, for example, the transmission of chocolate to Europe, which remained frmly embedded in Indigenous networks even as it was Europeanized. The Spaniards who spent extended periods in the Americas, perhaps marrying or born into local families, brought back to Europe a taste for chocolate that was prepared using Mesoamerican equipment and methods. Even if the chocolate could only be favoured with readily available spices instead of the original ones, the Spanish still wanted the sensory experience of making and drinking chocolate in the familiar way—a way of evoking connections to and memories of loved ones on the other side of the world.32 Recipes, then, provided links to absent family members, whether alive or deceased. One example of the relationship between recipes and anticipatory grief is the group of recipe books compiled by the Sloane family, which highlights their role as repositories of family memory. The books are connected to Sir Hans Sloane, a well-known 18th-century physician in London. Two books are held at the British Library, donated in 1875 by the Earl of Cadogan (a descendant of his daughter, Elizabeth Sloane, who married into the Cadogan family in 1717). One book of household recipes, primarily for cookery, was owned by Elizabeth Sloane.33 The second Cadogan book, c. 1750, contained medical, household and veterinary recipes, including several attributed to Sir Hans Sloane.34 A third book, which belonged to Elizabeth Fuller, is dated 1712 and 1820.35 Given the initial date and name, it is likely that the book’s frst owner was Sloane’s stepdaughter from Jamaica, Elizabeth Rose, who married John Fuller in 1703. Sloane’s nephew, William, married into the Fuller family as well in 1733. Two of the books do not reference Sloane specifcally, but the books represent the family’s tastes and concerns over time, passed on through the generations as a way of remembering what came before. Elizabeth Cadogan, of course, compiled her collection long before her marriage; 180

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born in 1695, she was 16 when she signed and dated the book on 15 October 1711. The handwriting in the book is particularly good, with lots of blank space left for new recipes, suggesting that this was a good copy book rather than one for testing recipes. There are, even so, some indications of use: a black ‘x’ beside recipes such as ‘to candy cowslips or fowers or greens’,‘for burnt almonds’, or ‘ice cream’.36 The ‘x’ was a positive sign, as compilers tended to cross out recipes deemed useless—but they also suggest a young woman with a sweet tooth. Elizabeth Fuller compiled her book of medicinal and cookery recipes several years after her marriage. The book, which was used by the family well into the 19th century, is written mostly in one hand, but there are several later additions, comments and changes in other hands. None of the remedies were Sloane’s, but there were several from other physicians. The idiosyncratic recipes refect the family’s particular interests: occasionally surprising ailments (such as leprosy) and a disproportionate number of remedies for stomach problems (fux, biliousness and bowels). Not surprisingly, the Fuller family drew some of their knowledge from their social and intellectual networks in the Caribbean, such as a West Indies remedy for gripes in horses.37 Both recipe collections suggest continued use through the generations as a family book, with the compiler’s personality and family’s background clearly stamped on it. By contrast, Sloane’s recipes were the focal point of the Cadogan medicinal remedies book, a collection of the family’s ailments—and the domestic treatments of their patriarch, a renowned physician. The primarily medical book appears to have been intended as a good copy, or perhaps a starter collection, although it became a working copy with signs of hastily added recipes. In particular, the recipes attributed to Sloane were written in the clearest hand in the text (but not Sloane’s own hand) and were the frst ones included in the book. There are several blank folios, but the multiple hands suggest regular updating over time. There are no textual signs of use, such as crossings out or comments, but several loose recipes were inserted into the book, indicating that they were useful enough to try, if not proven suffciently to write in the book. Recipes were often circulated on bits of paper and stuck into books for later—to enter a recipe into the family book (as with Sloane’s own remedies) solidifed its importance, and that of the recipe donor, to the family.38 Many of the remedies attributed to Sloane were homely, intended for a family’s everyday problems: shortness of breath, itch, jaundice, chin-cough (whooping cough), loose bowels, measles and worms. There are, however, two that spoke to his well-known practice of prescribing Peruvian bark and his work on smallpox inoculations: a decoction of the (Peruvian) bark and ‘directions for ye management of patients in the small-pox.’39 It is the presence or absence of Sloane’s remedies in the family books that is most intriguing. It is unlikely that absence refected a distant relationship between Sloane and his stepdaughter. After all, his other stepdaughter, Anne Isted (and her husband), consulted him for medical problems and the Fuller family often wrote to him about medical education, books and curiosities. There is evidence that Sloane maintained close family relations with his children and extended family, with letters from his stepdaughters and their families hinting at an affectionate relationship that continued even after his wife died in 1721.40 It is the apparent closeness that makes the Cadogan medicinal recipe book so important for understanding the role of the recipe books within the family. Collecting recipes has a powerful emotional signifcance as the ‘paperwork of kinship.’41 Sloane was 90 years old when the Cadogan family compiled their medical collection. He had already lived a long and esteemed life, and his health was starting to show signs of failing by 1750. It must have been a bittersweet moment as Elizabeth Cadogan—or perhaps the family together— selected what recipes would help her family to remember her father after he died. These were not just his most treasured and useful remedies but ones that also evoked memories of family illnesses and recoveries. As the Sloane family books show, recipe collecting was fundamentally about 181

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remembering a family’s meaningful foods and events and, in the case of the Cadogan remedies, preparing for the time when loved ones were gone. The foods (or even medicines) that appeared in recipe books could thus provide support during lonely moments, such as homesickness or grieving. Recipe books commemorated more than sociability and family continuation; they were also a form of anticipatory grief, marking the inevitability of separation. Although recipe books were created in preparation for loss, they contain few recipes that explicitly mention foods for grieving or funerals—and of course, their wide-ranging and practical nature means that there are too many foods to fnd a taste across the book. Food was crucial to remembrance, but the lonely moments of homesickness were not necessarily liminal in the same way as bereavement. Fortunately, other sources suggest what types of foods might have been served at funerals. Account records for the elite and yeomanry suggest that about a quarter (or more) of a funeral’s budget was typically given over to food and drink. Funeral foods typically included cake (along with sugar and spice), bread, cheese, meat and cider/beer or sherry/ port.42 Contemporary dictionaries and encyclopaedias or folklore accounts also refer to specifc dishes associated with mourning. An arvil-supper (a northern term) referred to the funeral feast, which—at least in Wales—comprised cake, cheese, beer and milk.43 Other dishes were mentioned in conjunction with the poor specifcally. Arvil-bread was distributed to poor mourners, while soul-mass cakes were put out for the poor (especially children) on All Souls Day, a time of remembrance of loved ones.44 In Hereford, a sin-eater might be hired to eat a loaf of bread and drink beer over the corpse, thus removing the sins of the deceased.45 The basic feast could be scaled up or down (Figure 12.1), according to one’s fnancial means, though many of the grieving traditions included an element of charitable food sharing with the poor. What the food tasted like, however, is less obvious on the surface. Writing in 1686–7, John Aubrey described soul-mass cakes alongside seed cakes and harvest cakes, which suggests similar ingredients and favours.46 Such recipes do show up in recipe books, but as cakes and breads that could be used for other occasions, too. Take, for example, a 1705 recipe for cake bread, which included currants, butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, yeast, sack (Spanish wine), cream and rosewater.47 In this recipe, the spices and dried fruit evoke an autumnal taste, while several ingredients (e.g. sugar, spices, sack) were expensive and imported. Seed cakes, which regularly appeared in printed and family recipe books, were a less expensive option, favoured by caraway seeds that were readily grown across Europe, while still offering the bitter, piney, woody and musty favour profle of nutmeg, cinnamon and mace.48 Signifcantly, in humoral medicine, all four spices were classed as having hot and dry properties, which could counterbalance cold ailments, such as grief or sorrow (a type of melancholy).49 These spices had several medicinal benefts, including strengthening the stomach and aiding digestion. Even currants, despite having cool rather than hot properties, were thought to ease digestion.50 The taste of cakes associated with mourning could treat grief by warming the coldness of sorrow and tempting a weakened appetite. Recipe books might not refer specifcally to funeral foods, but they regularly include recipes for foods that were also served at funerals. Seed cakes were not exclusively associated with funerals, but death was one association with them. Eating a seed cake would not have always evoked thoughts of grief, of course, as taste could be context-dependent. Within the context of a funeral, however, there was a specifc taste profle to the foods served—and ingredients that also had medical indications to help with the symptoms of grief, such as lack of appetite. The taste of loneliness did not run through recipe books in a clear way, but the books emphasize how thinking about family foods was an important part of the process of separation from one’s family. Food offered a sense of family continuity despite physical absence. Recipe books underscore the powerful relationship between food, family and anticipatory grief. 182

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Figure 12.1 Image of an 18th-century English funeral, with food and drink being served to guests. Source: Jean-Frédéric Bernard, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World (London: W. Jackson for Claude Du Bosc, 1733). Wellcome Collection, London.

Illness and Epidemics Illness was not necessarily a lonely period, but it was a time when sufferers’ usual lives shifted, potentially creating a sense of social separation. When people became (seriously) ill, their daily routines changed. The severity of the illness was indicated by whether the sufferer stopped work or housework, stayed in the home or took to their bed. The difference between normal time and illness time was even more stark during outbreaks of plague, when people acted in socially distanced ways. Whether considering ordinary ill health or epidemics, food delineated the boundary between illness and health. Sociologist Talcott Parson called the changes to sufferers’ routines the ‘sick role’: when a person could withdraw from normal duties because they had an obvious illness but was obligated to seek medical help to recover and to return to normal duties as soon as possible.51 Medical historians have drawn on Parson’s concept (though in a critical way), recognizing that life could indeed change profoundly for sufferers—from the wealthy who might choose to take to their beds to the poor who might need poor relief because they were unable to work. Rather than focusing on the doctor-patient relationship, however, they have focused on the experience of being ill.52 As part of adopting the sick role, sufferers were expected to withdraw from their usual business, with the resumption of duties marking recovery—though the boundary between health, minor 183

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illness (when one might stay in the house) and full sick role (when one stayed in bed) was blurry, the shift depending on an individual sufferer.53 Even being confned to bed, however, was not necessarily lonely. In a smaller house (or for those of a dependent status), the sick bed might be in a public space or even be shared with others.54 To be ill was not to be cut off from society; indeed, Christians were enjoined to visit the ill as part of their godly duties, and patients certainly kept track of who visited them and when.55 Tending to the sick was sociable in food-related ways too. An ill person, for example, ate a special invalid diet while recovering (Figure 12.2). Dietetics (or the understanding of how food choices affected health) might inform a patient’s choices, such as cooling foods during a fever or warming foods during a cold. Certain foods were considered helpful for strengthening an invalid

Figure 12.2 This image by Michael Burghers (c. 1700) shows a woman, Mrs John Webb, who is being nursed when ill in bed with ‘a dead palsey, and convulsion in the nerves’ before being cured by a physician. Given the severity and length of her illness, she would have needed someone to feed her. Source: Wellcome Collection, London.

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or easily digestible by those with a poor appetite; many of the staples of medieval invalid foods, such as chicken, white fsh, eggs and grains would have been familiar to 18th-century people too.56 Given that ill people were expected to eat differently, someone needed to prepare the special foods.57 In her Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse even occasionally implied in her recipes for invalids that the carer might need to feed the patient, such as giving a spoonful at a time of beef or mutton broth ‘for very weak people’.58 However, the experience of illness—particularly for long-term sufferers—was liminal; recovery was uncertain, and daily routines while ill, including the need to eat meals separately, were out of step with normal household activity.59 But illness also brought with it a loss of regular sociability. Recipe books offer some clues (by their absence) as to the foods eaten during less sociable moments, particularly during illness. Gruel (a thin oatmeal porridge), for example, was typically eaten out of company’s sight. In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, a family quarrel starts when the hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse chooses to eat gruel in front of guests.60 Gruel might have been considered a healthy food for all kinds of people in the 18th century, but since the 16th century, it had a lingering stigma as a poor person’s food (Figure 12.3).61 Some foods were not meant for sociable moments, with gruel’s absence refected in recipe books. Indeed, recipes for gruel rarely appear in family collections, although it often accompanied medicines. The Grenville family’s head pills, for example, were to be taken with gruel in the morning, while Mrs Knight’s electuary for costiveness was taken with water gruel mixed with mallows.62 Printed recipe books, aimed at a wider audience of servants and middling sort or urban housewives, tended to assume ignorance about food preparation and so provided a wider range of practical recipes including gruel. Glasse, for example, had a simple recipe for water gruel: a spoonful of oatmeal added to a pint of water, then boiled three or four times, constantly stirring, with butter, salt and pepper added.63 Glasse, however, placed the recipe in the ‘Directions for the Sick’, indicating the food’s specifc usage; there was a clear distinction between plain dishes that were eaten privately and foods that were publicly consumed. Dishes that might be classed as sick-dish cookery and intended to be eaten privately can sometimes be found in recipe books. The foods served to invalids were typifed by the ‘Directions for the Sick’ section in Glasse. Her recipes included a range of broths, puddings and drinks. Out of 30 recipes, nine had mace or nutmeg (or both). For example, broths of mutton, veal or chicken, a ‘good drink’ and two caudles were seasoned with mace, while foods like sago pudding and boiled plaice or founder included nutmeg. Other dominant favours included carraway (seed water), cloves (isinglass jelly), mint (pectoral drink and ‘for a child’) or sage (sage drink,‘for a child’,‘liquor for a child that has the thrush’).64 The overlaps among cloves, nutmeg, mace, and carraway are clear. Sage and mint, however, also have a profle that includes menthol or minty and woody or piney favours—and as common garden herbs, they were easier to acquire than the spices. In terms of medicinal action, there were similarities, too, as both were hot; sage was thought to increase the blood and to treat the cold, while mint would heat, dry and bind.65 Although these favours were not in every sick-dish, as some had no added herbs or spices, they appeared frequently enough to suggest that certain ingredients and favours were considered most appropriate for invalids. Certain diseases might also have food associations; during plague outbreaks, for example, rosemary and vinegar were closely connected to the wider sense of social dislocation and liminality. In London, during a plague year, the smell of rosemary would have flled the air. It was burned in homes and streets, worn on one’s clothes and included in remedies. The demand was so high that the cost of a normally inexpensive herb went up drastically during outbreaks. Not only was rosemary thought to clean the air, but it was used in many plague remedies or preventatives.66 Ruled by the sun, rosemary had warming, comforting and cleansing virtues.67 In terms of favour, it is medicinal (sage, cloves, mint and carraway), mint (mint, mace, nutmeg and cloves), pine (mace, nutmeg, carraway, sage), bitter (mint and sage) and hay (sage).68 An ordinarily pleasant herb would 185

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Figure 12.3 Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), ‘A man in pain receiving medicines from a housemaid.’ This image is reminiscent of Mr Woodhouse, as well as the medicinal uses of gruel. In this image, an old man stands up from his chair, clearly in pain. There are medicine bottles on the table and mantlepiece. A young woman hands him a bowl flled with gruel. The laughter of the man in the doorway suggests that the woman is treating the old man as a malingerer. Source: Wellcome Collection, London.

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have become oppressive, however, for anyone forced to quarantine in their home, locked in with ill and dying family members. The smells of death and sickness would have mixed with the high heat and smoke produced when burning rosemary to purify the air.69 The smell of an ordinary food suddenly took on new meanings during isolation. During an epidemic, the buying and selling of food came with the tang of vinegar. In 1666, the mining town of Eyam isolated itself when an outbreak occurred. The wealthiest families fed, breaking apart the community. The town, moreover, was cut off from its normal food supplies, which had to be left on stones along the town boundaries. Villagers paid with coins that they left in vinegar.70 William Defoe’s semi-historical account of the 1665–6 plague in London also emphasized the instability of the food supply and fragmented society. Those bringing food into the city remained at the gates, shifting the site of exchange from the marketplace to the perimeter. Customers dropped coins into vinegar bottles and paid with exact change, a description that evokes a smell of acid and metal. Even moving through the city to purchase food had changed, with people walking down the centre of streets to avoid others.71 Vinegar had another powerful meaning for early modern people: the drink given to Jesus during the crucifxion at Golgotha. There, Jesus wondered why God had forsaken him. In a letter reporting the loss of his wife to the plague, Revd William Mompesson referred to his town of Eyam as Golgotha, suggesting the depth of his grief and aloneness.72 Vinegar, then, evoked vulnerability, social dislocation and despair. Food was central to the liminality of both illness and epidemics. In the case of epidemics, simply obtaining food could be diffcult and, in any case, had to be done in new ways to avoid coming into contact with people. The scents—and the taste—of vinegar and rosemary for purifcation and medicinal uses would have been pervasive, shaping one’s sense of social dislocation and encounters with otherwise ordinary foodstuffs. Cookery for invalids also had a favour profle, which was similar to grief in that it was warming and stimulating; but the piney, woody, bitter and musty favours also had a hint of menthol. The sick role also brought changed social relationships; the sufferer might not necessarily be alone, but the reduced social contact and lack of activity can also be seen in terms of loneliness.

Imagined Cannibalism If early modern loneliness came from separation from society, then it is worth considering those individuals who were imagined as rejecting society completely: cannibals. Early modern discussions of imagined cannibalism appear in a wide range of sources, from shipwreck accounts to fairy tales. Let us begin with a story about a queen who is so monstrous in her desire for human fesh that she was described as an ogre. The version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ popular in 18th-century England was translated from Charles Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’.73 The story begins with the christening of a baby princess and a curse placed on her by a vengeful fairy whom her parents forgot to invite. The curse was that when the princess became a woman, she would prick her fnger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep for a century. A fairy godmother countered the spell: that a prince’s kiss would awaken her—and that the entire castle would fall asleep with the princess so she would not be alone. The curse came to pass as foretold, but one day a neighbouring prince discovered the castle and broke the curse by kissing the princess. There the modern version ends. The Perrault version continues long after marriage. The prince and princess had two children but lived apart after marriage for several years. The prince had a secret: that his mother, the queen,

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was an ogress who ate small children. It was only when he became king that he brought his family to live with him. The joy was short-lived, though, as he had to leave when a war began. While the king was away, his mother had an insatiable desire; she ordered her servant to kill and cook her granddaughter, served with a sauce Robert. The servant, however, could not kill the girl; he hid her away and prepared lamb instead. Soon the queen mother wanted the servant to kill and cook her grandson. As before, the servant hid the boy and this time served baby goat. Still hungry, the queen mother planned to eat her daughter-in-law. This time the servant hid the whole family in a house in the woods and served her venison. The queen mother discovered the truth one day while she was walking in the woods and hear the children’s voices. Enraged by the perceived betrayal, she planned to throw the family and the servant into a tub flled with vipers and toads. Fortunately, the king came back in time, resulting in his mother committing suicide by diving into the tub instead. This is a gory tale, but there were many stories about cannibalism in early modern England. Cannibalism as an act of revenge regularly appears in Tudor and Stuart drama, for example, with characters discussing its possibility even if it is never done.74 Medicinal cannibalism, in which people ingested parts of dead bodies like moss from a skull or powdered mummy, was common in England—but drawing on (problematic) travel accounts, early modern people tended to assume that the real cannibals lived in the New World.75 Fact and fction blurred. It did not help that accounts of real cannibalism by shipwrecked sailors were sensationalized, pushing the graphic depictions into people’s imaginations and making it hard to identify what was true or not. The initial account of the Nottingham Galley shipwreck, for example, was only eight pages, but other versions were much longer and were being printed into the 1760s.76 In December 1710, the Nottingham Galley was shipwrecked on an island near Maine without food for 24 days. Boon Island can be seen as a liminal place in which the crew was uncertain of rescue and underwent a transition into cannibalism. The remaining crew survived by eating a raw seagull and bits of food that washed up on shore, but they were increasingly hungry. When the ship’s carpenter died after nearly three weeks, they could resist no longer and importuned their captain (who was previously a butcher) to let them eat the deceased man. The captain tried to keep control of the situation but soon found that the men were becoming ‘ferce and barbarous’, and he feared that they might begin to feed on the living.77 Fortunately, they were rescued before the situation deteriorated. When cannibalism was imagined, it took place elsewhere, beyond regular society in far and lonely places. It represented the breakdown of society through excessive violence and barbarousness against other humans. In the shipwreck account, the men remained part of a community despite their hardships—until they consumed human fesh. At that point they began to turn on each other, isolated from each other even as they were in close proximity to each other on the desert island. The stories about cannibalism emphasize that the ultimate form of isolation is to reject society so completely that one develops an insatiable hunger to eat a human. Of course, the accounts of cannibalism, including the real example of the Nottingham Galley, do not tend to describe the taste associated with cannibalism. The notable exception here is ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ The meat was imagined to take on a different favour according to age, with the cook opting to select a gradually stronger favoured meat to suit the age of each family member. This is suffcient to trick the queen mother. But there is another detail in the story, which appears in both the French and English versions, that suggests how people imagined cannibalism—or the ultimate isolation—might taste beyond the meat itself. The cook served a sauce Robert with each meal, which contained mustard (bitter, earthy, musty, pungent), vinegar and nutmeg (menthol, musty, piney, woody, soapy) in the early modern period.78 Rejection of society, then, was envisioned as a tart and bitter favour, with an overtone of mustiness. 188

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Conclusion This chapter does not offer certainties, but suggestive snapshots to try to identify what loneliness and its relationship to food might have looked like in early modern England. Despite food history’s tendency to focus on sociability, recipe books do have traces of ‘loneliness’ or separation. Our modern feeling of loneliness may not translate directly across historical periods, but early modern people understood that being apart from loved ones or society brought feelings of separation and sadness; without society, one might even revert to a bestial state, as with shipwreck cannibalism. By looking at liminal moments, such as grief, illness or epidemics, I have uncovered hints of the emotional signifcance of separation. Food played an important role in marking moments of separation; recipe books may not address loneliness specifcally, but their very creation took place within the context of memory and grief. Liminal moments were also associated with particular foods, meaning that lonely moments of grief, illness and even imagined cannibalism have a taste. The favour associated with each type of moment is distinct, although they overlap. Grief was mace, nutmeg and cinnamon, while illness was mace, nutmeg and sage; plague was rosemary and vinegar, but cannibalism was nutmeg, mustard and vinegar. There was no comfort food in the taste of early modern loneliness. Dominated by mace, nutmeg and vinegar, the taste of loneliness—like social isolation—was overwhelming: bitter, musty and pungent.

Notes 1 Charles Spence,‘Comfort Food: A Review’, International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science 9 (2017): 105–9. Pizza was not eaten in early modern England, of course, but pasta—particularly, vermicelli and macaroni—appeared regularly in 18th-century recipe books. 2 Mark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience of Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Susan J. Matt, ‘A Hunger for Home: Homesickness and Food in a Global Consumer Society’, The Journal of American Culture 30, no. 1 (2007): 6–17. 3 Amelia Worsley, ‘The Poetry of Loneliness: From Romance to Romanticism’ (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 2014), 108–12; Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19–20. 4 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 20–2. 5 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: H. Cripps and E. Wallis, 1660), 85, 88–90. Lonely women in particular were potentially dangerous: Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 25. 6 Carolyn Kiser Anspach, ‘Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2, no. 6 (1934): 376–91 (386); Matt,‘Hunger for Home’, 9. 7 Burton, Anatomy, 87–8. 8 Holly Dugan, Marissa Nicosia and Lisa Smith,‘Smelling Contagion: The Sensory Experience of Plague in Seventeenth-Century London and the Covid-19 Pandemic’, Working Papers in Critical Disaster Studies 8 (2021), https://wp.nyu.edu/disasters/wp-content/uploads/sites/16355/2021/09/working-paperseries-dugan-nicosia-smith.pdf, 7. 9 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 10 Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1909] 1960); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: AldineTransaction, [1969] 2008), 94–130; Turner, Forest of Symbols. The ‘threshold person’ is discussed in Turner, The Ritual Process. 11 Burton discusses grief in terms of ‘sorrow’: Anatomy, 96. 12 Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (London: Routledge, [1999] 2014), 3–24 (22); Pamela Sharpe, ‘Survival Strategies and Stories: Poor Widows and Widowers in Early Industrial England’, in Widowhood, ed. Cavallo and Warner, 220–39. 13 Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 277–8, 284–6, 288–90; Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), 289–307 (especially 300–1).

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Lisa Wynne Smith 14 Houlbrooke, Death, 231–2, 249–51; Wilson, Magical, 300; Sharpe,‘Survival Strategies’, 223. 15 Irina Metzler applies the concept of liminality to medieval disability, which fell between the categories of illness and health—although the sick room and recovery were, arguably, also a liminal state as the recovery was often uncertain in pre-modern health. Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 4–5; Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 104–28; Alun Withey, Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 120–40. 16 Dugan, Nicosia and Smith,‘Smelling Contagion’; Claire Turner,‘Sensing the Past in the Present: Coronavirus and the Bubonic Plague’, History Workshop: Histories of the Present, 23 Apr. 2020, www.history workshop.org.uk/sensing-the-past-in-the-present-coronavirus-and-the-bubonic-plague/. 17 The most famous of these is chemist Ann Noble’s wine aroma wheel, accessed 1 Mar. 2022, www. winearomawheel.com. 18 Lydia J.R. Lawless, Annette Hottenstein and John Ellingsworth, ‘The McCormick Spice Wheel: A Systematic and Visual Approach to Sensory Lexicon Development’, Journal of Sensory Studies 27, no. 1 (2012): 37–47. 19 William Lewis, The New Dispensatory, Book 2 (London: J. Nourse, 1753), 155, 169. 20 Lawless et al.,‘McCormick Spice Wheel’, 39, 43. 21 Menthol’s taste and cooling sensation has been frequently used to mask bitterness in cigarettes and vapes. Hyoshin Kim et al.,‘Role of Sweet and Other Flavours in Liking and Disliking of Electronic Cigarettes’, Tobacco Control 25, supplement 2 (2016): 55–61 (59). 22 For a starting point on recipes as a social currency and the wider context of recipe collecting, see Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Market Place”’, in Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies c.1450—c.1850, ed. Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 133–52. 23 The Johnson family’s recipe book is a good example that included notes and newspaper clippings, MS 3052, Wellcome Collection, London. See also the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online copy of Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 3rd edn (London: Hannah Glasse, 1748) owned by Lady Innes of Ipswich 1751, which included several handwritten recipes on its pages. 24 Lisa Wynne Smith,‘Women’s Health Care in England and France (1660–1775)’ (PhD. thesis, University of Essex, 2002), 178; Leong, Recipes, 163–7. 25 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 85. 26 Leong and Pennell,‘Recipe Collections’, 141–2; Leong, Recipes, 21–4. 27 Leong, Recipes, 124–46. 28 Johnson Family Book, MS 3052, fo. 27v; Leong, Recipes, 127. 29 Leong, Recipes, 128–9. 30 Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 167–208. 31 Lucy Judd, ‘The Value of Domestic Knowledge: Recipes and Receipt Book Manuscripts in the Nottinghamshire Households of the Long Eighteenth Century’ (PhD. thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2021), 151–3. 32 Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 660–91 (683–8). A recipe for ‘good chocolate’ collected by the Grenville Family came from Colonel John Belayse, whom they met in Cadiz in 1665. Specifc about technique and taste, the recipe hinted at Mesoamerican methods: Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville Family, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, V.a.430, 95. All Folger citations refer to their digitized manuscripts, available in LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. 33 Elizabeth Cadogan, Household recipes for making preserves, confectionary, etc., copied ‘from Mrs. Earle’s Book’, 1711, Add. MS 29739, British Library, London. 34 Cadogan Family, Medical, household, and veterinary recipes; many of the frst by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., M.D. circa 1750, Add. MS 29740, British Library, London. 35 Elizabeth Fuller & others, 1712–1822, MS 2450, Wellcome Collection, London. 36 Cadogan, Add. MS 29739, fos 59, 57v, 56. 37 Fuller, MS 2450, fo. 23. 38 See Leong’s discussion of rough and neat books, for example: Recipes, 88–96. 39 Cadogan Family, Add. MS 29740, fos 8v and 10v; James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 177–8; Margaret DeLacy, The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion and Society in Britain 1660–1730 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 127–46.

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Loneliness and Food in Early Modern England 40 E. St. John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and His Circle (London: The Batchworth Press, 1954), 158–75. 41 Leong, Recipes, 124. 42 Houlbrooke, Death, 262–3, 270, 288–9. 43 ‘Arvil-supper’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 1, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778); John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. James Britten (London: W. Satchell, Peyton and Co., 1881), 23. 44 ‘Arvil-bread’, Encyclopaedia Britannica; Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (London: Peter Parker, 1677); Peter H. Ditchfeld, Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time (London: George Redway, 1896), 165–6. 45 Aubrey, Remaines, 35. 46 Ibid., 23. 47 Anonymous, The Pastry-Cook’s Vade-Mecum: Or, a Pocket-Companion for Cooks, House-keepers, Country Gentlewomen, &c. (London: Abel Roper, 1705), 36. This is the funeral bread recipe suggested by food historian, Janet Clarkson:‘Funeral Bread’, The Old Foodie, 16 Jan. 2008, www.theoldfoodie.com/2008/01/ funeral-bread.html. 48 Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, ca. 1688, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, v.a.544 item 2, fo. 12r; Lawless et al.,‘McCormick Spice Wheel’, table 1, 39. 49 Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages’, in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin (New York: Columbia University Press, [1996] 2013); Burton, Anatomy, 92. 50 Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician Enlarged (London: J. Churchill, 1714), 75; Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis; or, the London Dispensatory (Boston: John Allen and John Edwards, 1720), 42, 55. 51 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (London: Routledge, [1951] 1991), 294. 52 Withey, Physick, 120–40; Weisser, Ill Composed, 104–28. 53 Withey, Physick, 126–7. 54 Amanda Flather, ‘Gender and Home’, in A Cultural History of the Home in the Renaissance, ed. Amanda Flather (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 127–46, 145. 55 Weisser, Ill Composed, 106–11. 56 David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450–1800 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 9–26; Terence Scully,‘The Sickdish in Early French Recipe Collections’, in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall and David Klausner (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 132–40 (134–5). Although Gentilcore suggests that dietetics and cookery separated towards the 18th century, with a growing focus on taste, the use of invalid cookery in domestic medicine was much longer lived. Eighteenth-century recipe books in print and manuscript continued to include remedies alongside cookery or sections on invalid foods. See, for example, Johnson Family, Wellcome MS 3052; Glasse, The Art of Cookery; William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1781), 198, 219, 249. 57 Scully,‘Sickdish’, 132. 58 Glasse, Art of Cookery, 118. 59 Weisser, Ill Composed, 112–15. 60 Nora Bartlett, ‘Food in Jane Austen’s Fiction’, in Jane Austen: Refections of a Reader, ed. Jane Stabler (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 113–32. 61 David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450–1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 57, 59. 62 Grenville Family, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville family, c.1640–1750, v.a.430, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, 211; Mrs Knight’s Receipt Book, 1740, W.b.79, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, 69. 63 Hannah Glasse, Art of Cookery, 120. 64 Glasse, Art of Cookery, 118–21. 65 Lawless et al.,‘McCormick Spice Wheel’, table 2, 40; Culpeper, English Physician, 213–15, 295–7. 66 Dugan, Nicosia and Smith,‘Smelling Contagion’, 6–10. 67 Culpeper, English Physician, 283. 68 Lawless et al.,‘McCormick Spice Wheel’, table 2, 40. 69 Dugan, Nicosia and Smith,‘Smelling Contagion’, 16–17. 70 Patrick Wallis,‘A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666–2000’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006): 32, 35. 71 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (New York: Dover Publications Ltd., 2001), 102; Dugan, Nicosia and Smith,‘Smelling Contagion’, 15.

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Lisa Wynne Smith 72 Revd William Mompesson to John Beilby, 20 Nov. 1666, in The Christian Correspondent: Letters, Private and Confdential, ed. James Montgomery (London: William Ball, 1837), 2: 320–3. 73 Charles Perrault, Tales of Passed Times by Mother Goose with Morals, trans. R.S. Gent, (London: T. Boosey, 1796), 39–67. 74 Raymond Rice,‘Cannibalism and the Act of Revenge in Tudor-Stuart Drama’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 44, no. 2 (2004): 297–316; Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 75 Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism; Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London: Routledge, 2011). 76 Another account was also published in 1711 but was 46 pages long: A True Account of the Voyage of the Nottingham Galley (London: S. Popping, 1711). 77 A Sad and Deplorable, But True Account of the Dreadful Hardships, and Sufferings of Capt. John Dean, and His Company on Board the Nottingham Galley (London: J. Dutton, 1711), 7. 78 Peter Hertzmann, ‘Of Unknown Origin: Sauce Robert’, À La Carte: Ramblings, Thoughts, Comments, Observations and Miscellany, accessed 3 June 2022, www.hertzmann.com/articles/2004/robert/; Lawless et al.,‘McCormick Spice Wheel’, table 1, 39.

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13 ‘DISENGAGEMENT FROM ALL CREATURES’ Exploring Loneliness in Early Modern English Cloisters Claire Walker

Writing of her mystical encounters with Christ, English Carmelite nun, Delphina of St Joseph Smith, spoke of the need to eschew ‘all unnecessary distractions Company worldly discours and intertainment and retire ourselves with Jesus in the interiour desert of our Souls’.1 Smith’s sentiments refect the signifcance of solitude in the monastic tradition and is in accord with modern scholars’ assumptions about its centrality for nuns and monks pursuing the contemplative life. Yet her words also point to one of the many anomalies of promoting spiritual seclusion for religious women and men who lived communally. Achieving the isolation necessary for mystical abstraction could be profoundly diffcult amid the daily business of conventual life and the inevitable discourse with people both inside and outside the community. It would seem, therefore, that aloneness was more an unattainable ideal than a reality for those living in cloisters. Yet this was not necessarily the case. Many seventeenth and eighteenth century nuns struggled to balance the requirement for prayerful retirement from the company of others with the emotional distress affected by leaving kin in the world outside the convent walls. For English nuns, the grief and feelings of dislocation caused by leaving the world were exacerbated by departing their homeland to join convents abroad, which intensifed their keen sense of separation and distance from loved ones. As the Augustinian prioress Winefrid Thimelby observed to her widowed brother-in-law Herbert Aston in 1674: ‘Really, I wod faine love nothing but God, but all you at Bellamour are notorious theefs, yr selfe the Captaine, and steal or rather openly Rob of [sic] that poor interest I should pay only to Heaven’.2 The women in English cloisters, located in France, the Southern Netherlands and Portugal, considered themselves religious refugees who had fed Protestant persecution. The 22 contemplative convents were founded from 1598 by expatriate Catholics with the express intention of keeping female monasticism alive abroad until such a time when Protestantism was vanquished and England was again Catholic or, at the very least, when their faith was tolerated there. Culturally, then, the cloisters were imbued with a strong sense of exile, isolation and persecution but also hope for ultimate repatriation. While some women were in the convent because their families were straitened fnancially by recusancy fnes, there were disparate reasons for entering the religious life. Some had chosen the cloister against family wishes; others reluctantly accepted their monastic vows; the majority fell between the two extremes.3 In most instances, the nuns DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-16

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accepted their vocation and strove to fnd a sense of meaning and spiritual satisfaction. The convents, established after the Council of Trent, adhered to strict monastic enclosure and were largely under the supervision of the local episcopal authorities. They generally had British confessors and spiritual directors, and importantly, they were usually located in towns with a British expatriate community. This meant that, although living on foreign soil, English nuns had recourse to their countrymen and women for spiritual, economic and social sustenance. That said, they still positioned themselves as refugees and outsiders, cast adrift from their country and kin, despite the fact that many convents secured generous local patrons who pitied their plight and provided fnancial and political support. This chapter explores the contradictory experiences of loneliness in the English cloisters. It begins with a discussion of the scholarship to argue that the emotion was just as keenly felt prior to 1800 as after it. Early modern loneliness was simply articulated differently in a period when the word did not exist, and it was generated by historically contingent circumstances which differ from the economic and social structures driving the ‘modern epidemic’. The second section considers the spiritual dimensions of being alone in religious houses, demonstrating that monastic rules and spiritual treatises established parameters for nuns’ isolation. Monastic women negotiated the strictures of aloneness necessary for spiritual contemplation of their divine spouse, and the ways they did this reveal the complexities of solitariness and conversations with God. Finally, the chapter examines the reality of loneliness for women separated from homeland and kin and the mechanisms they used to assuage the anguish of isolation, including the harnessing of nostalgia. Exploring loneliness in religious communities highlights the problem with defning this emotion too narrowly. It also challenges the notion that the absence of company is necessarily negative. As the chapter demonstrates, English nuns developed myriad ways of eschewing and embracing loneliness, which reveal the intensity of this emotion and point to ways modern isolation might be countered by adaptation of early modern religious women’s coping mechanisms.

The Language of Loneliness in Early Modern Convents Scholars agree that the term ‘loneliness’ in its modern sense of social isolation, with accompanying psychological and bodily dimensions, did not emerge until the nineteenth century. Fay Bound Alberti asserts,‘ “Loneliness” is a relatively modern phenomenon, both as a word, and perhaps more controversially, as an experience.’4 She grounds her argument in a keyword search of books printed in English between 1550 and 2000 to show that the term was rarely mentioned before the end of the eighteenth century, and she suggests that its meanings evolved from merely signifying a physical experience in earlier usage to encompass an emotional dimension in modern times.5 David Vincent counters this slightly, noting that before the modern age loneliness was ‘rarely deployed in isolation from emotional solitude’, citing Milton’s 1643 contention that marriage was principally ‘a remedy against loneliness’.6 Vincent suggests that loneliness as a state or place of solitude prevailed in the eighteenth century, and the Romantic poets were responsible for characterizing it as a negative emotion. In modern debate, loneliness has become a binary opposition between human contact and separation from others.7 As Keith Snell argues, modern quantitative studies equate being alone with loneliness, despite the need to distinguish situational solitude from ‘subjective or temperamental feelings of loneliness’.8 He points out that single households do not necessarily inculcate the emotion, which is just as readily experienced in shared residences, and asserts that as loneliness is a historical human experience, affected by many social and cultural factors, scholars need to consider its contexts, expressions and ‘historical psychologies’.9 Seclusion from human company in order to be attentive to God was fundamental to the Christian tradition and spiritual isolation offers a key counterpoint to the emotion’s predominantly 194

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negative characterization. From Old Testament prophets like Moses and Elijah, Jesus in the desert and Gethsemane, and early Christian hermits such as Anthony and Simeon Stylites to medieval anchorites like Julian of Norwich, repudiating human company was seen as a prerequisite for divine engagement. In religious understanding, therefore, an individual’s separation from worldly society to commune with God was a positive act. Indeed, the term for voluntary loneliness in Christian parlance was ‘solitude’ which was devoid of any bad association. Yet, as John Barbour observes, religious solitude is complicated—it was usually temporary, could be penitential and transformative and it was by no means private, as the very public seclusion of hermits reveals.10 Mari Hughes-Edwards argues that medieval English anchoritic guides ‘site the recluse at the heart of their communities’, despite privileging solitude and demonizing sociability.11 Likewise Anneke Mulder-Bakker demonstrates how twelfth and thirteenth-century urban recluses in north-western Europe were free from social ties and obligations, which meant they could meditate unhindered and impart their spiritual wisdom to others.12 From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the complexities of eremitic separation ensured the coenobitic life became the primary vehicle for achieving spiritual solitude. Barbour asserts that the monastic tradition largely ‘affrms cenobitical (communal) existence as normative while acknowledging solitude as a valuable although minor part of a Christian life’.13 This by no means decries the spiritual benefts of aloneness, but there were logistical and psychological dangers in isolation, particularly for religious women who were deemed more prone to physical assault and demonic temptation.14 This meant that the desert spirit was fostered in monastic communities in other forms, principally in the requirement for periods of silence—during prayer, work and meals—but also in the proscription against forming special friendships and against unnecessary social discourse with seculars in parlours and in correspondence. Glòria Durà-Vilà and Gerard Leavey’s study of two modern Spanish contemplative monasteries demonstrates that the centuries-old monastic ideal of solitude remains current in the twenty-frst century and highlights how it functions in religious communities, present and past. Interviews with monks and nuns reveal how monastic training disciplines individuals to endure isolation to foster intimate communication with God. The women and men explained how,‘once one had managed to train oneself to endure silence and aloneness, and had let go of possessive human attachments, an inner space where God dwelled was found.’15 Signifcantly, the religious in both communities felt an affnity with eremitical and monastic forebears, identifying with them as role models and imitating them to achieve spiritual communion with the divine realm. They acknowledged the suffering inficted by an absence of human closeness but accepted it as necessary to achieve a satisfying relationship with God. Signifcantly, they implied that they did not experience loneliness because their training, prayer and silence engendered a ‘continuing feeling of God’s presence’, and they talked of a constant ‘uninterrupted conversation with God’ not only in prayer but also in the conduct of their quotidian chores.16 Durà-Vilà and Leavey’s research displays several correspondences with scholarship on medieval and early modern contemplatives, who likewise struggled to achieve divine communion but, when successful, wrote of an intense spiritual and emotional satisfaction which surpassed the beneft of any human discourse. Moreover, it highlights the anomalous position of solitude within a religious community. David Vincent discusses ‘abstracted solitude’ as ‘the capacity to be alone amidst company’, which became more imperative with increasing urbanization in the eighteenth century with individuals needing to withdraw mentally from those around them. Although there are few records of the practice, it was the only way people might approximate isolation and contemplation.17 Vincent is discussing domestic households but the principle and presumably the techniques underpinning ‘abstracted solitude’ are not far removed from the imperatives and practices of the monastic community. 195

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Recent refections on modern loneliness reveal that it can occur in the company of others, suggesting that physical proximity does not necessarily obviate a sense of isolation. Olivia Laing’s twenty-frst-century refections on being alone in New York point to the importance of a shared emotional space.18 A sense of commonality and personal connection is vital to prevent feelings of exclusion and disconnection. If this was the case in the seventeenth century, it is unlikely there were unhappy lonely people in religious cloisters where nuns and monks united in a joint spiritual enterprise. Yet as with the aforementioned words of Winefrid Thimelby to Herbert Aston, many nuns expressed feelings of isolation in letters. Discovering a typology of early modern monastic loneliness is useful for teasing out its complex elements. The wider literature suggests that factors informing a sense of isolation include geographic/spatial, demographic, economic, gendered and religious elements but also volition/agency play a part. The English nuns’ dislocation from their homeland, in combination with monasticism’s requirement for disavowing kin and all secular ties upon entrance to the cloister, ensured homesickness, nostalgia and loneliness for many. Yet at a time when these terms did not exist, or had different meanings in the lexicon, convent sources do not explicitly articulate them. Faced with this diffculty, Bound Alberti’s concept of an ‘emotion cluster’, which she describes as ‘a term . . . useful in describing experiences that incorporate many separate and even competing emotions’, is apposite for discerning their feelings. It is not always easy to pinpoint the early modern vocabulary for loneliness, particularly in nuns’ writing which had to conform to the dictates of monastic spiritual direction and censorship. However, by using the concept of an ‘emotion cluster’ it is possible to unravel how the women expressed the loss, grief, yearning and sadness of separation. Such feelings were in part ameliorated by the spiritual benefts of solitude. However, language alone did not mediate expressions of early modern loneliness. Spaces, objects, rituals and memories also epitomized separateness from the places and people constituting former lives and selves. Thus, for early modern English nuns,‘loneliness’ was often about identities—old, new and desired. Even when a woman was at her most comfortable in the cloister, surrounded by her religious sisters and confdent of God’s love and favour, she could be lonesome, longing for kin, country and the vestiges of her secular identity. The sensual, spatial and ritual elements which defned monastic solitude as both alienating and fulflling will be examined in the next section.

The Anguish and Contentment of Spiritual Solitude The process of separation from all that had constituted secular life began as soon as a woman entered the convent. The Minim friar, Michel-Ange Marin, commenced his treatise on how religious women might achieve perfection, noting that a nun ‘is a person who has solemnly renounced the world, to consecrate herself to Jesus Christ’.19 Renunciation was diffcult. Postulants hoping to be accepted into the novitiate and novices aspiring to be professed as nuns were trained by senior sisters who were exhorted to ‘take care to root out of their hearts all worldly Maximes’. This was achieved by ‘mortifcation, humility and penance’ and rejection ‘not only to the world and Parents, but even to themselves’. Only then would they be ‘worthy of Jesus Christ’, their divine spouse.20 As the Poor Clare novice mistress at Rouen was reminded, He should not be offered ‘a parted hart’.21 By strictly adhering to their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience they might realize the abstraction necessary for devotion to God. The Benedictines of Cambrai copied Savonarola’s exhortation that ‘daie & night their soules must entertain no other thought, their hearts no other affection, their tongue no other discourse but of their crucifed Lord.’ The Florentine reformer had recommended,‘as soon as you put your foote into the convent, cast off all your relations; & so cast them off that you never more desire to see or heare any of them.’22 Relinquishing former affections, even kin, was undoubtedly considered essential for attaining 196

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monastic perfection, but nuns were similarly barred from replacing worldly friendships with confdantes inside the cloister. The Bridgettines in Lisbon recalled that their confessor forbade ‘all friendships either a brode or att home which had the leest shaw of pertictullarity’.23 Fr Quiena was no doubt more concerned about secular bonds, but closeness among sisters was discouraged in all cloisters. Particular attachments between individuals not only stood in the way of a strong relationship with God but were also dangerous for communal harmony and monastic obedience. Achieving the requisite abstraction necessary for successful separation was an integral feature of training in the novitiate and remained something nuns strove to retain for the remainder of their lives. It was through ‘mortifcation’, the process of strict bodily, sensual and emotional comportment, that women learned to shed past habits and ‘die’ to their former selves in order to conform to the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to which they were bound upon monastic profession. The Augustinian nuns in Paris were exhorted to ‘shew modestie and a virginall bashfulnes . . . in their lookes, gates and expressions’ upon encounters with secular people in the convent parlour.24 Silence constituted a key element of mortifcation. The Poor Clares of Gravelines’ constitutions ordained strict silence from the offce of compline before bedtime until mid-morning the following day. Abstaining from talk was maintained to differing degrees in particular spaces—choir, dormitory, refectory, cloister and church.25 Even when conversation was allowed, speech was subject to stringent guidelines. In the workroom where nuns conducted craftwork for the cloister and to assist it fnancially, they were advised to speak of spiritually edifying topics in low voices.26 Likewise during recreation, conversation was permitted with the provision that ‘their discourse is to be of God, lives of Saints, or some other decent, indifferent and

Figure 13.1 Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, Nuns at Work, frst half of the eighteenth century, oil on canvas. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982, 1982.60.13.

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proftable subject, conducing to the progresse in virtue and good of their soules’.27 A convent’s failure to adhere to the strictures might be brought to the attention of its episcopal overseers. In 1620, Archbishop Matthias Hovius of Mechelen reminded the Benedictine nuns at Brussels to maintain silence when and where this was required in their statutes.28 It was through the observance of silence that solitude was enacted in the monastic cloister. Proscribed from forming friendships with other sisters and exhorted to lengthy periods of silence, with speech permissible only when necessary, and even sociable discourse restricted to spiritual topics, religious women were expected to establish affective bonds with Christ and other holy fgures rather than with one another. Achieving isolation in a monastery where the nuns lived in a community was not simple. The Benedictine rule advocated monastic self-suffciency in order to diminish the necessity for conducting business outside the monastic enclosure: The Monastery ought soe to bee buylt, if it bee possible that it may contayne with in it all things that are necessary for it, as Water, a Mill, a garden, a Bakehouse, or soe that divers arts may well be exercised within the Monastery, that there might bee noe necessitie for the Religious to runn abroade, because it is not in any wise expedient for their Soules.29 In spite of the aspiration, most convents did not achieve this degree of infrastructure and conducted commercial arrangements with tradespeople beyond its walls, with rigorous regulations governing interaction. Rules and conduct books were similarly at pains to control internal collaboration between sisters. Cloisters produced food and goods for their own consumption and occasionally for sale. These domestic and commercial enterprises, which included provision of spiritual services not only entailed regular contact with secular people but they also required the sisters’ labour and regular interaction. The statutes of the Benedictine abbey in Brussels suggest a hive of daily activity with secular people and clergy coming and going, and the nuns engaged in food production, domestic chores and the organization of the monastery’s religious, education and hospitable services. Eight pages were dedicated to ‘silence’, pointing to the diffculties inherent in conducting these activities without talking.30 This quotidian business and evidence of overcrowding in certain cloisters implies that monastic solitude was not easily achievable. Indeed, the coenobitic life rested upon the ideal of commonality, and almost every activity was conducted in the presence of others. It was essential, therefore, for individuals to learn a form of Vincent’s ‘abstracted solitude’ where they might seek refuge from the bustle of daily life and the presence of other sisters. At the Ghent Benedictine abbey, Abbess Mary Roper was all too aware of the spiritual dangers posed by the daily discourse of household business, and she placed notices on the doors of all common spaces to remind the sisters that ‘IN SILENCE AND RECOLLECTION shall be our proft and hope’.31 If conversation was discouraged within the religious community, discourse with those beyond the cloister walls was strictly regulated. This was a necessary part of disengagement from family and secular ties, but also in order to guard against worldly distractions. Monastic rules and advice books consistently identifed an attachment to socializing and idle chatter as inherently dangerous. The Poor Clares at Gravelines could only speak with parents, kin or spiritual friends and within earshot of two senior nuns.32 Marin recommended novices and young nuns to dissuade family and friends from visiting, disapprovingly castigating ‘a religious, who runs with an eagerness & an air of dissipation to the speak-house, when ever [sic] called; who expresses to secular people the extreme joy she receives in their visits; who complains &

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reproaches them with their long absence’.33 The brother of one Benedictine sister assured her that ‘I cannot but imagine your heart so infamed wth the love of god that you will no more care whether ever you heare from me or any of your freinds or ever speake wth them more.’34 However, the regularity with which criticisms of worldly intercourse occur suggest that attachment to secular friends was a constant problem. In 1694, the superior of the Paris Augustinian convent reminded the sisters to follow their constitutions more assiduously with regard to the parlour where they conversed with visitors.35 Clearly not everyone was as devoted to separation as Dutch sister Beatrix of St Teresa Gelthoff who in the 1680s joined the English Carmelites in Antwerp against her kin’s wishes and was said to be ‘so disengaged from her family and relations, that she could not have a greater mortifcation then to be calld to the Grate’ to see them.36 Nuns were likewise expected to avoid correspondence with loved ones in England, which was also deemed a distraction as it had the potential to strengthen earthly bonds to the detriment of spiritual abstraction. In 1668, Richard White, the confessor of the English Augustinian canonesses in Louvain, advised the prioress that to ‘seek unnecessary correspondence with any is far from a religious spirit, & so esteemed by all truly religious’. He warned that ‘no time is more unproftably spent, nor no greater occasion of distraction, then in idle correspondence of unnecessary letters.’37 The terms of monastic solitude strictly regulated internal discourse and relationships, as well as communication with the world beyond convent walls, effectively isolating women from one another, their family and their former sociable selves. This regulation of the senses and prohibition of companionable intercourse might be termed ‘structural loneliness’, which in turn enabled Vincent’s ‘abstracted solitude’. Inevitably the impact upon individuals varied. Nuns recognised the desirability of successful worldly abstraction which would facilitate the possibility of a deeper connection with the divine. Antwerp Carmelite Teresa of the Holy Ghost Wakeman was ‘a great Lover of Silence and solitude’ and always used the ‘time of being alone’ proftably in prayer to grow closer to God.38 Prioress Teresa of Jesus Maria Worsley ‘would go to the remotest places of the house and hide herself that so she might there without any disturbance treat with God alone’.39 Clare of the Annunciation Darcy revealed how successful such abstraction might prove. She was completely focused on Christ—even before she entered the cloister, she removed herself mentally from social amusements in company in order to pray. In 1650 she refected upon religious solitude, interpreting the biblical verse ‘I will lead thee into the wilderness, and there I will speak to her thy heart’ to mean not so much removal from distractions ‘as from affection to what we most love and esteem.’ Her constant striving for ‘structural loneliness’ paid rich spiritual dividends. Darcy received many ‘supernaturall favours’ experiencing visions, revelations and regular signs of divine approval.40 Similarly Cambrai Benedictine Gertrude More noted that it was through ‘abstraction and praier’ that God led souls to successful contemplative communion with him. In her spiritual writings, she observed, it behooveth me indeed to be silent, and that all created things be likwise silent to me, to the end I may hear the sweet whispering of thy voice, and attend in most quiet repose of soul to thy Divine Majesty, speaking to my hart.41 The diffculty was that not all women could achieve this degree of separation, and those who did were not always blessed with a spiritually satisfying relationship with Christ. Benedictine monk, Leander Thompson, commiserated with a sister who suffered from scruples, acknowledging how fearful thoughts ‘hinder & prejudice your quiet tendance to god more then [sic] you can imagine, & distract you much in prayer’. She concurred, revealing that the monastic structured loneliness deemed so essential for successful prayer provided a space for doubts to ‘possess my mind & thoughts too much even in my best exercises’, thus hindering religious devotion.42

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Even spiritually successful women might experience episodes of lonely estrangement from God. Cambrai Benedictine Margaret Gascoigne agonized when this occurred: ‘O my poore soule, seing it is the will of thy beloved to quitt thee to remaine in exile & banishmt, & in some sorte separate from him, who is the only desire of my heart.’43 Other women found it almost impossible to assuage feelings of isolation from secular loved ones by employing the tenets of structural loneliness. This was particularly the case for younger sisters, or those who were in the cloister for education, awaiting the time when they were old enough to begin formal monastic training. Winefrid Thimelby’s niece, Catherine Aston, spent some years in the Louvain convent’s school before professing her vows in 1668. Although her aunt doted on her, Keat (as she was called by her family) suffered bouts of ill health and melancholy, necessitating her return to England for a period of time in order to recover. It seems likely she was suffering acute homesickness for her father and siblings in Lincolnshire.44 Monastic solitude clearly had mixed outcomes for the women living under its precepts, despite communal living. Physical isolation from family and friends beyond and within the cloister, combined with lengthy periods of silence and bouts of homesickness, encouraged nuns to establish deep spiritual relationships with holy fgures. Many, like Gertrude More, formed close attachments with their divine spouse. More strove to adhere to all prerequisites for achieving structural loneliness in order to enjoy Christ’s company: My Lord, to whom I wil speak, and before whom my hart shall not be silent, while thus it stands with me, least the heavy weight of sinnes and my disordered passions do oppresse my soul, and seperate it from thee, the only desire, and beloved of my hart.45 The reward for her silence was intimacy with Jesus. Some nuns were not comforted by mental prayer alone and desired physical contact with Christ. During her fnal sickness, Carmelite Mary of St Albert Trentham spoke to him on her crucifx, seeking solace ‘when she thought her self alone’.46 Several sisters sought companionship from saints to whom they were dedicated. Carmelite lay sister Margaret of St Francis Johnson was so devoted to her namesake that she was ‘like one in an extacy when she heard him spoke of ’. The younger sisters played a practical joke, talking of St Francis to send her into a spiritual reverie, while they hid the supper she had prepared.47 Mary Xaveria of the Angels Burton attributed her cure from childhood illness, vocation and choice of the Carmelite convent in Antwerp to St Francis Xavier, her spiritual companion during 20 years as a nun. The saint promised to be her friend and guided her through illness, grief and an extraordinary mystical spiritual life. After a vision, she had a picture drawn of him, which she wore to comfort her, again highlighting the importance of physical connection with holy confdantes.48 Other women sought company and comfort from deceased members of their cloister. Mary of St Albert Trentham had regularly helped a sister who was afraid of the dark by accompanying her to the places she needed to attend after nightfall. After Trentham’s death the nun overcame her former nocturnal anxieties and attributed her new-found confdence to the knowledge that she would never be alone because her friend’s ‘Body is in the house’.49 Similarly, the Lierre Carmelite prioress, Margaret of Jesus Mostyn, had been infrmarian at Antwerp, nursing the blind Dorothy of St Francis Hicks during her fnal illness. Three years later, Mostyn had a vision of Antwerp founder, Anne of the Ascension Worsley, and the Virgin Mary, who asked if there ‘were any other friend I desired to see, and presently I thought upon Sister Doroahy [sic]’.50 Chronicle accounts of supernatural contact were in part to reassure the community that deceased sisters had indeed achieved salvation and were enjoying the celestial company of Christ and his saints, yet they also point to the religious women’s need for companionship. The camaraderie of other sisters, although proscribed, provided another resource for combatting isolation and homesickness. Amid stories of religious obligations, spiritual achievement

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and daily domestic business, monastic annals also detail food and frivolity on liturgical and community feast days, theatrical performances, poetry and games. In September 1729, the Augustinian nuns in Bruges celebrated their convent’s centenary with religious ceremonies, feasting, bunting, a musical tableau in the garden and ‘a little diverting Gambol’ performed by younger members of the community. The prioress presented each nun with a crown symbolizing their anticipated salvation and a—more worldly—marzipan heart ‘as an emblem of her affection’.51 As with the trick played upon Carmelite Margaret of St Francis Johnson, such episodes point to the emotional refuges sought by the religious women to assuage the rigours of structural loneliness. In cloistered solitude, nuns engaged with spiritual associates in prayer, visions and other miraculous encounters, often inspired by sensory engagement with images and other holy objects. Living communally under a regime of ‘structural loneliness’, which prescribed strict physical and emotional regulation and forbade close attachments with other people, the nuns established vicarious companionship, mentally through prayer and physically through contact with the holy objects and sociable performances. For many, this reaped religious dividends in the form of mystical encounters and visions, confrming the importance of solitude for spiritual success. For others, the friendship of Christ and saints ameliorated feelings of aloneness. The practice of monastic solitude was not always positive, however, with some women suffering adverse emotional and physical symptoms that will be considered in the next section.

Community, Exile, Grief and Action Winefrid Thimelby’s longing for family news, articulated at the beginning of this chapter, points to a key fssure in the lived experience of ‘structural loneliness’ and its outcomes. No matter how profciently nuns practiced the precepts of mortifcation and separated themselves from secular behaviours and ties, vestiges of their former worldly selves remained in their ongoing attachment to kin. Although physically separated by their exile in another country, many remained emotionally connected to their family and England, where they had spent their childhood. As a consequence, they suffered feelings of loss akin to the nostalgia experienced by migrants, separated from the people and places which informed their identity and sense of self.52 Katharine Hodgkin argues nostalgia ‘signifes an unassuageable longing, a powerful connection with a lost time and place’ and she fnds that early modern writers recalled childhood emotions or actions with ‘a kind of satisfaction in the act of recollection . . . as well as a diffculty in relinquishing the past’.53 For the nuns, monastic solitude intensifed the forbidden yearning for loved ones. They longed for contact with visiting relatives and sought news of family affairs by whatever communication channels were available. Letters represented a key source of information. Despite the proscriptions against unnecessary correspondence, many sisters conducted epistolary exchanges with relatives, usually under the context of convent business. Amid requests for the payment of overdue dowries and other monastic expenses, correspondents sought family and neighbourhood news. Some looked for evidence that kinship ties had not been fractured by their monastic profession. In 1740, Benedicta Caryll petitioned her nephew to honour her deceased father’s debt to the Dunkirk Benedictine cloister and chided John Caryll for his failure to answer her previous missives: As I have out of tender affection, & ye naturall love that’s impossible for me not to have for so near a Relation as your self, twice writt to you through that cause, but fnding none on your side in my reguard did desine no more to trouble you wth ye repetition,

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or confrmation of it, since tis as disagreable to you; as ye least [itum?] of your affection (a kind word or a line) would be of joye & satisfaction to me.54 Caryll desired reassurance of her nephew’s regard for her. She proclaimed that her love and affection for him stemmed from ‘ye common tye of fesh and blood’ and declared ‘no one can be more affectionate towards ’em [i.e. kin in England], than my self, for I canot were off my nature, & cease to love what is so near & Dr to me’.55 Like Winefrid Thimelby 80 years earlier, Caryll admitted that monastic mortifcation and structural loneliness had not stifed worldly sentiments. Nostalgia for family and her childhood home in West Sussex continued to defne Caryll’s identity within her cloister and she wanted evidence of her kin’s ongoing affection to assuage the grief of separation from them. Both Thimelby and Caryll articulate the exiled English nuns experience of monastic loneliness in their yearning for lost identities. There is an element of nostalgia in its modern sense—a longing for an idealized and unobtainable past—in their evocation of childhood spaces and people.56 However, convent life-writing confrms Hodgkin’s contention that early modern childhood was beset with loss, illness and separation. Many nuns’ families had suffered fnes, property confscation, imprisonment and occasionally death for practising their minority faith, and worldly suffering is a common trope in convent life-writing. In spite of this less-than-rosy depiction of worldly existence before entering the cloister, the pain and suffering of childhood memories were reframed within the convent as prompts towards a closer relationship with Christ, who had also suffered unjustly. Combined with obstacles and illnesses experienced within the cloister, they shaped an identity of pain and suffering. This added to the benefts bestowed by structural loneliness and propelled many sisters towards the spiritual success of close relationships with God and the saints. Monastic solitude and the nostalgia it invoked inspired more than devotional accomplishments. Research by modern psychologists points to the benefts of nostalgia, which can counteract feelings of loneliness and perceived social isolation, and even enable forward-looking and proactive behaviours.58 While Kristine Johanson reminds us that early modern nostalgia cannot be equated with the modern understanding of the term because ‘nostalgia is always historical’, there is evidence that the nuns nostalgia inculcated a sense of mission which aimed to restore Catholicism in England.59 As previously mentioned, the convents expected to return to their homeland when political and religious circumstances permitted. Hope for an imminent homecoming inspired certain nuns to move beyond merely offering prayers and religious rituals towards achieving this goal to engage in political activism for the cause. In the 1650s, Ghent Benedictine abbess Mary Knatchbull conveyed royalist correspondence using her convent’s postal networks and channelled news between England and the Low Countries for Prince Charles and his chief conspirators. Knatchbull and other exiled Catholics believed the opportunity to return to their homeland rested with the Stuarts and the restoration of the monarchy.60 Despite Charles II regaining the crown in 1660, these hopes proved unfounded. Yet they did not fade. In the aftermath of 1688, Catholics expected another Stuart restoration of James II or his descendants. Many nuns became ardent Jacobites. In the 1720s, the cloisters’ century of dislocation from England and thwarted expectations of repatriation inspired Dominican sister Mary Rose Howard to assist James Francis Edward Stuart. In 1726, she explained her rationale for supporting the ‘Old Pretender’, recounting the daily prayers expended on his behalf. Like Knatchbull, she transmitted the prince’s correspondence to his Jacobite supporters and she wistfully anticipated his restoration even 11 years after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715:‘my solitud would be doubly happy to heare that news, whilst I have long suffered life with impatience & death in desire, yet my thinks this last news would compleate my desirs on earth’.61 Howard’s hopeful optimism, despite ongoing Jacobite failure, clearly links homesickness, nostalgia and proactive action. Separation 202

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Figure 13.2 John Faber the Younger, after Gabriel Mathias, The Lady Howard Abbess of the English Nuns at Antwerp, eighteenth century, mezzotint. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1974.12.524.57

from kin and country, enhanced by the precepts and practices of monastic solitude, encouraged her and many other religious women to dream of the future. For some, that entailed union with their divine spouse through mysticism in the short term and, fnally, in death, but others entertained more worldly ambitions of returning to their homeland where the degree of isolation from their secular family and the co-religionists with whom they shared past suffering for the faith would not be so great.

Conclusion Ultimately, monastic solitude in early modern English convents confrms Hughes-Edwards’ assessment of medieval guides for anchorites which, despite privileging seclusion and eschewing 203

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sociability, represented recluses as signifcant actors in their communities.62 The practice of mortifcation trained novices in their transition from secular women to nuns who were expected to abjure worldly comportment and attachments in order to achieve the religious perfection necessary for brides of Christ. Structural loneliness constituted a key tenet of this process and was intended to be maintained for the rest of the nun’s earthly existence. In practice, individual women achieved varying degrees of success, as ecclesiastical admonitions regarding behaviour at the grate and praise for paragons of abstraction attest. Within cloisters, sisters mitigated the loneliness of separation from family and the proscription of friendships with one another through fostering attachments with holy fgures, expressed in prayer and visions, written refections and engagement with the material culture of piety. Refuge was sought in pious practices, ritual and mysticism but also through employing the epistolary tools of convent business to seek news of kin and affrmations of ongoing affection and in the music, theatre and humour of sociable occasions and proscribed friendship. Dislocation from family and country and the grief this engendered invariably invoked nostalgia for childhood attachments to people, places and identities. In this way, monastic solitude encouraged exiled nuns into political action to bring about religious toleration in their homeland, and thereby return their convents to English soil. So, far from a negative emotional state,‘loneliness’ in religious cloisters paradoxically inspired positive engagement with one another within the convent, holy luminaries in the heavenly realm and Catholics and Protestants beyond the enclosure walls. Bound Alberti’s concept of an ‘emotion cluster’ makes possible the exploration of a word like loneliness that was not in the early modern lexicon but was keenly felt in the English convents. Nostalgia and its potential for linking a person’s past, present and future aside, nuns experienced loneliness in all its guises from the loss, grief, yearning and sadness of separation from kin and country to the exquisite joys of suffering with Christ, who was forsaken by his father and apostles in the Passion. Ultimately, although separated from family and friends in the world and expected to adhere to silence and solitude in the cloister, the women lived in a monastic community with a mutual experience of exile and a common purpose of prayer for one another, their kin and their country. As Laing suggests, the shared emotional space of the convent worked to ameliorate individual experience of isolation and loss. In many ways, although separated by 300 or so years, the English sisters experienced the strictures of structural loneliness in ways which were not dissimilar to the religious men and women in Durà-Vilà and Leavey’s study of contemporary Spanish monasteries. Ultimately, it would appear that loneliness and how it is felt, whether as a positive or a negative emotion, depends upon its rationale—solitude as necessary for spiritual intimacy with God—and volition. Choosing to be lonely and understanding the benefts of isolation made it possible for even women like Thimelby and Caryll who yearned for the companionship of kin to accept, even embrace, aloneness and transform it into a positive emotion.

Notes 1 ‘Short Colections of the Beginings of Our English Monastery of Teresians in Antwerp with Some Few Perticulars of Our Dear Deceased Religious’, in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800,Vol. 4, Life Writing II, ed. Katrien Daemen-de Gelder (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 285. 2 British Library MS Add. 36,452, Aston Papers, fol. 100, Winefrid Thimelby to Herbert Aston, 1674. 3 Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 30–8. 4 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17. 5 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 244; Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 18.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 20. Vincent, History of Solitude, 20, 22. K.D.M. Snell,‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42, no. 1 (2017): 5. Snell,‘Loneliness in History’, 22; see also Bound Alberti,‘Modern Epidemic’, 242. John Barbour, ‘A View from Religious Studies: Solitude and Spirituality’, in The Handbook of Solitude: Psychological Perspectives on Social Isolation, Social Withdrawal, and Being Alone, ed. Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2014), 557–62. Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 45. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 12–13. Barbour,‘Solitude and Spirituality’, 560. For consideration of the dangers of solitude, see Douglas Burton-Christie, ‘The Work of Loneliness: Solitude, Emptiness, Compassion’, Anglican Theological Review 88, no. 1 (2006): 32–4. Glòria Durà-Vilà and Gerard Leavey, ‘Solitude among Contemplative Cloistered Nuns and Monks: Conceptualisation, Coping and the Benefts of Spiritually Motivated Solitude’, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 20, no. 1 (2017): 50. Durà-Vilà and Leavey,‘Solitude’, 51–3. Vincent, History of Solitude, 23–4. Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being in Alone (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016), 81, 201–3, 281. Michel-Ange Marin, The Perfect Religious (Douai, 1762) in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 2 Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 84. The strictly ascetic Order of Minims was founded in the 15th century, and it aspired to solitude and prayer. ‘The Manner of Bringing Up Novices’ (1751), in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 5 Convent Management, ed. James E. Kelly (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 394, 396. ‘Instructions Upon the Manner of Governing Novices’, in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 2 Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 56. ‘A Short Treatise of the Three Principall Vertues and Vows of Religious Persons’, in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 2 Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 76, 79–80. Exeter University Library, MS 262/add2/27 ‘Short Acct of Transactions of Convent since Coming to Lisbon’, fol. 148. [St Augustine], Rule . . . together with the Constitutions of the English Canonesse Regular’s of Our B. Ladyes of Sion in Paris (Paris, 1636), 283–91. The First Rule of the Glorious Virgin S. Clare (St Omer, 1665), 257–9. Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule of the Most Glorious Father and Patriarch S. Benedict (Ghent, 1632), 22–3. Rule of . . . S. Clare, 283–4. AAM/Mechliniensia/Reg. 8, Visitatio Monastery S. Mariae Ordinis S. Benedicti Anglarum Bruxellen~, 10 May 1620, fol. [236c]:‘toutes les Religieuses seront fort soigneuses de mieulx garder la silence en tout temps et lieu come il est comandé’. I am grateful to Craig Harline for this material. The numbering of the unpaginated folios is his. [St Benedict], The Rule of the Most Blissed Father Saint Benedict Patriarke of All Munkes, trans Alexia Gray (Ghent, 1632), 6. Statutes Compyled for the . . . Rule of . . . S. Benedict, 22–30. ‘Obituary Notices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Ghent in Flanders’, in Miscellanea XI, Catholic Record Society, vol. 19 (London: J Whitehead and Son, 1917), 44. Rule of . . . S. Clare, 259–61. Marin, Perfect Religious, 86. Lille, Archives Départementale du Nord, MS 20 H 10, Fragments, fol. 465. Westminster Diocesan Archives, AAW/A Vol. XXXVI No. 46, Mr Inese’s 2nd regulations for the Austin Nuns, fol. 168. ‘Short Colections’, 274. Douai Abbey Archives, St Monica’s MS Qu2, fols 92–3, Richard White, ‘Instructions for a Religious Superior’. ‘Short Colections’, 242.

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Claire Walker 39 Ibid., 80. 40 Ibid., 157, 164, 165–79. 41 Gertrude More, The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More of the Holy Order of S. Bennet and English Congregation of Our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray (Paris, 1658),‘Advertisement to the Reader’, 40–1;‘Confessiones Amantis’, 78. 42 Lille, Archives Départementale du Nord, MS 20 H 10, Fragments, fols 467, 471. 43 Downside Abbey, Gillow MS Baker 4, Bonilla, Gascoigne B (Margaret Gascoigne’s writings), fol. 105. 44 British Library, MS Add 36,452, fols 76, 77. 45 More, The Spiritual Exercises, 77. 46 ‘Short Colections’, 108–9. 47 Ibid., 91. 48 British Library MS Add. 75,568, ‘Thomas Hunter, Life of Mrs Catherine Burton, alias Mother Mary Xaveria of the Angels’, fols 78, 82–8, 95–101, 106–7, 120–3, 151, 159. 49 ‘Short Colections’, 109–10. 50 Ibid., 140. 51 The Chronicles of Nazareth (The English Convent), Bruges 1629–1793, ed. Caroline Bowden (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 218–20. 52 Sonia Cancian, ‘With Your Words in My Hands’: The Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2021), 32–3. 53 Katharine Hodgkin,‘Childhood and Loss in Early Modern Life Writing’, Parergon 33, no. 2 (2016): 134. 54 British Library MS Add 28,230, Family of Caryll Correspondence, vol. IV, 1740–7, fol. 97, Benedicta Caryll to John Caryll, 25 Feb. 1740. 55 British Library MS Add 28,230, fols 14v, 15v, Benedicta Caryll to John Caryll, 3 Apr. 1740. 56 Kristine Johanson,‘On the Possibility of Early Modern Nostalgias’, Parergon 33, no. 2 (2016): 7. 57 This image is curious. It purports to be a superior of the English Carmelites in Antwerp—either Mary Joseph of St Teresa Howard or Teresa of Jesus Howard. However, the Carmelites were led by prioresses, not abbesses, and Geoffrey Scott’s analysis of the print suggests it is a satirical engraving. See Geoffrey Scott,‘Cloistered Images: Representations of English Nuns, 1600–1800’, in The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity, ed. Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 204–5. 58 Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, ‘Past Forward: Nostalgia as a Motivational Force’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, no. 5 (2016): 319–21; Xinyue Zhou et al., ‘Counteracting Loneliness: On the Restorative Function of Nostalgia’, Psychological Science 19, no. 10 (2008): 1023–9. 59 Johanson,‘Possibility of Early Modern Nostalgias’, 4. 60 Claire Walker, ‘Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 3 (2012), 635–55. 61 Royal Archives (Windsor), Stuart Papers 90/127, Mary Rose Howard to James Edward Stuart, 18 Feb. 1726. 62 Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, 45.

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14 AGEING AND LONELINESS IN ENGLAND, 1500–1800* Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster

Loneliness ‘is not the state of being alone’ proposes Fay Bound Alberti,‘it is a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others; an emotional lack that concerns a person’s place in the world’.1 There are particular times across the life cycle when people are more likely to feel lonely, with old age being a period of acute loneliness for many in the Western world. Yet loneliness as an emotional experience can only be traced from the nineteenth century, Bound Alberti argues, for it was then that the language for expressing loneliness emerged. Before this date, her theory goes, people were alone, and there was ‘oneliness’, but this was a physical state, not an emotional one.2 This chapter tests Bound Alberti’s hypothesis by exploring the experiences of older people in England, defned as those aged over 50, in the period between around 1500 and 1800.3 Given that life expectancy at birth varied from 31.3 to 44.8 years over this period, this older age group probably represented less than 10 per cent of the population.4 We write on the premise that the conditions for loneliness existed in this period, and the triggers for it in old age were not unique to the modern world. Grief, widowhood, dementia and mental decline, the focus of Bound Alberti’s chapter on old age, were experienced in the early modern period and had profound emotional consequences for the elderly. Memory loss associated with ageing was a signifcant barrier to sociability and could be so isolating that suicide could follow.5 Those on the margins of society, particularly the itinerant poor, whose lives were rarely tied to a particular location with associated community belonging, may have been particularly prone to loneliness.6 Loneliness could haunt old age, and people in the early modern period understood that loneliness might bring negative consequences for the mental, physical and material well-being of the elderly. Yet it was precisely because of this conceptualization of loneliness that the elderly, either consciously or unconsciously, took steps to avoid loneliness resulting from social isolation in later life. This was, as Keith Snell has put it,‘risk-aversion behaviour’.7 Beginning with an examination of the lives of the elderly poor and then moving to consider the experiences of the middling sort and elite, this chapter will explore the economic, social and cultural practices that countered the threat of loneliness. In contrast to Bound Alberti, we propose that many older people had a place in their families and communities, which meant that they remained socially integrated and valuable. We argue that a positive view of old age, as a time of opportunity and fulflment and as ‘the apogee of life’, as adopted by Peter Laslett in his study of the elderly in the present and recent past, was shared by people in the early modern period.8 It may be that fear of loneliness DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-17

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produced its opposite: a cohort distinguished by their sociability and contribution to the lives of others, not simply by their advanced age.

The Poor There was no modern understanding of retirement from work in this period: people continued to work until they were too frail to continue. Work was an economic necessity, but it was also central to social and community life. Popular culture, whether it was the seasonal celebrations surrounding May Day or the harvest, or the ballads that were sung to accompany the everyday routines of work, ensured that many types of work were social activities. Tasks were adapted as people aged, and some occupations were particularly associated with the elderly: for example, laundry, household work, childcare and nursing the sick and dying—which could include caring for other older members of the community—as evidenced by the many surviving lists of payments by parish overseers to the elderly who performed these roles.9 All of these occupations depended upon social and economic interactions with others. Work was important to identity, a sense of worth and belonging to the end of life.10 As Lynn Botelho has concluded from her study of the elderly in this period,‘The desire to remain working and their pride in past strength is arguably one of the most consistent character traits of the labouring poor’.11 While being economically self-suffcient was a common goal for the elderly, it was recognized that those entering advanced or ‘decrepit’ old age (as it was then termed) or experiencing illness and disability, could not be expected to manage without family and community support. The legal obligation of communities to support the elderly and infrm was enshrined in the Elizabethan poor laws of 1598 to 1601 and across the period there was agreement that the elderly were the most deserving of parochial aid. As a result, the elderly were the largest group of recipients of relief, and although the value of cash payments may have varied by region and was put under strain and decreased in real terms during the ‘crisis’ faced by the Old Poor Law at the end of the eighteenth century, communities continued their support of the elderly, often for many years.12 While parish relief was undoubtedly vital to the economic survival of the elderly poor, its emotional signifcance, as well as the part it played in ensuring that ‘a lonely old age’ was not the ‘lot of most of the labouring poor’, as once claimed by Paul Slack, has not been fully appreciated by historians.13 The very process of applying for relief acted to counter loneliness because it required proving worth and belonging. ‘Community’, as Snell explains, ‘in the sense of those belonging to the parish, was reinforced and perpetuated by the legal networks created by the poor and settlement laws’.14 The elderly poor were not hesitant about reminding parishes of their duty to support them, as the record of pauper letters shows. Writing to their parishes of settlement or fnding others to write on their behalf was a way of reconnecting with their communities and reminding them of their needs.15 In turn, case studies of the support provided by rural parishes, have shown how overseers did not simply or mindlessly handout cash payments to the deserving. Instead, they devised individual ‘welfare’ or ‘care packages’, which were ‘highly tailored’ and gave relief in kind as well as pension payments.16 Such care plans required overseers to have detailed knowledge of the personal and changing needs of the elderly inhabitants of their parish. For the recipients, the supply of fuel, clothing and medical care signalled that they were valued members of their communities who deserved attention, dignity and respect in their old age. Parish relief formed part of the ‘economy of makeshifts’ that bound the elderly to their families and their communities. Although shared residency was no guaranteed protector against loneliness, sharing the costs of housing, fuel and food removed a major cause of anxiety. Around 40 per cent of the elderly in the late eighteenth-century parishes studied by Susannah Ottaway were living with their children.17 This was not necessarily a dependent relationship: the elderly 208

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could contribute to family life by offering childcare for grandchildren and by helping with a wide range of domestic tasks. These contributions were not only within the realm of domestic labour and emotional support: older relations of either sex could also be the holders of tenancies or freeholds that enabled younger generations within families to fnd accommodation and sometimes premises from which to run businesses or raise incomes from land or rents. The frequency of references to such arrangements are too numerous to mention in eighteenth-century records: one indication of this is in the advertisements section of Georgian newspapers which make passing reference to intergenerational arrangements of this kind. Joseph Trobridge Jr, for example, advertised that he sold teas and other goods imported from London ‘At his Father’s house on the Broad Pavement, four Doors below Gandy’s lane, in the High-Street, EXON’.18 Caution is therefore needed in assuming ‘maiden aunts’ were necessarily dependent on other kin: they may have been the ones providing accommodation or premises for others. The elderly poor could not afford to be isolated from their neighbours or distanced from their families. As a result, the elderly did all they could to remain socially integrated: it was this form of self-help that bolstered older people’s well-being and ensured economic survival. Ann Bowman, an elderly widow who petitioned the parish offcers of Kirkoswald and magistrates of Cumberland on seven occasions between 1694 and 1711, relied upon begging as well as poor relief. ‘Being confned to an old ruinous house’ some three miles away from Kirkoswald was objectionable, she argued, because it was ‘beyond the cry of her neighbours’. She demanded not to be cast out and forgotten but to be heard and seen, for in this way she could help herself by earning the good will and charity of her community.19 When family resources were in short supply, it may have been the fear of loneliness that persuaded older people to take residence in workhouses. Yet there is much evidence to support the view that the workhouses built in the eighteenth century were neither the predecessors of the institutions that operated under the New Poor Law in the nineteenth century nor the modern care homes described by Bound Alberti in her chapter on loneliness and old age.20 Instead, they were porous institutions, often geographically situated in the heart of villages and towns, funded by the community and open to visitors.21 With the majority of workhouses purpose-built in the eighteenth century, many were designed with the needs of the elderly in mind. Those needs were recognized to be social and practical. In Newport, Isle of Wight, the workhouse constructed in 1791 had two sitting rooms adjoining the 20 separate rooms provided for elderly couples so that residents could meet for meals and not need to go downstairs to the larger common areas.22 As they aged, those living in workhouses located in north Wales and Chester could look forward to the provision of a better diet than younger residents, with gin and ale to drink.23 Undoubtedly, and tragically, there were instances of elder abuse in workhouses, but this was not systemic to the institution. As a recent study by Susannah Ottaway on the Leeds township workhouse has demonstrated, workhouses in the eighteenth century were ‘hybrid institutions centred as much on care as control’, which provided a lifeline of food, clothing and shelter for the most vulnerable members of communities, and thus, it is ‘critical we take their positive roles seriously’.24 Located within, not outside the communities where they had worked, workhouses did not leave the elderly living ‘among strangers’, as Thomas Malthus believed.25 Instead, given the predominance of older people living within them (in Terling, Essex, over 70 per cent of workhouse residents were aged sixty or over), workhouses created new communities of the elderly.26 There is no reason to believe that the elderly did not renew and strengthen previous acquaintances or forge new friendships within workhouses. While mortality could quickly follow admission to workhouses, this may be because the free medical care on offer by a surgeon and apothecary, or an on-site infrmary attracted the sick and dying.27 But once this critical period was passed, older people could remain resident for many years and even gain celebrity for their good health and 209

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longevity. Three women and one man, aged between 63 and 85 and all living in the workhouse of St George, Hanover Square, London, were reported to have died on the same day in 1771.28 Such was the pride of the keepers of St Margaret’s workhouse in Westminster, at the remarkable long life of their resident Margaret Patten that they commissioned a portrait of her before she died in 1738, supposedly aged 138 years (Figure 14.1).29 Margaret was said to be ‘very hearty’: contemporaries were keen to emphasize that these very old people had long lives not just because they were physically ft but also because they were happy and social. Isabella Brans, who worked until she was 110 years old and then lived in the workhouse of St Botolph, Aldersgate, London, for two years, ‘is still cheerful and hearty’,

Figure 14.1 Margaret Patten, print made by John Cooper, 1737. Source: The trustees of the British Museum. Elderly workhouse residents were remembered with pride by their communities, contributing to their sense of worth and countering loneliness. The portrait of Margaret Patten was displayed in St Margaret’s workhouse in Westminster for all to view.

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it was reported in 1759.30 Just as with the Mrs Norton, who, fve years before her death at the age of 109, had ‘led up a Country dance’ at the wedding of one of her great-grandchildren in the County of Kildare, Ireland; or the 130 year-old Welsh woman Jane Morgan, who, in 1677, ‘is as mery as a Girl of Fifteen, and will sing from Morning till Night’; or the much-celebrated Thomas Parr, who was said to have died aged 152 years in 1635 and was a ‘good fellow’, enjoying ale and laughing, and who ‘loves Company’—these elderly women and men were remembered fondly for continuing to participate in the pleasures of ordinary life.31 Their presence created jollity and good humour for others and in turn, this shielded the elderly from loneliness, as well as contributing, as contemporaries believed, to unusual vigour and long life. These examples, though anecdotal, are suffciently commonplace to support the conclusions reached by Botelho: The aged poor of rural, early modern England were not uniformly assigned to the fringes of physical community and to the extremities of its affection. . . . The indigent elderly were very much part of the village’s mental world, as well as within its physical bonds. . . . They remained an active part of the daily give-and-take, the social exchange of village life.32 At the very least, such examples are an important counterpoint to the misperception that pre-modern elders were resigned to living out dismal, isolated and lonely later years.

Fostering Well-Being: The Middling Sorts and Social Elite Old age saw a continuation of many activities engaged in by the middling sorts and the social elite, and these both sustained and protected them from loneliness. Letter writing was a time-consuming activity that helped to maintain connections between friends and family.33 The sharing of news, whether familial, local or national, meant older people remained part of the conversation. Geography mattered less when letters kept people in touch. Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William, was delighted to receive a letter from her ‘dear Friend’ Henry Crabb Robinson in November 1828, shortly after she had moved to Whitwick rectory, near Ashby de la Zouche. Aged 56, she was dreading the ‘lonely winter’, and although she was living with her nephew and Whitwick was a ‘crowded village’, it was ‘barren of society’. A letter from Henry, ‘the sight of your hand-writing’, was ‘always welcome’. Henry would reconnect her with the right kind of people: I beg that whenever you have the inclination to take the pen—whether you have anything new to tell me or not, you will favour me with a letter—of Chitchat or whatever may come into your head. . . . You can hardly form a notion of the pleasure it will be to me. . . . to receive tidings of distant Friends.34 For Lady Sarah Cowper, who began her diary when she was 56 years old, recording her thoughts provided opportunity for refection. It also allowed her to evaluate what helped to alleviate feelings of loneliness. ‘Books every way assist me’, she decided,‘they comfort me in age, and solace me in solitariness’. Contrary to Bound Alberti’s assertion that early modern ideas of ‘oneliness’ did not have negative connotations, here we have an example of an older woman consciously taking steps to avoid ‘melancholic’ emotions that were associated with solitary living. Keeping her mind active through reading was an important way of alleviating the troubles of growing old, she thought,‘He that can read and meditate need not think the evening long, or life tedious’.35 Reading for Cowper was a silent activity, but for many others, especially in the eighteenth century, it was a social pleasure. Reading aloud, attending book groups, or readings as performances, 211

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gave books a ‘social life’ to which all could participate. Reading bound the elderly to their families since reading was a collective household activity and grandparents might teach their grandchildren to read, as well as read to them.36 Elite women, particularly those in rural areas at a distance from urban centres, such as Elizabeth Rose (1747–1813), the lady laird of Kilravock, near Nairn in north-east Scotland, might fnd that their private libraries (Elizabeth’s held more than 2,000 volumes) became a community meeting point, with clergymen, tenant farmers, as well as friends and family visiting to borrow books.37 A network of Literary and Philosophical Societies and lending libraries proliferated among nonconforming religious groups and was a feature of rapidly growing industrial towns with a growing population of professional families and middling-sort readers keen to have access to knowledge.38 Clubs, mutual societies and a secular ‘associational world’ characterized urban life among these groups and (by the end of the eighteenth century) even further down the social scale, with skilled and semi-skilled artisans and tradespeople forging regular ties of mutual association. For men in particular this could provide sociability and a sense of common purpose across generational divides.39 Novel reading provided entertainment and diversion and was considered more dangerous for younger than older women as a pastime. According to one censorious male correspondent featured in the Ladies Magazine (1770–71), novels were ‘noxious trash’ that ‘set the [fair] sex into a ft of longing’. The author complained that it was the task of older women and matrons to advise against reading romantic fction since novels represented ‘persons and things in a false and extravagant light’. Women of all ages discovered, however, that reading fction was a useful way of passing what were otherwise idle, unflled hours.40 Correspondence between women exchanged news of the latest publications, and shared opinions about their content and quality. Abbé d’Ancourt must have been the publisher’s favourite when he advocated reading in The Lady’s Preceptor (1743): Books are a Guide in Youth, and an Entertainment for Age; they relieve us under Solitude, and keep us from being a Burden to ourselves, help us to glide over the Rubs of Life, and lay our Cares and Disappointments asleep; and, in a word, when well managed afford Direction, Discovery and Support.41 Barred from the venues associated with men’s reading activities in public (such as coffee houses and associational clubs), women were featured reading newspapers and periodicals at home, both silently to themselves for their own instruction and amusement and to their families as forms of diversion. The exponential growth of advertising in newspapers and periodicals, specifcally aimed at female consumers, is just one indication of the high level of engagement with popular print by literate women of different ages, including the marketing of quack remedies, cosmetics, and surgical garments that were designed to mitigate the effects of ailments. Far from being marginal, the ageing female body was featured front and centre of a burgeoning consumer society, requiring cosseting, dressing and healing.42 Old age also presented new opportunities for activity and social engagement. As the oldest members of their communities, they were the custodians of customary law. Especially at the start of our period, when written records were less common, the elderly could be called upon as community experts during disputes between neighbours, particularly over land usage. Their memory of property ownership and rights put the elderly in a position of authority that demanded attention and respect.43 In an era when the vast majority of men and almost no women were enfranchised, female members of the community could be active participants in electoral processes, including as important bearers of ‘electoral memory’ in boroughs where there were disputes over voting rights.44 212

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Old age was also the time for putting personal and fnancial affairs in order. As the most senior members of a household, they were the keepers of family memory, traditions and property. Making wills, listing bequests and, for some, writing autobiographies were all regarded as appropriate occupations for the elderly and ensured that they remained important to their families, even after death. In these ways, older people were the linchpin in their family’s past, present and future. Becoming a grandparent could provide a chance to form new relationships across the generations. By the eighteenth century, around 80 per cent of those over the age of 60 had at least one grandchild.45 We have seen how poorer families could depend upon grandparents to provide childcare; it is from the middling sort and elite that we learn of the emotional value of these family ties. There is much evidence that parents continued to play a part in the lives of their adult children, and this could intensify with the birth of grandchildren. Daughters might return to the homes of their mothers to give birth, and the habit of offering advice during pregnancy and childbirth, whether in person or by letter, continued as grandchildren grew. Some grandparents, such as those of Simonds D’Ewes (1602–50), became the sole carers of their grandchildren.46 By the mid-eighteenth century, infuenced by the culture of sensibility, ‘the unquestioned assumption’ of portrait artists and writers on family life, Joanne Bailey argues, ‘was that grandparents were very fond of their grandchildren’. The birth of grandchildren could be greeted with overwhelming happiness: ‘Her joy was boundless’, remembered Mary Robinson when her mother frst met her granddaughter, ‘she kissed me a thousand times; she kissed my beautiful infant’.47 Grandchildren certainly remembered the tenderness and care of their grandparents. Thomas Bewick, born in 1753, was cared for by his aunt and grandmother. He recalled that his grandmother,‘indulged me in every thing I had a wish for, or in other words made me a great Pet’.48 Doting grandparents had new demands for their attention and affections, which left little room for loneliness. Visits from grandchildren were eagerly awaited and could be sustaining in times of ill health. Mrs Smith suffered from gout and stomach complaints for much of 1721, but she was comforted when her grandchildren visited her in Bath at least eight times over a period of nine months, with her two granddaughters, Peggy and Betty, staying with her for weeks at a time.49 Similar evidence of regular contact between the elderly and their children and grandchildren in New England and Pennsylvania leads Terri Premo to conclude that older people in this period would have been perplexed by our notion of the ‘empty nest’ syndrome.50 Yet the absence of the company of grandchildren could cause emotional distress: when Elizabeth Freke’s daughter-in-law ‘cruelly’ refused to let one of her children stay with her, she claimed that this ‘turned me to a violentt sickness’. James Yonge recorded that he was afficted with ‘heaviness of heart’ following the death of his only grandson in 1708.51 There is no doubt that death of loved ones could lead to feelings of grief, despair and isolation, which might never be overcome. There was the ‘loneliness of survival’; the ‘principal complaint’ of Mrs Windimore, aged 106 years in 1770 and living in ‘Lady Daere’s almshouse’, was that ‘she has outlived all her friends’.52 Yet loneliness did not always follow the death of others or become a permanent condition. During widowhood, elite women provide us with some remarkable examples of resilience. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was concerned for the four-time-widowed Bess of Hardwick when he wrote to her in August 1593: I wishe to your Ladyship to take more Comfort by stirringe abroade to visit your frendes and children, and not to lyve so solitary as yt semeth yow doe there in Chattesworthe amongst hills and Rockes of Stones.53 But the death of her fourth husband, George Talbot, three years earlier was a release from an unhappy marriage and the spur to her building project at Hardwick. Isolated Chatsworth may 213

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have been, but Cecil underestimated the huge pleasure and satisfaction that Elizabeth took in designing her new home. Fully absorbed in her plans, friends and children would need to visit her, for she had no urge to seek their company. Lady Rachel Russell (1637–1723) was widowed in 1683,following the execution of her husband for his involvement in the Rye House Plot. Yet she capitalized upon her husband’s reputation as a Whig martyr, as well as her considerable wealth and social connections, to exercise ‘exceptional political infuence’ following the Glorious Revolution. Dying when she was 86 years old, her correspondence shows that her opinion and favour was sought by leaders of church and state, particularly when she was in her 50s and 60s.54 Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821), who was widowed frst in 1781, then again in 1809, had none of the wealth or family support experienced by Bess of Hardwick or Lady Russell. She had angered her family when her second choice of husband was an Italian musician, and when this love match ended in his death, she was left grief-stricken. Yet in each period of widowhood, she turned to writing for comfort, publishing works that secured her reputation, and connected her to wider literary circles.55 The celebrated Mary Delany (called Mrs Delany) moved in the most elevated cultural circles of her day and made intricate and vivid embroidered fower pictures. A keen gardener and botanist, as she entered her 70s, her eyesight no longer allowed her to sew, so she switched to producing exquisite compositions using vividly coloured cut paper on dramatic black backgrounds, a new technique of her own devising that she continued to perfect until her death in her late 80s.56 For each of these women of high social status, being intellectually active and socially engaged shielded them from loneliness. They were independently minded and refused to submit to contemporary stereotypes of widows. For them, old age was not a time just to be endured but to be enjoyed creatively.

Prescriptions for Sociability The eighteenth century saw an explosion of publications aimed at the middling sorts that encouraged them to believe that good health and a long life could be obtained through self-care. As Marie Mulvey Roberts has argued, the Enlightenment saw ‘the commercialization of life-extension’.57 Care of the body, through attention to diet, fresh air, exercise and sleep, had long been advocated as promoting longevity, but in the eighteenth century, this advice was extended to include more attention to the mind. As Helen Yallop has proposed, ‘what we might now refer to as positive mental attitude’ was added to the mix of healthy life stimulating qualities, and this left no room for loneliness.58 Numerous guides for health recommended avoiding being governed by the violent passions, of which grief was most damaging to the health of the elderly. Eleazar Duncon wrote in 1606 that grief had a devastating effect on the body and mind, leading to ‘wasting, torment, vexation, deformity; it teareth, it eateth, and utterly consumeth the mind, and body also’. By the eighteenth century, the message that grief was damaging to health had not changed, even if it was now explained through the pathology of nervous illness. Grief joined other negative emotions, such as fear, envy and hatred to be ‘known by experience to weaken the nerves’, the physician James Mackenzie wrote, and ‘often’ led to ‘spasms, obstructions, and hypochondrical disorders’.59 Loss of loved ones could not be avoided, but the passions or emotions it provoked could be managed. This might involve spiritual preparation: in 1650 the physician Humphrey Brooke advised that reading the scriptures would ‘arm thy mind against the day of need; that so when affiction comes, thou mayest be provided for it’. Brooke’s work also anticipated the advice of eighteenth-century writers with his remedy for sadness. It was important, he argued,‘to give our Sadness vent, for so it spends it self and the sooner forsakes us, whereas cooped up and stifed, it takes deeper hold upon us’. The key to releasing sadness was to fnd a ‘Bosome Friend’ with whom a person could express their feelings. ‘Restrain not thy tears, but give them away, and it will ease 214

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thee’: the cure for unhappiness was not to hide it from others but to fnd a trusted and understanding friend. Suffering alone would never bring relief.60 By the eighteenth century, being social was regarded not just as a solution to personal crisis but as essential to well-being throughout later life. Medical practitioners prescribed sociability and ‘cheerfulness’ as a way to preserve good health in old age. As William Buchan told his readers, whoever would live to a good old age, must be good humoured and cheerful . . . We can either associate with cheerful or melancholy companions, mingle in the amusements and offces of life, or sit still and brook over our calamities, as we chuse. Being happy required a person to ‘mix with friends of a cheerful and social temper’.61 For the middle classes, such advice was perfectly aligned with their notions of politeness. As Yallop has shown, ‘Cheerfulness and politeness had much in common’.62 It also gave license to mixing with younger people. Mackenzie’s sixth rule for health in old age was ‘to be of a contented, chearful mind, and endeavour to render . . . behaviour and conversation agreeable to, and courted by young people, and to be frequently in their company’.63 Richard ‘Beau’ Nash, as Bath’s master of ceremonies, regulated the conduct, dress and deportment of fashionable assembly-goers for nearly half a century until his death, aged 86, in 1761. ‘Such longevity in offce was a remarkable achievement’, observes his biographer Philip Carter, ‘in a society prone to celebrate the fashionable and the contemporary. He was, in his own words, “a beau of three generations”’.64 Certainly, there is evidence of older people having important roles in polite venues. Following Nash’s example, men might be called upon to manage the sociability of the young as masters of ceremonies in assembly rooms or, like Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), act as chaperones for younger women. Yallop raises the possibility that coffee houses were young men’s spaces, but this neglects the contemporary evidence from visual sources, literary evidence and frst-hand reports, that there was considerable diversity in age (if not gender) in the composition of coffee house clientele, depending upon the character of different venues. From the time of the Restoration, London’s coffee houses and their provincial counterparts were prime venue for older men with time on their hands to meet, read newspapers and (if contemporary satires are to be believed) hold forth before captive audiences about their younger days and opinions on contemporary politics. By the end of the seventeenth century, this had become a familiar aspect of coffee house sociability and a cornerstone of Grub Street journalist Edward ‘Ned’ Ward’s most well-known doggerel satires. According to Ward, an old soldier was typically ‘One of the loudest of the prating Crew’ to be found in a London coffee house: Who after spitting thrice began, Stroaking his Beard,—Quoth he, Here sits the Man Who Thirty several Campaigns has seen, At fve and forty Sieges been, And in both foreign and domestick Wars Receiv’d as many Scars . . .65 These were more than literary tropes: older men were not just the stalwarts of coffee-house custom; they were often the proprietors of some of the more long-established meeting places in the City of London and its surrounding parishes. Mr Davis, who reputedly died at the age of 110 years in 1740, was the keeper of Harry’s Coffee House in Fleet Street, London, and ‘retained all his senses to his death’, an elderly man at the hub of London social life.66 Polite sociability was also located in the home. Social visits continued: older people might be the visited rather than the visitors, but mixing was an important part of the social round. Indeed, 215

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the number of social events might increase in later age, as Amanda Vickery demonstrated from quantitative analysis of the records left in Elizabeth Shackleton’s journals between 1773 and 1780.67 Being a host and offering hospitality provided purpose, structure to time, and required planning and budgeting. Anne Kugler makes the valid point that ‘retirement’ for gentlewomen was not a realistic possibility when there were households to manage, and her case study of the widowed Lady Sarah Cowper demonstrates the pride that older women could take in performing this role. ‘It is work well: becoming our elder years to put our families in due order’, Lady Sarah told herself in her diary,‘ffor nothing is more usefull or more beautiful than good order’.68 Staying occupied and mixing with others, whether at home or beyond, older people in this period did not have the ‘fear of a social death’ that Bound Alberti describes in more recent times.69 Expectations of sociability and politeness did not cease with old age, and friendships had no time limit. Indeed, older people could gain a reputation for being especially gregarious. The popular belief that the old could be extra talkative, because their mouth and tongue were least affected as the rest of their body decayed, indicates that the elderly were not regarded as likely to be withdrawn or lonely fgures in this society.70 The ‘disinhibition’ of speaking one’s mind as age evoked a devil-may-care attitude to social niceties was featured routinely, often to comic effect, in eighteenth-century culture. The intrigues among the key protagonists of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals centre upon Mrs Malaprop as a broker of information and gossip, sometimes extracted by bribery (one central female character, Lucy, notes she has been paid by Mrs Malaprop ‘for betraying the young people to her’).71 Though of indeterminate age, the comical ‘malapropisms’ to which Sheridan’s most popular and enduring character lent her name could be attributed to her character’s post-menopausal ‘mind fog’. Throughout the eighteenth century, private correspondence indicates the central role that older family members, women in particular, played in brokering family relationships, forging new alliances, consolidating or destroying reputations, and making marriages. There were some who achieved the idyll of contentment and cheerfulness prescribed by medics. In a letter to his cousin in September 1787, the poet William Cowper wrote of the ‘pleasure’ he had learning of the good health of his 86-year-old uncle: his snug and calm way of living, the neatness of his little person, and the cheerfulness of his spirit. How happy is he at so advanced an age, to have those with him whose chief delight is to entertain him, and to be susceptible as he is of being amused. Longevity, that in general either deprives a man of his friends, or if not of the power of enjoying their conversation, deals with him more gently, and still indulges him in the possession of those privileges which alone make life desirable.72 As Cowper recognized, attempts to be social could be frustrated by the death of friends, physical frailty that might confne them to their homes, or deafness preventing full participation in conversation.73 But the resourcefulness of the elderly meant that loneliness was not necessarily the consequence. Keeping pets frst became widespread in the eighteenth century, as Ingrid Tague has shown. For Lady Isabella Wentworth (c. 1646–1733), who died when she was 87-years old, her pets, which included a number of dogs, a parrot and a monkey, were ‘surrogate’ family and ‘provided a crucial source of emotional fulflment in her life’, especially in widowhood and when her favourite son married. As Lady Isabella explained to her son, she was not the only elderly woman who had affection for her pets: I hate cards and tables, and old people must have some diversion. Mistress Godfrey has a monkey, and Lady Duchess of Southampton, and they are fonder, if possible than I am.

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Not wanting to participate in the usual polite activity of card playing, if she had only the company of her son, she would have been perfectly content. Describing one day’s activities to her son, she began, I live like a nun, see nobody. Miss Pug [her monkey], tubs [her dog] and I, sat two hours this morning . . . and my boy [a servant] played of his viol, and set all the birds a-singing, had you but been there I should not have envied the Queen.74 Susanna Montgomerie, Countess of Eglinton (1689/90–1780), retained her reputation for wit well into old age, while fnding new company in the rats that lived in the dower house to which she retired in her 80s. She summoned and then dismissed the rats for scraps of food by banging on the walls. According to her biographer,‘when friends shuddered at her strange pets, she would say defantly that the rats were better than many of her human guests, for at least they knew when the time had come to leave’.75 Such fondness for animals was not just a habit for the wealthy: Margaret Finch, who died in 1740 aged 108 and was popularly known as the ‘queen of the gypsies’, was depicted with her pet dogs in contemporary prints (Figure 14.2). A century earlier, poor

Figure 14.2 Margaret Finch, Queen of the Norwood Gypsies, died 1740, aged 108 years. Engraved by Jack Sharp, published 1793. Source: The trustees of the British Museum. Remarkable for her eccentricity, as well as her longevity, pet dogs were the constant companions for Margaret Finch in her old age.

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women like this might have been associated with witchcraft, with their animals serving as imps. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, pet-keeping had become so normalized that the eccentricity of Margaret Finch was likely to have focused on her itinerant lifestyle and her smoking two pipes rather than upon her harmless (and in one case, fawning) dogs.

Contented Solitude The assumption has often been made in relation to the history of ageing that solitude was inherently damaging and freighted with negative connotations. There is certainly a long association between ‘want of company’ and a melancholy or depressive condition. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) regarded involuntary solitariness as damaging to what today would be called mental health, but when an individual in later life chose to be alone, the results could be very different.76 Being old and solitary and retiring from the bustle of life could be regarded positively, particularly in relation to the opportunity it afforded for quiet contemplation and spiritual refection. This was regarded in the Protestant (Anglican and nonconforming) traditions as necessary for spiritual health and cultivating a peaceful, resigned and cheerful disposition at all life stages, but particularly in old age. Providential wisdom articulated concerns about ageing and mortality in the correspondence and personal diary entries of people facing life’s challenges.77 It is almost impossible (and perhaps a rather futile exercise) to attempt to separate out sincere inward faith from outward religious practice in the fragmentary and subjective historical sources available.78 However, it is certainly the case that the adoption of rhetorical language of Christian belief provided an enduring and socially recognized form of comfort, particularly for those of advanced years. The remarkably long-lived former diplomat Sir Richard Bulstrode made it his business in old age to refect upon happiness and the human lifespan. Famous for his vigour and ftness (he fathered children over a period of fve decades, including in his 70s), Bulstrode proposed that it was important to balance being in company with withdrawal from society since ‘the more we converse with Men, the less we confer with God’.79 We need to be cautious about over-generalization in relation to questions of devotional practice since the assumed benefts of (for example) personal prayer and communal worship as a mitigation against loneliness were not straightforward. The various enduring conficts over liturgy and theology, interdenominational differences and neighbours’ disputes among laity and clergy illustrate that living in harmony as the church dictated was seldom guaranteed and never complete. However, church services did provide a common and enduring weekly ritual that offered the elderly social contact and cemented intergenerational communal bonds. The new Methodist movement, which grew out of 18th-century Anglicanism, also emphasized the communal nature of Christianity as an essentially social religion, one that necessitated being part of a congregation of all ages, which offered a countermeasure against ‘contented solitude’ tipping into social isolation.80 Scriptural precedent could be cited in sermons which embedded the idea culturally that older people were valued for their wisdom and respected for their established place in their families and communities. Respect for elders was enshrined in the Ten Commandments (‘Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother’), although early modern contemporaries complained this was not always observed. The Old Testament provided numerous examples of men and women chosen by God to undertake remarkable deeds in old age. According to the book of Genesis, Sarai/ Sarah and her husband, Abram/Abraham, became parents as they both reached their centenary. Moses, the greatest of all Jewish prophets, according to the book of Deuteronomy, lived to the great age of 120. A long tradition of regarding age as conferring wisdom gave the right (for older men especially) to assume positions of spiritual leadership and authority. Furthermore, the 218

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Judaeo-Christian tradition of respect for elders gave cultural credence to the idea that older people in general should command respect, in theory, if not always in practice. It was deemed suitable for older parishioners, who were considered to be particularly dedicated to turning their minds heavenward, to pass on devotional practices through shared knowledge of rituals and the familiar ties of communal worship through the generations. This phenomenon continued, though in different cultural formations, in larger towns and cities, including London, where parish loyalties and community identity persisted, even though the metropolis grew rapidly during the course of the early modern period.81 Moreover, the injunction to honour and care for older parishioners had the character not just of Christian charity but of moral obligation. While we should be rightly sceptical of claiming a ‘golden age’ of care and social integration at the senior end of the age spectrum in early modern times, the longevity of the Elizabethan poor laws through to the nineteenth century was just one indication of the practical means through which parishes, as units of administration and expressions of ecclesiastical and communal identity, put those principles into action and ensured a ‘safety net’ for the vulnerable old. Though none could hope to reach the age of Methuselah (at 969 years, the oldest person in the Bible), there were plenty of examples of positive associations between age and divine favour to give elderly parishioners succour that they were treasured members of godly society. Biblical precedent and religious faith provided narratives and gave meaning, hope and instruction on how to be guided by spiritual principles during the trials of older years. As the Methodist Darcy Brisbane Maxwell refected in a letter dated January 1793: ‘I do dwell alone.’ These words, one day, lately, came very seasonably to my mind, as describing the case with God’s Israel of old, when tried with various temptations, and among others, that of standing alone. I seem to have none with me. I have indeed a lonely path: but blessed by my heavenly Father, I have the Sacred Three with me.82 Talking to God through prayer was one means of fnding what Keith Snell has called ‘other-directed conversation’, though this is a secular interpretation of the utility of what could have been a sincerely held religious conviction that a two-way conversation was both possible and a source of reassurance and comfort, even in solitude.83

Conclusion Assuming the elderly were lonely in the past is part of the way in which historians have contributed to the stigmatization of older people.84 We need to get away from the stereotype of the lonely old man or, more often, woman. This chapter has shown how we should take a more positive view of old age in the early modern period. Old age could be an enriching period of life, when the elderly, their families and communities took positive steps to ensure that most people did not end their lives in loneliness. We have seen how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, older people were not seen as marginal to everyday life. Instead, those who achieved remarkable longevity were celebrated and remembered. The ability to achieve old age without loneliness did vary, of course, and was especially dependent upon a person’s state of health and economic circumstances. Old age was recognized as having two stages:‘green old age’, followed by ‘decrepit old age’.85 It is plausible that loneliness was easier to avoid in the frst (or ‘green’) phase when physical ftness and activity were still possible, including the means, if necessary, to continue to be economically active and (lower down the social scale) to make the most of the economy of makeshifts. The impact of loss of mobility upon the labouring poor, compounded sometimes by disabilities, should not be underestimated.86 For 219

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the middle and upper classes, economic hardship may have been less likely as a result of decrepitude, but being ‘housebound’ made sociability more diffcult. As one diarist, Katherine Austen, expressed it,‘when age comes with infrmities, that paynes are unpleasant. [What] poure peevish dispositions ariseth in the temper of men and women’.87 In the early modern period, as today, women of all social ranks tended to live longer than men and were forced to become adept at developing strategies for avoiding loneliness. Gendered expectations made it culturally acceptable for women, throughout their lives, to exist in relation to others and to build networks of affect and mutual help, which safeguarded many from involuntary alone-ness. It may be that the increasing number of medical guides to health in old age, which prescribed good company and the control of the passions, were written by men for whom these forms of advice were not second-nature.88 Unlike their aged female counterparts, ageing men who had spent a life largely outside of the domestic realm of responsibility, needed to be taught the value of sober sociability, good conversation and friendship in old age, in a way that their female peers, who had long been obliged to develop sociability as a survival strategy, did not. In the period from 1500 to 1800, being lonely was viewed as potentially unhealthy for body, mind and soul, especially in old age. For the poor, social isolation endangered economic survival. For those further up the social scale, being alone could be benefcial, as Bulstrode explained, in life, occasionally,‘it is necessary, that we retire into our Selves, to gather the Fruit of our Experience, otherwise we shall be but ill Husbands of the Wealth we have gotten’. Yet solitude needed to be a condition of choice, and time-limited, if melancholy and ‘uneasie’ thoughts were to be kept in check. Solitude required a special degree of self-control, Bulstrode continued, for ‘it is most dangerous for those to be alone that are not Masters of themselves . . . for many Men, who have well preserv’d themselves in Company, have been lost in Solitude’.89 For the majority of the elderly, for most of their old age, a key to ageing well was believed to rest with others—whether from being in their company or receiving support, in both emotional and practical ways. This connectedness acted to counter loneliness, and meant that in the early modern period, old age was not commonly associated with loneliness. As this chapter has demonstrated, most people managed to avoid loneliness because they were open to learning new ways of living and could even embrace their last life stage with creativity and pleasure.

Notes * The authors would like to thank Naomi Pullin for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, Samantha Williams for references to the elderly poor, and the editors for their helpful advice and suggestions. 1 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5. 2 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 10, Ch. 1. 3 Historians debate the age at which ‘old age’ was thought to begin in the past: here we adopt the age determined by Lynn Botelho, whose study focused on the visual and physical determinants of old age in post-menopausal women: ‘Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern Suffolk’, in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, ed. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (Harlow: Routledge, 2001), 43–65; see also Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976): 240; Pat Thane, ‘Social Histories of Old Age and Aging’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 98. 4 E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J. Oeppen and R. Schofeld, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 295. 5 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, chapter 6; Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 8; D. Schäfer,‘No Old Man Ever Forgot Where He Buried his Treasure: Concepts of Cognitive Impairment in Old Age circa 1700’,

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6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 53, no. 11 (2005): 2023–37; Ella Sbaraini, ‘The Ageing Body, Memory-Loss and Suicide in Georgian England’, Social History of Medicine 35, no. 1 (2022): 170–94. Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 166–71. K.D.M. Snell, ‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living’, The Open Psychology Journal 8 (2015): 65. Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old Age in Poverty: The Record of Essex Pauper Letters, 1780–1834’, in Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840, ed. Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 136–7; Margaret Pelling,‘Old Age, Poverty and Disability’, in Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity, ed. Paul Johnson and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1998), 82–3; Pat Thane, Old Age in English History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91, 93; Claire S. Schen, ‘Strategies of the Poor Aged Women and Widows in Sixteenth-Century London’, in Women and Ageing, ed. Botelho and Thane, 16; Lynn A. Botelho, Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 120–1, 128–32; S.R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Ch. 2; Deborah Simonton, ‘ “Birds of Passage” or “Career” Women? Thoughts on the Life Cycle of the Eighteenth-Century European Servant’, Women History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 214–17, 219–20. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), particularly Ch. 7. Botelho, Old Age, 128; see also Sokoll,‘Old Age’, 147. Susannah Ottaway,‘Providing for the Elderly in Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change 13, no. 3 (1998): 391–418; Smith,‘Ageing and Well-being’, 64–95; Ottaway, Decline of Life, chapter 5; Steve King,‘Reconstructing Lives: The Poor, the Poor Law and Welfare in Calverley 1650–1820’, Social History 22, no. 3 (1997): 318–38; Samantha Williams,‘Support for the Elderly during the “Crisis” of the English Old Poor Law’, in Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290–1834, ed. Chris Briggs, P.M. Kitson and S.J. Thompson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 129–52. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 85. Keith Snell, Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 50. Sokoll,‘Old Age in Poverty’; Steve King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), chapter 11; Jake Ladlow,‘Unsettled Minds in England and Wales, 1800–1834’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2021), Ch. 6. Ottaway, Decline of Life, 189–90, 232–7; Williams,‘Support for the Elderly’, 145–9. Ottaway,‘Providing for the Elderly’, 395. Brice’s Weekly Journal, 73 (3 Nov. 1727). Steve Hindle,‘ “Without the Cry of any Neighbours”: A Cumbrian Family and the Poor Law Authorities, c.1690–1730’, in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 133–50. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, Ch. 6. Thane, Old Age, 106–7; Botelho, Old Age, 126; Jeremy Boulton, Ramola Davenport and Leonard Schwarz, ‘These Ante-Chambers of the Grave? Mortality, Medicine, and the Workhouse in Georgian London, 1725–1824’, in Medicine and the Workhouse, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Leonard Schwarz (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 58. Susannah Ottaway,‘The Elderly in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse’, in Medicine and the Workhouse, ed. Reinarz and Schwarz, 49. Janet Roebuck, ‘When Does “Old Age” Begin? The Evolution of the English Defnition’, Journal of Social History 12, no. 3 (1979): 418–19. Susannah Ottaway,‘ “A Very Bad Presidente in the House”: Workhouse Masters, Care, and Discipline in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse’, Journal of Social History 54 (2020): 2. As quoted in Smith,‘Ageing and Wellbeing’, 90. Ottaway,‘The Elderly’, 42. Kevin Siena,‘Contagion, Exclusion, and the Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse: London Infrmaries in Their Widest Relief ’, in Medicine and the Workhouse, ed. Reinarz and Schwarz, 19–39; Boulton, Davenport and Schwarz, ‘These Antechambers’, 69; Ottaway, ‘A Very Bad Presidente’, 7.

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Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster 28 Christian Hoffman, Longevity: Being an Account of Various Persons, Who Have Lived to an Extraordinary Age (New York, 1798), 51. 29 Hoffman, Longevity, 16 (Hoffman mistakenly calls Margaret Patten, Mary); Bernard Lynch, A Guide to Health Through the Various Stages of Life (London, 1744), 55. 30 Hoffman, Longevity, 23. 31 Hoffman, Longevity, 31; Wonderful News from Wales (London, 1677), 5; John Taylor, The Old, Old,Very Old Man (London, 1635). 32 Botelho, Old Age, 153. 33 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Ch. 4. 34 Ernest De Selincourt and Alan G. Hill, eds, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol.4: The Later Years: Part I: 1821–1828, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Letter 379. 35 Anne Kugler,‘ “I Feel Myself Decay Apace”: Old Age in the Diary of Lady Sarah Cowper (1644–1720)’, in Women and Ageing, ed. Botelho and Thane, 79, 80. See Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, Ch. 1. 36 Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (London:Yale University Press, 2017); see also, Naomi Tadmor,‘ “In the Even My Wife Read to Me”: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Ch. 9, 162–74. 37 Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (London: Brill, 2010), particularly 56–159. 38 See, for example, Jon Mee and Jennifer Wilkes, ‘Transpennine Enlightenment: The Literary and Philosophical Societies and Knowledge Networks in the North, 1781–1830’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 4 (2015): 599–612. The geographical extent of this phenomenon across provincial England is illustrated by Keith A. Manley, ‘Lounging Places and Frivolous Literature: Subscription and Circulating Libraries in the West Country to 1825’, in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production & Distribution since 1500, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (London: British Library, 2005), 107–20. 39 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies c.1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 40 Ladies’ Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–71), 1: 364–5. On the association between women readers, the novel and family life in this period, see Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 41 As quoted in Williams, Social Life, 64. 42 Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 271–2; Amanda Vickery, ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England’, Journal of British Studies 52, no. 4 (2013): 858–86. 43 Thomas, ‘Age and Authority’, 233–4; Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 89–116. 44 Elaine Chalus,‘Gender, Place and Power: Controverted Elections in Late Georgian England’, in Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800, ed. James Daybell and Svante Norrhem (London: Routledge, 2016), 179–96, particularly 181. 45 Ottaway, Decline, 157. 46 Elizabeth Foyster,‘Parenting Was for Life, Not Just for Childhood: The Role of Parents in the Married Lives of Their Children in Early Modern England’, History 86 (2001): 313–27. 47 Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 200, 201. 48 Bailey, Parenting, 202. 49 Ottaway, Decline, 161. 50 Terri L. Premo, Winter Friends: Women Growing Old in the New Republic, 1785–1835 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 73–5. 51 Ottaway, Decline, 159. 52 Premo, Winter Friends, 158–61; Hoffman, Longevity, 44. 53 Bess of Hardwick’s Letters: The Complete Correspondence c.1550–1608, accessed 29 June 2021, www. bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=108.

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Ageing and Loneliness in England, 1500–1800 54 Anne Kugler,‘Women and Aging in Transatlantic Perspective’, in Power and Poverty: Old Age in the PreIndustrial Past, ed. Susannah R. Ottaway, Lynn A. Botelho and Katharine Kittridge (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), 74–5. 55 Kugler,‘Women and Aging’, 78–80. 56 Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs. Delany & Her Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 57 M.M. Roberts,‘ “A Physic against Death”: Eternal Life and the Enlightenment-Gender and Gerontology’, in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. M.M. Roberts and R. Porter (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 154–5. 58 Helen Yallop, Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), 2. 59 E. Duncon, Rules for the Preservation of Health (London, 1606), 14; J. Mackenzie, The History of Health, and the Art of Preserving It (Edinburgh, 1758), 389; see also, H. Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (London, 1640), 159, 166–8; R. Steele, A Discourse Concerning Old-Age (London, 1688), 29–30; G. Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London, 1724), chapter 6; and J. Easton, Human Longevity (Salisbury, 1799), xxxi–xxxii. 60 H. Brooke, Ugieine or a Conservatory of Health (London, 1650), 245, 246–7. 61 W. Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 2nd edn (London, 1772), 146–7; see also, J. Hill, The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life, 6th edn (London, 1775), 29. 62 Yallop, Age and Identity, 88. 63 Mackenzie, History of Health, 414. 64 Philip Carter, ‘Nash, Richard [Known as Beau Nash] (1674–1761), Master of Ceremonies and Social Celebrity’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed May 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-19789. 65 Yallop, Age and Identity, 114; Edward Ward, The School of Politicks, or: The Humours of a Coffee-House, a Poem (London, 1690), 5–6. 66 Hoffman, Longevity, 16. 67 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 205–6. 68 Kugler,‘I Feel Myself Decay Apace’, 70–1, 77. 69 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 141. 70 Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life, 208. 71 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, 3rd edn (1776), Act 1, Scene 1. 72 William Cowper,‘William Cowper to Harriot Hesketh, Lady Hesketh [née Cowper]: Thursday, 20 September 1787’, in Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence, ed. Robert McNamee et al., https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.13051/ee:doc/cowpwiOU0030030a1c. 73 Sarah Savage (1664–1752) lamented her deafness in old age, see Susannah R. Ottaway and Ingrid H. Tague, eds, The History of Old Age in England, 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 2008), 8: 263; for further examples, see Emily Cockayne,‘Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003): 499, 501–2, and David Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (New York: Routledge, 2012), 112. 74 Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2015), 174–6, 200–6. 75 Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘Montgomerie [née Kennedy], Susanna, Countess of Eglinton (1689/90–1780), Literary Patron and Society Hostess’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed 23 Sept. 2004, www-oxforddnb-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-66421. 76 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 115. 77 Whyman, The Pen and the People, 132–57; Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, particularly Ch. 3. 78 Bound Alberti does not explore this diffculty with generic expression and rhetoric used in sources, in her assertion that fewer people felt ‘alone’ before the 19th century because more people believed in God. See, for example, her use of the case study of the widower Thomas Turner, whose religious rhetoric is confated with belief in God. Loneliness, 98–9. 79 Sir Richard Bulstrode, Miscellaneous Essays (1715), 96. See also his ‘Of Solitariness and Retirement’, J.D. Davies,‘Bulstrode,Sir Richard (1617–1711), Diplomat and Writer’,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed 23 Sept. 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-3930.

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Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster 80 David R. Wilson,‘Anglicanism and Methodism’, in The Oxford History of Anglicanism,Vol. II, Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829, ed. Jeremy Gregory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 480–1. 81 Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For recent research, see Kate Gibson, ‘Faith and Urban Domestic Sociability in Northern England, 1760–1835’, Historical Journal 64, no. 2 (2021): 255–80. 82 John Lancaster, The Life of Darcy, Lady Maxwell, of Pollock: Late of Edinburgh, 2nd edn (London, 1826), 419. 83 Snell,‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness’, 65. 84 Yallop, Age and Identity, 6. Even Susannah Ottaway has adopted an overly negative approach with the title of her otherwise splendid book, The Decline of Life. 85 Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Man, 192–3; Steele, Discourse Concerning Old-Age, 11–12; J. Smith, The Portrait of Old Age (London, 1752), 16. Interestingly, this distinction parallels terms adopted by modern gerontologists and epidemiologists: see, for example, Annette Baudisch and James W. Vaupel,‘Why do Patterns of Aging Differ Widely across the Tree of Life?’, Science 338, no. 6617 (2012): 618–19. 86 The importance of physical mobility for the elderly poor has been highlighted by Jonathan Healey. See, for example, ‘ “By the Charitie of Good People”: Poverty and Neighbourly Support in Seventeenth-Century Lancashire’, Family and Community History 19, no. 2 (2016): 89–90. 87 As cited in Aki C.L. Beam,‘ “Should I as Yet Call You Old?” Testing the Boundaries of Female Old Age in Early Modern England’, in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations, ed. Erin J. Campbell (Aldershot: Farnham, 2006), 108. 88 Yallop, Age and Identity, Ch. 5; Helen Yallop, ‘Representing Aged Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England: The “Old Man” of Medical Advice’, Cultural and Social History 10, no. 2 (2013): 191–210. 89 Bulstrode, Miscellaneous Essays, 88, 90.

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15 LONELINESS, LOVE AND THE LONGING FOR HEALTH Mary Graham’s Consumption Carolyn A. Day The tragedy that befell the Cathcart family was repeated in countless households during the eighteenth century, and they were certainly not alone as a family ravaged by consumption (now known as tuberculosis). The frequency of this sort of occurrence, where multiple members of a household suffered from the illness or where entire families perished, led to the belief that the disease was the product of a hereditary predisposition where the afficted individual inherited a defective or delicate constitution. Although heredity was a predisposing cause of consumption, the disease could be activated by numerous ‘exciting causes’ in those with a fawed constitution.1 In 1782, An Essay on the Nature and Cure of Phthisis Pulmonalis asserted,‘This disease usually attacks people of a delicate, weak, tender constitution and, as such habits of body are peculiar to certain families; in such cases, it may with some truth be termed an hereditary disease’.2 In the case of the Cathcarts, a mother, a father, a son and three daughters were struck down by the illness, but it was the poignant death of the second daughter, Mary, that demonstrated the myriad interconnections between consumption and loneliness during the late eighteenth century.3 This chapter explores the ways in which the disease of consumption, its treatments and outcomes intersected with and fostered the conditions of loneliness for Mary Graham (neé Cathcart, 1757–1792) and her loved ones.

The Search for Health and Family Loneliness In 1774, Mary Cathcart caught the attention of Thomas Graham of Balgowan, a circumstance that delighted her future mother-in-law, Christian Graham, who hoped their connection would ‘be the source of infnite happiness [sic] to the two persons most deer [sic] to me in the world’.4 Her wishes were granted, as the couple took great delight in one another throughout their married life which began on 26 December 1774. The bride’s father, Charles, Lord Cathcart, also spoke of the affection between the pair:‘Mary has married . . . the man of her heart and a peer among princes’.5 From the beginning, however, Mary’s health was a concern, a circumstance even she acknowledged to her new husband shortly after their wedding:‘you know . . . how little I can do for myself yet I think that wishing to contribute to your happiness as sincerely & ardently as I do will at last carry me through every obstacle & enable me to succeed’.6 The couple was devoted to one another, but Mary’s constitution would prove to be a major obstacle for them both, and Thomas went to enormous lengths to shore up her health. For those with delicate constitutions, physicians often prescribed removal to more temperate and DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-18

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less variable climates and lifestyle choices, either to prevent the development of a confrmed consumption or to hinder the disease’s inexorable progress. Sunny, dry and warm locations were touted as a therapeutic for those with the fnancial means.7 Unfortunately, Thomas’ estate of Balgowan in Perthshire, Scotland, did not ft the delicacy of Mary’s constitution. As a consequence, the couple spent a great deal of time in the milder climate of England, a practice they began immediately upon their marriage, remaining in London for several months until the summer weather made Scotland a more hospitable option.8 They generally split their time between England and Balgowan, travelling extensively throughout their marriage. While Mary’s health was robust, these trips focused on social visits to family, but as her health deteriorated, they shifted to care-based expeditions. The couple’s absence from Scotland also generated commentary, apparently not all of it positive. In 1780, Mary’s sister Louisa addressed these sentiments: ‘I am very glad you have got over the ridicule which there is in your coming to England for your health’. Although the source of the ridicule is unclear, Louisa’s position was not:‘I join with the rest of the wise heads and entirely approve their decisions and hope you will be very docile and obedient to all they tell you, however ridiculous you may think it’.9 By this point, Mary’s condition was serious enough to warrant a trip to Portugal, one that kept them from Scotland for close to two years. The Grahams arrived at the end of October and wintered in Lisbon before moving south as ‘Mary’s health was “in a Bad State”’.10 They did not return home until the summer, following a dangerous journey that included being boarded by an American privateer and a winter sojourn in France. To minimize potential exhaustion, should another trip abroad be required, the couple decided upon their return to stay in the southern part of England. This had the added therapeutic beneft of ‘a milder climate than any other in Britain’.11 By March 1782, there were ‘good accounts of Mrs. Graham’s health’ and the couple returned to Scotland that summer but again moved south for the winter of 1783.12 These measures seemed to have served, and in the second half of the 1780s Thomas and Mary primarily moved between Balgowan and the family houses in Scotland, but they also spent time in Leicestershire at Brooksby.13 The treatments prescribed to forestall the development of consumption, particularly the call for a mild climate, disrupted established routines and forced the sufferer to leave the places where their families had roots. In this way the very nature of consumption created loneliness by fostering a disconnection from one’s social circle. Although the ‘language of loneliness’ may not have been fully articulated in the eighteenth century, as Fay Bound Alberti has argued,14 a rigid adherence to terminology removes the space for the embodied experience of loneliness that grew from Mary Graham’s struggle with consumption. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the varied and nuanced ways that a disease can foster the conditions of isolation and social dislocation. These are signifcant factors that contribute to loneliness, which Lars Anderson has articulated as ‘an enduring condition of emotional distress that arises when a person feels estranged from . . . and/or lacks appropriate social partners for desired activities, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy.’15 These qualities, particularly the loss of emotional intimacy and social integration, were a prominent part of the loneliness experience for the Grahams and their family network. Even as the travel seemed to achieve a recovery for Mary, the extended absences from Scotland caused other problems, isolating her from familial bonds. This was particularly true for the relationship with Thomas’ mother, who, upon hearing her son and daughter-in-law would once again remain so far south, wrote, I must own I am a good deal disconcerted at their not coming home this season but when I refect it is for the confrmation of Mrs. Graham’s health, it is too good a reason for their staying abroad another winter.16 226

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The prolonged absence of her only child weighed heavily upon her mind, and she routinely lamented the couple’s inability to spend time at home in Scotland. As Mary’s illness progressed, and the time away became longer and more frequent, both she and Lady Christian experienced feelings of separation and estrangement, key components of loneliness.17 By 1791, Mary’s health had deteriorated to the point she was unable to accompany her husband on his trips to Balgowan and her anxiety over her mother-in-law’s reaction was apparent when she wrote him that she ‘hope[d] Ly C G will be satisfed it was right to stay where I am’.18 Mary’s concern was that the lack of access might cause resentment, and she sought to foster that missing connection between mother and son:‘I told her that since I cd not be with her . . . I was glad to think that she had you there wch I hope she will take as a great compliment’.19 The couple’s frequent absences were softened by the actions of the rest of the family, who sought to mitigate Lady Christian’s loneliness by serving as surrogates when her son was away. His maternal frst cousin, Lord Hopetoun, stepped in to assist writing in January 1791 to reassure Thomas that his mother was well cared for so he could focus his attention on his wife’s health. Hopetoun acknowledged Lady Christian was ‘much distress’d about her [Mary]’ but reassured him:‘We do our best to amuse your excellent Mother & she is so good as to be pleased to stay’.20 Despite the loneliness and disenchantment brought about by Thomas and Mary’s distance, Lady Christian always erred on the side of what would best beneft her daughter-in-law. By 1792 the pair were travelling again, as Mary’s heath had taken a serious turn for the worse, and Thomas’ mother anxiously awaited updates on her progress. When it became clear that Mary’s physicians recommended wintering abroad, Lady Christian wrote,‘you may believe it is no small mortifcation to me to look forward to such a long period but I must give up my own satisfaction as her life is at stake’.21 A month later she again wrote of her disappointment, when it was determined they would not return to Britain anytime soon:‘We must take patience but it is a great loss to me at this time my son’s absence’.22 Sadly, Lady Christian’s lonely isolation from her child would not be mitigated by Mary’s death. Instead, until her own death in 1799, his mother never stopped wishing he would fnd happiness and settle back at Balgowan, but Thomas only made brief visits to Scotland.23

Mary’s Isolation and the Search for Connection Lady Christian was not the only family member who experienced loneliness as a result of Mary’s ill health. The nature and treatment of consumption in the eighteenth century created loneliness not only for those left behind but also for the sufferer and their signifcant other who often had to make diffcult decisions based on the progress of the illness. Mary’s health forced Thomas to take numerous trips on his own to preserve her from the rigors of travel. Even before their return from Portugal in 1781, he established that he would ‘be by myself in Scotland’.24 By 1790 Mary’s health was again on the decline and she was sent south to stay with her brother Lord William Cathcart and his family near London, while her husband went to settle business affairs at Balgowan. Thomas’ solitary movements were prescriptive and practical, part of his attempts at preserving Mary’s heath.25 Mary had demonstrated her willingness to ‘adapt and improve herself to ensure her and her husband’s happiness’, and this was exploited by her husband to ensure she took care with her health.26 While, she regretted his absence, Thomas saw the separation as a medical necessity: I beg you will not for a moment indulge the shadow of regret at not having made this journey with me, there never could occur a point of more positive duty then it was in you to give it up. I see it entirely in that light, and never can allow any circumstances to weigh against that.27 227

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He did seek, however, to mitigate the sting of separation by promising to keep a tally of his activities while he was away. In this way Thomas sought to provide Mary access to the people and places that were lost to her due to her illness.28 As Katie Barclay has argued,‘Many couples had agreements to write with particular frequencies, even if there was little to report’.29 One of the effects of these efforts to shore up Mary’s health and combat consumption was to replace activity with discourse. Now, instead of a shared experience of travel and the ability to take part in social activities, the couple’s interactions were reduced to Thomas reporting and Mary responding. She did, however, take great delight in his letters:‘thanks for . . . all this you tell me wch makes them so amusg & enables me to follow you in this journey’. These letters, along with her family’s attentions, served to buoy her emotional state, and she admitted to Thomas:‘Yr letter keep up my spirits as well as all the comforts here’.30 Despite these efforts, as her illness progressed, so too did her isolation. Mary had never enjoyed being separated from Thomas; even early in their marriage, she described herself as ‘unreasonable’ at his absence and even mentioned, ‘It has happened to me once or twice to call different people by yr name’.31 Although she did admit, ‘I really can do without you, [but] I need not tell you that your absence is always most unpleasant to me’.32 As Katherine Glover has demonstrated, this sort of sociable correspondence between family members who were separated by physical distance created a form of emotional intimacy, even when covering seemingly trivial subjects.33 As her health made it impossible to travel with Thomas, her loneliness increased, as did her longing for those places lost to her due to her condition. Consumption then not only cost her access to her habitual activities but also cut her off from her vision of her future life. In this way, Mary lost not only her expectations of what her life was meant to be, according to her social station, but she was also disconnected from her notions of its potential. This was particularly evident in her sentiments about Lynedoch/Lednock/Lednoch, the beautiful estate and cottage seven miles from Balgowan, acquired by the couple in the second half of the 1780s. Situated on the River Almond, the place had captured Mary’s imagination and she sketched it many times.34 Thomas even toyed with the notion of moving there permanently, writing soon after the purchase: My mother, who is quite well and has been with us all the summer, would not approve I believe, otherwise it would be a prudent plan and a very pleasant one, as Lednoch is a delightful little spot and will very soon be a neat and comfortable place, though the house is a mere cottage.35 The couple took a great interest in developing the site, attending to every aspect to achieve their idealized vision for their home, one that was never fully realized, as they were never able to live there due to Mary’s illness. Still the idea of it remained a dream for her, one she longed for while isolated in England away from Thomas and the promise of their home together.36 For Mary, Lednock was the material reminder of a social identity lost to illness and the focus of nostalgic musing, as well as her longing for home (both real and imagined). This nostalgia, according to Alberti, can function both in positive and negative ways with respect to loneliness. On the one hand,‘Nostalgia can include a mourning for what has been lost; a sense of lack compared to what were once the key elements of a life’, but it can also ‘help to combat loneliness’ as ‘the set of relationships that one carries in one’s head, in other words, can protect against perceptions of social disconnect in the present, even if those relationships no longer exist’.37 The chronic struggle with her health manifested as loss for Mary, the loss not just of activities, locations and relationships but also the loss of a version and a vision of herself. Mary’s longing for that idyllic site was plainly evident in her letters to Thomas, as was the desire for home and the places she was 228

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prevented from visiting due to her illness:‘I imagined you yesterday at Lednock. . . . I long to hear of Lednock—of the Farm—of the Inhabitants—of the Cattle of the Place &c.’.38 Thomas replied: The little you say of yr self, confrm’d by Ly Stormonts couplet makes me very easy & happy abt. you, I beg you will thank Ly S. for those two lines & for her care of you wch. indeed I knew wd. be so much the case that your being at L. grove reconcil’d me to the idea of their separation—you judge very truly in thinking that I miss you here & at Lednock.39 Consumption and loneliness then were intricately intertwined, but not just in the terms of absence and loss. The treatment of the disease manifested the conditions of loneliness, but loneliness and other forms of mental strain were also thought to make the illness worse.

‘A Melancholy Cast of Mind’ During the eighteenth century, the nervous system rose in prominence as a cause of disease and consumption was one of many illnesses that was tied to a malfunctioning of this structure.40 The growing prominence of socio-psychological accounts of disease meant there was a growing role for the impact of emotions upon health, particularly as an exciting cause in constitutional diseases, like consumption. As K.D.M. Snell has argued, the ‘cultural meanings and historic constructions of loneliness’ overlap with ‘allied words’ like melancholy, which was both an emotional state and, like loneliness, a disease tied to civilization.41 Clark Lawlor has similarly asserted, ‘Melancholy gradually became an aspect of the disorders of the nerves and, in England, a defning characteristic of English civilization and its accompanying lifestyle as well as its climate’.42 Physicians investigated the connections between the body and the mind and the role of the emotions in disturbing that balance. ‘Troublesome Passions of the mind’ were put forth as one of the causes of consumption, with many medical investigators arguing for a strong connection between the mind and body.43 For instance, George Cheyne stated that the frst stage of consumption was marked by its ‘great nervous Symptoms’, particularly ‘in tender, delicat [sic], lovely young persons’.44 Cheyne also linked lifestyle with a ‘lowness of spirits’ or ‘melancholy’ in his infuential the English Malady: Or, A Treatise of Nervous Disease of all Kinds.45 Health and disease were no longer the result of humoral balance but instead were a function of ‘nervous tone’ that could be disturbed by an excess of ‘stimulus [and] sensations’ which ‘debilitated the nerves, leading to chronic disease’ like consumption.46 The close association of consumption, nerves and melancholy meant that many of the same factors played a role in both disorders, and consumption could be a sequalae of melancholy. As Charlie Huenemann argued, ‘loneliness serves both as cause and symptom’ of melancholy, as such it also had a role in consumption.47 In 1769, William Buchan’s popular health manual, Domestic Medicine, asserted these notions to an expansive audience, stating that ‘the patient’s mind ought to be kept as easy and chearful as possible’, because ‘consumptions are often occasioned by a melancholy cast of mind’.48 By the early 1790s, there was growing apprehension about Mary’s mental state. The increased time away from her husband and the loss of those things that represented her place in the world, weighed heavily upon her mind. As her illness progressed, her family intensifed its efforts to prevent her loneliness and emotional distress, actions directly linked to their concerns over her delicate constitution. By 1791, as Mary’s health crisis was intensifying, her sister Louisa Stormont was extremely worried about the role anxiety played in her physical health, writing worriedly to Thomas that ‘it is giving Mary an anxiety & an affiction more than I thought quite necessary particularly as that anxiety hurts her so much’.49 229

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The attention to Mary’s spirits intensifed after the deaths of two of her siblings from consumption: her brother Colonel Charles Alan Cathcart in 1788 and then her sister Jane Murray, Duchess of Atholl, in 1790.50 Coupled with the deaths of both her parents from the disease, these losses must have brought Mary’s own situation into sharp focus, and Thomas and the rest of her family’s worry over her mental state deepened. In 1790, before a visit to the couple to introduce his new wife, her brother Archy Cathcart articulated the struggle between the family’s desire to spend time with their sister, their concern that their proximity might harm her, and their fear that their absence could upset her fragile mental state. These tensions were not easily resolved and he wrote to Thomas: It strikes me . . . that it might hurry & agitate Mary to have a new acquaintance to make at such a time, at the same time I know how kindly she feels disposed to have us with you & she might think it a disappointment if we did not come.51 Thomas was also apprehensive about her emotional health, particularly after Charles and Jane’s deaths: ‘But I know My Dst. Mary how properly & calmly you can look back to these sad losses & I am far from wishing you to banish such recollections wch. indeed wd. be impossible wth. such a heart as yours’.52 Thirteen days later he wrote from her late sister’s home at Dunkeld, ‘I know how easily your feelings are awaken’d & how much they affect your spirits & even yr. health’.53 His next letter also revisited his concerns that her grief would affect her health stating ‘I hope my letter from Dunkeld did not make you too melancholy my Dst. Mary—I beg you to suspend these thoughts till you have more strength of body wch. is always affected at present by subjects wch. affect yr spirits’.54 His anxiety was shared by other family members who grew increasingly strident in their attempts to preserve Mary’s mental state and, therefore, her physical health. However, these protections also further isolated her and intensifed her separation from her family. As Snell has argued, a ‘defcit or dissatisfaction of the quality or the quantity of social interactions’, particularly a ‘perceived gap between the expected and the actual social relations’, fosters the ideal conditions for loneliness to develop. An important component in creating a culture of loneliness rather than one of solitude is ‘the degree of voluntary control a person has over the situation’.55 This issue of control manifested itself in the protective measures regarding Mary’s access to communication. Among her few pleasures, as her illness progressed, were the social interactions she maintained by writing to friends, family, and her husband as he travelled for business: ‘My Dearest Mr G I found an unexpected pleasure last night in fnding a letter of my Brother’s among those I was to send you, It revived me & raised my Spirits’.56 Letters provided access to the life experiences and relationships that were otherwise limited by her illness, but her family’s growing attempts at shielding her impinged on this avenue of connection, creating a gap between her desire for authentic interaction and the level deemed acceptable for her health. In July 1791, Thomas Graham and Louisa Stormont, concerned Mary was overtaxing herself by ‘writing too much’, cooperated to limit this social interaction, even going so far as to suggest that she should not even ‘think of answering letters’.57 Her sister placed a barrier to Mary’s meaningful engagement with her close relations by stating that the family’s letters were simply to provide her with amusement and did not require answers. This denial of reliable interaction and emotional intimacy further removed Mary from ‘a sense of social integration’.58 In doing so, the family reduced the patient to her illness, removing her personhood and closing the avenue by which authentic relationships could be fostered, further isolating her. Louisa even went so far as to say, ‘all we want is to hear written good accts of her health’, then suggested Mary only be permitted ‘a scrap of paper, inclosed [sic] in a Bulletin with a

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faithful acct of her health’. If Mary attempted to exert control and did not agree to limit her responses for her own good, Louisa stated, ‘we must give her nothing to answer’.59 This forced estrangement from those most important in Mary’s world created the conditions associated with loneliness. This emotional separation was intensifed by physical separation as various members of her family also sought to restrict her movement for her health. Mary’s mother-in-law, Lady Christian, made her promise to abrogate her social duties for her health: I hope this open weather has agreed with you & that you adhere to your resolution of making no visits as the going out & in of a warm room to the Air tho’ it be in the morning is apt to do.60 She was also prevented from moving between family homes as her sister Charlotte reported to Thomas in April 1790:‘My sister had great self-denial in resisting this opportunity of making a fying visit to Lady Stormont, but we both agree in thinking it might have furried her’.61 Despite all of these efforts, Mary’s health continued to decline, and by April 1791, she was sent to Clifton and the nearby Bristol Hotwells, a well-known retreat for consumptives. This trip provided a time for refection for Mary, who generally did not like to talk about her illness and often intentionally withheld the gravity of the situation from her husband. While she was at Clifton, Thomas chastised her for her reticence in speaking plainly about her condition: ‘I can scarcely believe the acct. of yourself, it is so very good, I wish instead to “Cough &c” you had said in plain spelling “Cough & Spitting have quite disappeared & then I must have believed it as there cd be no mistake”’.62 Upon her return from Clifton, Mary provided a rare personal assessment of her illness, writing melancholy recollections about the feeting nature of life that was ‘unpleasant to dwell upon’. She also hinted at the toll her illness had upon both herself and those dear to her, writing mournfully: 4 months (Febry, March, April, May) I may reckon as devoted to my Health, let me never recollect them without . . . gratitude to my friends & to Mr. G for the anxiety they shewed me wch I never can say enough of, if any thing cd bind me more to Duties that are so Dear to me their goodness wd—do so.63 Unfortunately, neither these efforts, nor the kind solicitation of her loved ones proved equal to the task, and Mary’s health took a serious turn.

The Approaching End In 1791, the desperate couple made their way to France, hoping the milder climate would prove benefcial. After spending time in Paris, they settled in Poil, just outside of Nice, on the advice of Mary’s physician, Dr Webster, where they remained until May 1792. Her doctor, seriously concerned about her immediate danger, prescribed a sea voyage and Thomas wrote on 16 June 1792 that ‘by his advice we are preparing to leave this as fast as possible . . . he thinks it possible that the voyage may be of much service & that nothing else cd be of use’.64 Mary was not unaware of her situation and, by this point, recognized the inevitability of her death. Her looming permanent separation created a different kind of estrangement between her and Thomas, as she made the conscious choice to isolate him from the knowledge of the severity of her illness. Choosing to keep her thoughts from her husband, fearing she would cause him even greater distress, she turned instead to her friend Mrs Nugent speaking of his ‘affectionate conduct to me’ but also of her fears that no one could know ‘how he suffers, or how He trys to conceal it from me . . . a Mr. Graham is not easily found’.65

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The Grahams set out from Nice on 19 June, but nine days earlier, Mary wrote a letter to her husband to be given to him after her death. This note demonstrated her resignation and her concern for those she would leave behind. To her beloved Thomas, she wrote, I cannot help writing you a few words My Dearest husband, which may be a comfort to you. . . . I thank God, as far as I know myself, I am resigned to his will, I am fully persuaded that he adapts our thoughts to our situation, & detaches us gently from this world when we are to leave it.66 Although she had given up hope of recovery, Thomas’ journal provides glimpses of a woman enjoying her time dining on deck, reading Don Quixote and even proving a good sailor. He wrote,‘She was not at all sick & did not mind this gale at all but was rather entertained with the confusion & the awkwardness of those who try’d to get the things put in order’.67 Mary made a conscious effort to downplay her situation and became angry with herself when she occasionally showed her fear over her approaching end. She was especially concerned about the impact it had on her ‘dearest husband’ and told him,‘I was so hurt at the impression that what escaped me yesterday made on you, that I determined if possible never to let you see my fears. I was very low at that moment, I am not so now’.68 Mary was cognisant of the fate that awaited her family, having been on the receiving end of the loss and horror associated with a death from consumption. As a young woman, she witnessed frst-hand her mother’s death from the disease. In 1771, her father wrote of the experience stating his children witnessed her repeated ‘Paroxism[s]’ and ‘were much affected with her greatly altered looks’. Jane Cathcart died after ‘12 years of gathering and growing illness’.69 Although she was not present at her sibling’s deaths, she had felt the emotional toll herself and had seen its effect upon her sister Louisa. She wished to spare her family that visualization, stating, ‘Poor Lady Stormont it would kill her, & I have seen what my Brother & Lady Cathcart feel. It is too much’.70 She did not wish them to suffer the agony of watching her expire, and she struggled with loneliness at the end, both her own personal feelings and her fear for the loneliness her absence would engender. As part of her coping strategy, she consciously tried to ‘avoid dwelling upon the pangs of leaving my friends’ and turned to God to ‘support . . . [her] sinking heart’. Mary knew the grief her death would bring and felt the impact would be worse for those who witnessed it. In this moment, she hoped that those very things that had fostered loneliness during her long illness, the geographical dislocation, would offer a buffer:‘it is better to be at a distance, than to expose them to such a cruel scene which some of them might never recover’. Her words for her husband spoke poignantly to her own notions of loneliness, believing his absence would be unbearable to her and as such she left him with the following words: ‘Let your comfort be that I could never have lived without you, & am happy to go frst’.71 Despite his tender devotion, Thomas was not present when Mary passed away. This was an intentional mercy on her part to prevent his witnessing her fnal moments. On 26 June 1792, they had anchored off Hyères and Thomas went ashore to fnd them lodgings after being assured that Dr Webster felt ‘there was no such immediate danger’.72 Although her physician misread the situation, Mary was also careful to ensure Thomas would not be by her side. Afterwards, he recollected that ‘in the afternoon she desir’d me to leave her quiet that she wishd to sleep & that Dr W wd stay by her—she told him that she was quite sensible of the great change’. When Thomas returned to the ship, Mary was gone, and he lamented, ‘It is impossible to say how much I regret being absent when this angel breathed her last’.73 It was only

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after receiving Mary’s letter that he realized his absence was intentional. It was her last effort to protect him and prevent him further pain. Thomas said goodbye to his wife, gently closed her eyes and cut off a lock of her hair. He then spent his fnal night by her side sleeping on a settee next to the cot upon which her body lay.

The Lonely Legacy of Consumption Thomas Graham’s experienced key components of loneliness after Mary’s death, not just the loss of the emotional intimacy that comes with the death of a spouse, but also a loss social integration that fostered loneliness. He chose solitude, eschewing many of the conventions of eighteenth-century sociability in his grief. Haunted by Mary’s absence, he rejected his family and friend’s attempts at consolation and their physical presence, as these came with reminders of his loss. Although the Cathcart siblings were deeply affected by the death of their cherished sister, only Thomas faced his grief in lonely isolation, as the others found solace in their own families and duties. Mary’s passing removed the purpose from her husband’s existence, and he chose to separate himself from family and the painful reminders of the life they shared.74 Even before he returned with her body, Thomas decided to remove himself from the family home, writing to his factor Mr Henry Burt,‘I shall certainly not live at Balgowan in a family way for a good while’.75 Instead, he went to Brooksby in Leicestershire, where the couple had spent many happy times. Alberti has argued that eighteenth-century widowhood functioned in terms of solitude rather than loneliness because individuals, like the shopkeeper Thomas Turner ‘lived according to the desires and expectations of ’ their stations. Turner found consolation in ‘civil companionship’ and in his belief in the ‘guiding hand of God’ which, Alberti states, created conditions of ‘oneliness’ but not loneliness.76 Turner’s ‘oneliness’ was due to failed expectations and a lack of the sociability that he craved. Unlike Turner, Thomas Graham limited his interactions with his social networks and did not buy into religious rationales proffered by friends and family in an attempt to ameliorate his grief. A key component of his loneliness then was his rejection of the expected forms of sociability defned by his station. Instead, Thomas Graham’s experience of grief transcended eighteenth-century sociability and his behaviour created conditions more in keeping with a modern defnition of loneliness. These choices certainly worried his social network, and many attempts were made to dissuade him from his isolating actions. Mrs Charlotte Nugent, a close friend of the couple, wrote a few months after Mary’s death that ‘I dislike your projects; Brooksby will not do for you, & if you indulge the Calm you think yourself posess’d of you will fall a victim to the mistake’.77 His mother expressed similar apprehensions about his plan to isolate himself surrounded by the material reminders of his life with his wife, stating, I own your plan you mention gives me concern as I cannot conceive your living any where to have no object to occupy both your mind & your body one who has been used with an active life must suffer both in their Health & Spirits.78 She further reminded him that Mary would not have wished to see him suffer in such a way, and then attempted to comfort him by reminding him ‘that every thing is ordered or permitted that happens to us in this lower wordle [sic] by infnite goodness as well as infnit [sic] Power who knows what is best tho’ we cannot comprehend it’.79 Other friends also invoked religion as a conciliatory tactic. For instance, Andre Farandy wrote him from Nice ‘that the loss is so great that I fnd no argument to comfort you except that of resigning yourself to providence’.80 These platitudes failed to relieve his grief, nor did the sojourn at Brooksby, where Thomas found only painful reminders. Recollecting his feelings at this time, he stated, ‘I soon found that it would be impossible for me to remain there alone. I determined to give up the place, and wrote to ask

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General O’Hara to give me passage’.81 Thomas had met Charles O’Hara, while they were in Nice for Mary’s health in 1792, and he sailed for Gibraltar setting on a course that took him away from the spaces imbued with Mary’s memory and eventually led him to a distinguished military career. On 14 July 1792, while stopped in Toulouse on his trip to bring Mary’s body home, Thomas experienced an outrage that, along with Mary’s death, would shape the rest of his life. Drunken National Guard troops ransacked the ship and broke open Mary’s coffn. A horrifed and enraged Thomas recorded the events in his diary, calling them ‘a riotous mob of half-drunk rascal . . . armed with muskets . . . [who] insisted on seeing the Box that was sealed’. Despite his every attempt to stop them, he watched helplessly as ‘with savage violence they broke open everything’. The attack was so ferocious that ‘there was a necessity for a new lead coffn’.82 This experience gave Thomas a virulent hatred of the French, and as a consequence, he volunteered later in 1793 to be part of Lord Hood’s feet, taking part in the siege of Toulon.83 The following year, he raised a regiment in Perthshire, the 90th Foot, and gained the commission of lieutenant colonel of the regiment, later rising to the rank of major-general for his distinguished service.84 Mary’s absence continued to play a role in Thomas’ ideas of his own life and place in the world. It not only set him on a new path to military service, but his continued loneliness meant he rejected the traditional rewards associated with such service. In 1811, he wrote to his friend, ‘rewards can never gratify me, I stand alone in the world!’85 This response, as well as his refusal of the Spanish government’s attempt to grant him a title after his success at Barrosa, refected his ideas of connection and purpose.86 In 1812, after being forced home due to a medical condition, his ruminations on returning to the Peninsular War included a calculation of his worth in relation to family, when he stated, ‘there is no ostensible reason against my serving—I have no family to take care of—no private duties to perform’.87 This stark assessment of his life circumstances may stem from the fact that Thomas’ distinguished military career began after the end of his ‘private duties’ with the death of his wife. Although his marriage had lasted for 17 years, Thomas would remain a widow for a further 50 until, at the age of 95, he was laid next to Mary in the mausoleum he had constructed for her at Metheven.88 During that long interlude, he wore the material reminder of his connection to his wife, her wedding ring on his pinkie fnger. Other reminders, however, were too painful to contemplate, particularly the images of his lost love. Just as she had sent him away to prevent his pain, Thomas Graham packed away the portraits of Mary to spare himself the memory of her image, including the portrait painted soon after their wedding by Thomas Gainsborough—one that Hugh Belsey has argued ‘is one of the fnest portraits he ever painted’.89 Thomas Graham’s sense of being alone in the world was personally distressing, but his choices after the death of his wife further estranged him from his place in the world—and his social role. He even endeavoured on multiple occasions to avoid being raised to the peerage, arguing he had no children and did not wish to remarry; however, his loneliness also led to his choosing public service as a path to connection.90 These actions and sentiments stand as tangible markers of Thomas Graham’s grief and subsequent isolation; however, beyond grief, loneliness intersected in various ways in Mary Graham’s struggle for health and eventual death from consumption. The attempts to preserve her health created social and geographic dislocation, straining familial bonds and isolating the invalid. They also created unique challenges by fostering the very loneliness that was thought to be a contributing factor in the disease process of consumption. In the end, Mary’s death from the disease produced a lifelong loneliness for her widowed husband.

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Notes 1 For a full discussion of the myriad causes of consumption, please see Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion & Disease (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 2 T. Reid, An Essay on the Nature and Cure of Phthisis Pulmonalis (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 2–3. 3 Family members who perished from consumption: Jane Cathcart, neé Hamilton (1722–1771); Charles Cathcart, Ninth Baron Cathcart (1721–1776); Colonel Charles Alan Cathcart (1759–1788); Jane Murray, neé Cathcart, Duchess of Atholl (1754–1790); the Honourable Mary Graham, neé Cathcart (1757–1792); and [Catherine] Charlotte Cathcart (1770–1794). 4 ‘Christian Graham to Mary Cathcart, 21 October 1774’, Lynedoch MS. 3590/81, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NLS). 5 ‘Lord Cathcart to Mr. Graham of Fintry’, quoted in Alexander M. Delavoye, Life of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch (London: Richardson & Co., 1880), 9. 6 ‘Mary Graham [Shaw Park] to Thomas Graham [Balgowan], Tuesday [1775]’, Lynedoch MS.16002/3, NLS. 7 The Iberian Peninsula and Mediterranean were popular destinations. Day, Consumptive Chic, 25–6. 8 In January 1777, Mary and Thomas travelled to Paris to visit her sister Louisa, Lady Stormont, who was married to the British ambassador. The couple spent the best part of the year in France, not returning to England until the fall. When they did return, once again they did not go back to Scotland but instead took up residence at the sea resort of Brighton. Hugh Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2003), 27 & 31. 9 Unfortunately, there is no archival evidence that survives to explain the source or nature of this commentary on Mary’s travels and health. ‘Louisa Stormont to Mary Graham, 4 August 1780’, Lynedoch MS. 3590/278, NLS. 10 ‘David Allen to William Hamilton, 6 November 1780’, quoted in Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 31–2. 11 ‘Thomas Graham [Oporto] to Mr. Burt [Balgowan], 11 July 1781’, Lynedoch MS. 3591/7, NLS. 12 ‘Christian Graham to Mr. Burt, 30 March 1782’, Lynedoch Papers MS. 3591/36, National Library of Scotland, UK. & ‘Christian Graham to Mr. Burt, 15 January 1783’, Lynedoch Papers MS. 3591/40, NLS. 13 Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 35. 14 Alberti argues ‘that modern loneliness is a product of the nineteenth century, of an increasingly scientifc, philosophical and industrial focus of the individual over the collective, on the self against the world’. Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), X–XI & 16. 15 Lars Anderson’s defnition of loneliness in Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness, 5. 16 ‘Christian Graham to Mr. Burt, 27 August 1781’, Lynedoch Papers MS. 3591/18, NLS. 17 Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness, 5. 18 ‘Mary Graham to Thomas Graham, 23 June 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/62, NLS. 19 ‘Mary Graham [London] to Thomas Graham [Balgowan], 27 June 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/65, NLS. 20 ‘Lord Hopetoun to Thomas Graham, 24 January 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/24, NLS. 21 ‘Christian Graham to Mr. Burt, 1 May 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/216, NLS. 22 ‘Christian Graham to Mr. Burt, 9 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 16041/23, NLS. 23 E. Maxtone Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle (Boston: Houghton Miffin Company, 1928), 309. 24 ‘Thomas Graham [Oporto] to Mr. Burt [Balgowan], 11 July 1781’, Lynedoch MS. 3591/7, NLS. 25 ‘I am very happy to be able to give you a very good account of my sister’s health & sprits & she does not cough at all’. ‘Charlotte Cathcart (with insert from Mary Graham) to Thomas Graham, 25 April 1790’, Lynedoch MS. 3593/126, NLS. 26 Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 113. 27 ‘Thomas Graham [Edinburgh] to Mary Graham, 21 June 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/7, NLS. 28 ‘Thomas Graham [Hopetoun House] to Mary Graham, Thursday 23, 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/13, NLS. 29 Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 28. 30 ‘Mary Graham [Little Grove] to Thomas Graham, Friday 24 [1791]’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/63–4, NLS. 31 ‘Mary Graham [Shaw Park] to Thomas Graham [Balgowan], [1775]’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/3, NLS.

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Carolyn A. Day 32 ‘Mary Graham [Balgowan] to Thomas Graham [Bothwell Castle], [1775]’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/8, NLS. 33 Katherine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 74. 34 Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 35 & Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle, 208. 35 ‘Thomas Graham to Lord Cathcart, 21 October 1789’, quoted in Delavoye, Life of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch, 24. 36 Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle, 209. 37 Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness, 85. 38 ‘Mary Graham [London] to Thomas Graham [Balgowan], 28 June 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/66, NLS. 39 ‘Thomas Graham [Balgowan] to Mary Graham, 1 July 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/25, NLS. 40 ‘A melancholy cast of mind’, William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; or the Family Physician (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1772), 122–3. 41 K.D.M. Snell, ‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living’, The Open Psychology Journal 8 (2015): 61–70 (64). 42 Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73. 43 Benjamin Marten, A New Theory of Consumptions: More Especially of a Phthisis or Consumption of the Lungs (London: R. Knaplock, 1720), 43. 44 George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Curing the Diseases of the Body and the Disorders of the Mind, 4th ed. (London: Geo. Strahan, 1742), 186. 45 Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac, 85. 46 Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 64–5. 47 See Huenemann in this volume. 48 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; or the Family Physician (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1772), 122–3. 49 ‘Louisa Stormont to Thomas Graham, February 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/74, NLS. 50 Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 38. 51 ‘Archy [Archibald] Cathcart to Thomas Graham [Brooksby], 27 November 1790’, Lynedoch MS. 3593/185, NLS. 52 ‘Thomas Graham [Balgowan] to Mary Graham, 5 July 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/33–4, NLS. 53 ‘Thomas Graham [Dunkeld] to Mary Graham, 18 July 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/53, NLS. 54 ‘Thomas Graham [Balgowan] to Mary Graham, 31 July [1791]’, Lynedoch MS. 16001/72, NLS. 55 Snell,‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness’, 62. 56 ‘Mary Graham to Thomas Graham, Wednesday [1791]’, Lynedoch MS. 16002/5, NLS. 57 ‘Louisa Stormont to Thomas Graham, Thursday [1791]’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/76, NLS. 58 Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 5. 59 ‘Louisa Stormont to Thomas Graham, Thursday [1791]’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/76, NLS. 60 ‘Christian Graham to Mary Graham, 21 January 1790’, Lynedoch MS. 3593/109, NLS. 61 ‘Charlotte Cathcart [Brooksby] to Thomas Graham, 25 April 1790’, Lynedoch MS. 3593/126, National Library of Scotland, UK. 62 ‘Thomas Graham to Mary Graham, 26 June 1791’, quoted in Hugh Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 39–40. 63 ‘Mary Graham [Little Grove] to Thomas Graham, July 1791’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/137, NLS. 64 ‘Thomas Graham to Mr. Burt, 16 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/244, NLS. 65 ‘Mrs. Nugent to Thomas Graham, 16 September [1792]’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/ 296, NLS. 66 ‘Mary Graham to be given to Thomas after her death, 10 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/242, NLS. 67 ‘Thomas Graham Diary, 20 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 16046, NLS. 68 ‘Mary Graham to be given to Thomas after her death, 10 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/242, NLS. 69 Charles Cathcart,‘Particulars Addrest to Lady Cathcart’s Friends’, Lynedoch MS. 3590/38, NLS. 70 ‘Mary Graham to be given to Thomas after her death, 10 June 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/242, NLS. 71 Ibid. 72 ‘Thomas Graham’s Diary, 26 July 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 16046/2, NLS. 73 Ibid.

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Loneliness, Love and Longing for Health 74 This was particularly the case after the death of Charlotte in 1794. Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle, 297–8. 75 ‘Thomas Graham to Mr. Burt, 4 July 1792’, quoted in Alexander M. Delavoye, Life of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch (London: Richardson & Co., 1880), 28. 76 Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 98. 77 ‘Mrs. Nugent to Thomas Graham, 16 September 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/296, NLS. 78 ‘Christian Graham to Thomas Graham, 20 July 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/265, NLS. 79 Ibid. 80 ‘Andre Farandy to Thomas Graham, 20 July 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 3594/267, NLS. 81 ‘Thomas Graham’s Recollections from His Memoir, Pisa, January 1830’, in Philip Grant, A Peer among Princes: The Life of Thomas Graham Victor of Barrosa, Hero of the Peninsular War (Yorkshire: Pen & Sword, 2019), 53. 82 ‘Diary of Thomas Graham, Tuesday, 17 July 1792’, Lynedoch MS. 16046, NLS. 83 ‘Thomas Graham’s Recollections from His Memoir, Pisa, January 1830’, in Grant, A Peer Among Princes, 55–8. 84 David Gates, ‘Graham, Thomas, Baron Lynedoch (1748–1843), Army Offcer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sept. 2004, accessed 24 May 2022, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-11223. 85 ‘Thomas Graham to Sophia, Lady Asgill, 9 March 1811’, quoted in Antony Brett-James, General Graham, Lord Lynedoch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 225–6. 86 The Battle of Barossa (5 March 1811) although unsuccessful in breaking the French siege of Cádiz, resulted in the frst capture of a French imperial eagle. 87 ‘Thomas Graham at Lynedoch, Monday [1812]’, Lynedoch MS. 16017/50, NLS. 88 Grant, A Peer Among Princes, 201. 89 Belsey, Gainsborough’s Beautiful Mrs. Graham, 27 & 43 and Graham, The Beautiful Mrs. Graham and the Cathcart Circle, 305–7. 90 In 1812, at the same time he was contemplating his career and life circumstances, Graham heard rumours of a possible promotion and instructed his cousin Alexander Hope to respectfully refuse a title should it be offered. Despite his wishes, his cousin accepted the honour on his behalf, and he was raised to the peerage in 1814 as Lord Lynedoch. Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, Freshly Remembered: The Story of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch (London: The Hogarth Press, 1956), 269.

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16 LONELINESS AND CONTESTED COMMUNITIES IN MARY PRINCE’S SLAVE NARRATIVE, THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE, A WEST INDIAN SLAVE, RELATED BY HERSELF (1831) Jennifer Leetsch

This chapter interweaves the subject of loneliness with an example of early-nineteenth-century Black life-writing, the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, the frst Black life narrative by a woman published in Britain, at a time of immense social rupture and change effected by anti-slavery and abolitionist politics. Locating the intersections of displacement and community in slavery life-writing across the Black Atlantic, this literary analysis contrasts the many contested communities at work in Prince’s text with the loneliness of her experiences in, through and after slavery. The chapter argues that loneliness, fragmentation and separation are fundamentally part of the slave narrative, just as much as the existence and continual rearticulation of Black community and solidarity. By focusing on loneliness as a condition constitutive of the genre, the following arguments excavate the dynamics between the intimate feelings of loneliness, social isolation and systemic alienation as experienced by enslaved people, as well as inconspicuous yet wilful forms of community-building and acts of care that are activated in relation to and articulated through experiences of oppression, dehumanisation and objectifcation. In a frst step the chapter will introduce the text and its contexts, as well as the theoretical framework of social Black death, which will help chart the many ways The History of Mary Prince mediates the humane and humanizing effects of loneliness. The chapter then will engage two ‘spaces of loneliness’, spaces in which the hope to belong pushes against the inhumane conditions of slavery: the chapter will focus frst on the geographical spaces of the Plantationocene, in particular, the salt fats on the Turks and Caicos Islands, which Prince harvested for many years. As Michele Speitz argues, ‘harvesting salt proved harmful enough to inspire Prince’s rendition of a horrifc contortion of being’; the salt transformed ‘Prince’s body, consciousness, and ultimately, of course, her narrative’.1 Attending to the ecologies of the plantation system on the salt marshes of

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the West Indies lays bare material histories of horror, pain and isolation in the lives and afterlives of slavery. However, the way Prince fashions herself and her fellow slaves as a collective helps us understand the way loneliness and death in the Plantationocene jostle against complex notions of community. The second focus of this chapter is the textual space of the autobiography itself, which was orally narrated by Prince, transcribed by the amanuensis the Quaker Susanna Strickland Moodie and edited by the abolitionist Thomas Pringle. As Sara Salih points out, ‘The History did not have a single, stable Black subject as its author.’2 In fact, this is a slippery and multi-layered text which speaks with many voices and is embedded in a network of other slave narratives united in the fght for Abolition. Yet despite all this, Prince seemed to remain a lonely fgure, isolated and slowly growing blind, as indicated in the second edition postscript by her editor.3 In the fnal section, the chapter closes with a discussion of how the complicated textual communities of Mary Prince’s History have been taken up by other writers and how they have imagined Prince’s story into the future. By attending to the various embodied, affective and cultural meanings of loneliness in The History of Mary Prince, this chapter thus suggests to redraw stories of loneliness that emerge at sites of trauma and yet offer tentative possibilities for living together in diasporic community.

Mary Prince’s History: Death, Loneliness and the Black Atlantic Slave Narrative The History was published in 1831, three years before the offcial abolition of slavery in the British colonies. According to the frst sentence of Prince’s story, she was born ‘at Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda, a group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean, on a farm belonging to Mr Charles Myners’ to parents who were also enslaved.4 As Gillian Whitlock asserts,‘the opening sentences of A History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself are both conventional and confronting: here is the beginning of a life narrative that situates its subject and her parentage and, at the same time, locates this family as “property”’.5 The History is indeed a diffcult, layered text. It is enveloped and occasionally shrouded, as is not unusual with slave narratives, by a large and varied paratextual apparatus of prefaces, appendices, introductions, footnotes and postscripts, one that grows and changes with each new edition. The chronology of Mary Prince’s life narrative itself, however, is relatively straightforward. We follow Prince as she travels, and is forced to travel, from Bermuda to the Turks and Caicos Islands, to Antigua, and then to London, where her story, at least as it is encompassed within the pages of the book, ends. When she was an infant, Mary Prince explains, she was sold to the Williamses, who seemed to treat her and her family well, circumstances considering. However, in 1800, when her mistress died, Mary was separated from her family,‘put to market’ by Captain Williams and peddled ‘like sheep or cattle’.6 This is the start of a long history of isolation during which she was traded from one master to another. Prince refects on this terror powerfully, in one of the most striking passages of the text where she ponders the brutal conditions of slavery: Did any of the many by-standers, who were looking at us so carelessly, think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the negro women and her young ones? No, no! They were not all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks; and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud, without regards to our grief—though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts. Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves.7

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Here, as will be further discussed in detail, Prince’s expressions of private grief at the loss of her family merge into a more expansive expression of grievance against the systemic alienation suffered by the enslaved. Subsequently sold to a Captain I, at Spanish Pond (also Bermuda), Prince was frequently beaten and brutalized, by both her new master and mistress. Five years later, Prince was sold to Mr D, who sent her to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Bahamian archipelago. Here, Prince ‘presents a graphic eyewitness account of slavery in the remote salt ponds, where slaves are abused with impunity’.8 On the island of Grand Turk, slaves suffered in a hostile saline landscape that ate away at their bodies and, hand-in-hand with the hard labour to which they were constantly subjected, had severe consequences for their health. After ten years on the island, Prince was sold to John Wood and subsequently taken to Antigua, where she continued working for the Wood family as a household slave. In Antigua, Prince managed to carve out a little space of independence for herself: she joined the Moravian Church, earned money on the side and even married without telling her owners. In 1828, she accompanied the Woodses to England as their washerwoman and childminder. Under British law at the time, Prince was free on English soil. After the Woodses refused to alleviate her workload to help her with her rheumatism, she decided to leave the family. With the assistance of the Moravian Church and the Anti-Slavery Society, in 1829 she eventually found paid employment as a domestic servant in the household of Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in London. And it is from this perspective and positioning that Prince narrated her story to the Quaker Susanna Strickland, who also lived in Pringle’s household and from which we encounter her as she retrospectively unfolds her life narrative for her readers. We do not know exactly what happened to Prince after the publication of her narrative—how long she lived; if she remained in England free, but separated from her family and loved ones; or if she ever returned to the Caribbean and her husband, although that would have meant forfeiting her freedom and returning to slavery. Both the History and Mary Prince ‘fell into oblivion, and it is only recently that they are recognized for their literary and historical importance’.9 At the time, however, the History was published to great acclaim (it ran to three editions in 1833 alone) and slotted into the very heart of the heated campaign for the abolition of slavery in the British empire. Tonally and structurally, Mary Prince’s History refects many of the contemporary narratives published by former slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Alongside texts by Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoano and Phillis Wheatley, among others, the History is now commonly recognized as one of the frst examples of the literature of what Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Gilroy reconfgured thinking on the Middle Passage, the transitory Atlantic water space between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and argued for the ‘shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges’ where ‘the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship—provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity and historical memory’.10 At the heart of the genre of the slave narrative lies the struggle to narrate Black life by explicitly naming the conditions of death, trauma and social isolation—to give testimony to the horrors of slavery. What these narratives have in common is that they are writing into existence their authors; they are producing their authors as human subjects who, often bolstered by anti-slavery activists, entered the fraught discourse of abolition at the time. As Henry Louis Gates has argued, ‘slave narratives, taken together, represent the attempt of Blacks to write themselves into being’.11 And further, ‘Accused of lacking a formal and collective history, Blacks published individual 240

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histories which, taken together, were intended to narrate, in segments, the larger yet fragmented history of Blacks in Africa, now dispersed throughout a cold New World.’12 As such, isolation, fragmentation and separation are inscribed into the genre, just as much as the very existence and continual rearticulation of (Black) communities and solidarities. Loneliness, then, is a condition constitutive of the slave narrative as it charts the separation from family and kin and the unrelenting physical and psychological torture enslaved people went through at the hands of their masters and the plantations system. Yet what also always shines through is the resilience in the face of death and the drive to build communities and forge new family ties. Subjugation and resistance, death and life, lie side-by-side. One of the scholars who has most urgently and lucidly engaged with this side-by-side is Christina Sharpe; her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being theorizes the ‘modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death’.13 What Sharpe and others have called social Black death is inscribed into the very existence of the slave; it is ‘the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery’.14 Sharpe describes slavery as ‘ongoing disaster’, a rupture that is nowhere more present than in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life narratives of those who have only recently emerged from, and more often were still embroiled in, exactly that system: Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster. The disaster of Black subjection was and is planned; terror is disaster and ‘terror has a history’ and it is deeply atemporal.15 The history of capital is inextricable from the history of Atlantic chattel slavery. The disaster and the writing of disaster are never present, are always present.16 Articulating a way to hold these past, present and future disasters simultaneously, Sharpe introduces the method of ‘the wake’ and ‘wake work’, combining connotative layers of funeral, death and the slave ship and its hold:‘plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death, and . . . tracking the ways [black people] resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially’.17 The wake, then, emerges as a method, an analytic and a way of attending to the world that fgures both life and death at the same time: In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and fgurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death?18 As a praxis of being in the wake, these theorizations work through conditions of Black life, and suggest a way to imagine otherwise:‘And while the wake produces Black death and trauma . . . we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake’.19 Black life, that what is at stake in early examples of Black life-writing, such as slave narratives and testimonies, insists on naming the exploitation of Black being and attempts to refuse a capitalist system in which Black bodies are fed into the machineries of violent oppression and inhumane, deathly objectifcation. The slave narrative takes up these matters and mediates them as it attempts to write the slave into life, into humanity within and beyond death. Often placed in extreme situations of pain, isolation and terror, the narrator of the slave narrative emerges to hold side-by-side Black non-being and being, a life despite. By attending to the wake, by speaking out and into world this suffering, slave narratives as autobiographies of subjects who were not conceived of as human at all carry 241

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within them the paradigmatic tenet of loneliness: the longing to belong, to build human connection, to be in communion and in community with others. As Fred Moten has argued, blackness (and its narratives) ‘pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood’.20 Mary Prince’s History can be seen as exemplary of the pressure Moten proclaims. It is a text that articulates personhood as it moves between the extreme terror of loneliness and the desire for community, even though such a community is never straightforward or uncontested. Loneliness and death and community and life are not diametrically opposed; they intersect in various ways. Prince’s text can be read, as this chapter shows, as attending to the two deeply entwined modes of isolation and communality. Moving through different spaces of loneliness in Mary Prince’s History enables us to recognize the larger project of writing humanity and human suffering as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. It allows us to historicize an understanding of loneliness through literary history and to formulate loneliness as constructed, performed and mediated. By attending to the various embodied, affective and cultural instances of loneliness in The History of Mary Prince, this chapter suggests to redraw histories of isolation and negation as entangled in Sharpe’s notion of ‘wake work’, which emerges at sites of trauma and offers tentative possibilities for living together in diasporic community.

The Plantationocene’s Geographies of Loneliness Mary Prince’s life radically changed when she was a young girl: though born into slavery, she did not realise what exactly this meant until separated from her mother and her siblings: ‘for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave’.21 She describes how she lived with the Williams family, working as a household slave to their daughter Betsey, in almost family-like attachment: ‘we used to play together with Miss Betsey, with as much freedom almost as if she had been our sister’, and ‘I was truly attached to her [Betsey’s mother; Prince’s owner], and, next to my own mother, loved her better than any creature in the world.’22 When Mrs Williams died, her husband, Captain Williams, sold Prince and her siblings at a slave auction. Wrenched away from her home and her family, Prince articulates her loss in a powerful, evocative passage: Oh dear! I cannot bear to think of that day,—it is too much.—It recalls the great grief that flled my heart, and the woeful thoughts that passed to and fro through my mind, whilst listening to the pitiful words of my poor mother, weeping for the loss of her children. I wish I could fnd words to tell you all I then felt and suffered. The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these . . . My heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently, that I pressed my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep it still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body.23 This is the frst moment of separation, metonymically echoing what Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death has called ‘natal alienation’, the abrupt severing from one’s natal ties in the moment of enslavement and forever after.24 In fact, the sale marks the beginning of the true horrors of slavery and the dissolution of family and community bonds. It is the moment Prince enters into the exploitative system of chattel slavery and where her intimate world and her private sense of loss and loneliness merge into an existential state of non-being, what Patterson defnes as ‘deracination’, the ‘alienation . . . from any attachment to groups or localities other

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than those chosen . . . by the master’.25 The portrayal of deep emotion and grief by Prince is important because, to point towards the History’s publication context in early-nineteenthcentury England, such a recording ‘was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, the brute animal become the human being’.26 When Prince underlines how she and her mother ‘lamented with a great and sore crying’,27 she emphatically expresses her humanity: the metaphor of the heart proliferates through this passage as her beating, bursting heart is contrasted with the small, hardened hearts of white slave owners and sellers. The use of such language, as Bohls points out, ‘brings out enslaved people’s ability to feel emotional pain—contrary to stereotypes of Blacks as insensitive—and makes clear the strength of this enslaved family’s emotional ties’.28 While this certainly marks a turning point in the story, the clash of intimate feelings of loneliness with a more encompassing systemic structure of alienation, what Susheila Nasta has called ‘ethical loneliness’, continues throughout the text as different modes of Black life and death are moderated and negotiated by Prince.29 Soon, after going through physical and psychological pain at the hands of her new owners, Prince is sold again and forced to endure one of the most brutal environments of the British Caribbean, the salt fats on the Turks and Caicos Islands. Taking a closer look at this particular space lets us understand how, through descriptions of her different displacements, Prince mediated her own loneliness and persistence for her readers. In fact, the Black and colonial plantation geographies she inhabits give an exemplarily account of how the History entangles loneliness, alienation and contested community. Prince’s ten-year stay on the Turks and Caicos, a set of islands and cays in the Caribbean, located about 900 miles south-east of Bermuda and at the southernmost tip of the Bahamas, sheds light on the inhumane, dehumanizing conditions of the colonial plantation system. As Cynthia M. Kennedy explains,‘[t]hese salt islands were all low sandy formations with low average annual rainfall where warmth, sun, and incessant trade winds predominated.’30 Such ‘geological and meteorological conditions aided the quick, natural evaporation of seawater that overfowed into shallow lagoons and brackish inland ponds’.31 The islands were harvested and variously claimed, by French, Spanish and British profteers, beginning in the sixteenth century.32 This ‘white gold’, even more precious than sugar or molasses, was transported and traded north to America. ‘Salt, like sugar, yielded misery as well as money’ and should be understood as one of the most important, if seldomly talked-about, enterprises of empire.33 Having arrived on the Turks and Caicos Islands after a four-week sea voyage, Prince’s work on the island comprised standing in shallow pools of saltwater washing in from the ocean to rake the salt crystals that remained on the edges of the lagoons once the water had evaporated in the blinding sun. Not only did the sun refect on the crystalline surfaces and damage the workers’ eyes irreparably, the salt water they had to move in for whole days on end also caused blisters and boils on exposed skin: [We] worked through the heat of the day; the sun faming upon our heads like fre, and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afficting the sufferers with great torment. We came home at twelve; ate our corn soup . . . as fast as we could, and went back to our employment till dark at night. We then shovelled up the salt in large heaps, and went down to the sea, where we washed the pickle from our limbs, and cleaned the barrows and shovels from the salt.34

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Day and night, Prince and her fellow slaves were wholly enveloped by the salt. The ‘large heaps’ of salt they were constantly processing ate into their fesh and their bones, and they were ordered to drink salt water as punishment and cruel medicine.35 In short, it took over their lives: Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making. Then we had no sleep . . . but were forced to work as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual . . . Cruel, horrible place!36 Prince’s work on the salt plantation and her in-depth descriptions of the dehumanization enforced by the slave masters reveal the Caribbean’s materialities, geographies and ecologies as caught in empire’s plantocracies. The plantation as a ‘synthesis of feld and factory’ took shape as an agro-industrial enterprise enabling the rise of capitalism: ‘The plantation and its accompanying rearrangements of life are produced through processes of land alienation, labor extraction, and racialized violence’.37 As such, the plantation ‘marks an important site to consider the ways in which land, labor, and capital have been ordered to proft some, while imperilling the lives and livelihoods of others, across the globe’.38 As the cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick has argued,‘the legacies of slavery and the labor of the unfree both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit.’39 Our environmental problems and changes in climate, ecology and geology cannot be separated from histories of colonialism, capitalism and racism: [I]t was during the early modern era,and specifcally in the Caribbean,where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor . . . intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale.40 The very beginnings of colonialism and its accompanying plantation machinery can be seen as the starting point of humanity’s infuence on the ecologies and geologies of earth, as Kathryn Yusoff has succinctly argued in her reconsideration of the origin stories of the Anthropocene and her formulations of a ‘black Anthropocene’.41 Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others have, in fact, reconfgured the Anthropocene into the Plantationocene in order to attest to the hierarchies enforced and perpetuated by the plantation that still form and order our world today:‘the plantation system predates both the terms Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The Plantationocene makes one pay attention to the historical relocations of the substances of living and dying around the Earth as a necessary prerequisite to their extraction’.42 Mary Prince and the other slaves with whom she worked in the horrors of the Plantationocene’s salt landscapes are embroiled in an insidious cycle of resource extraction, human life/death and capital. Nature, which grows barren as it is turned into proft, in turn corroded the bodies of the slaves: ‘Prince’s text records how lethal amounts of salt seep through the skin, forging a visceral, literal, and grotesque union between salt, the commodifed substance, and the slave, the commodifed worker.’43 The alienation and exploitation of land happens simultaneously with the alienation and exploitation of humans, and the hostile, deadly environment of the plantation functions to isolate slaves from one another, even when they are crowded together in barracks. As Kennedy explains, ‘[s]ome of the salt circulated throughout the Caribbean, but much went to the eastern seaboard colonies/states in the United States and Canada where it was used to salt fsh’.44 This food, in turn, ‘returned to the West Indies where it became the staple diet of slaves 244

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on many sugar plantations’.45 Mary Prince and the other slaves on the Turks and Caicos Islands are thus wholly caught in the genocidal circularity of slavery and its economic production. The way salt and slaves are equated as commodity, entangled with one another as material that is to be harvested, sold and consumed, speaks to the Plantationocene’s absolute inhumaneness, ‘its production of the subjective category of nonbeing’.46 Attending to the violent colonial ecologies of the tropical plantation system on the salt marshes of the British-held West Indies lays bare the unavoidable histories of death, pain and isolation in the lives and afterlives of slavery. And yet the utter desolation of the lone labouring fgure of the slave on the salt fats is countered by the simple fact of Prince’s narration. When looking closely at the passages quoted from this part of her story, it becomes clear that she consistently speaks in frst person plural—‘we worked’, ‘we came home’, ‘we ate’. Despite an understandable narrowing-in on the intimate bodily experience of suffering and pain, this section also points towards more expansive, worldly and communal aspects which alleviate the loneliness Prince had to bear. Note, for example, one of the most grievous scenes Prince describes the torture of the old slave Daniel: stripped and laid down on the ground, and . . . beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw. He [Mr D—the owner] would then call for a bucket of salt, and fing it upon the raw fesh till the man writhed on the ground like a worm, and screamed aloud with agony. This poor man’s wounds were never healed, and I have often seen them full of maggots, which increased his torments to an intolerable degree. He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old.47 The other slaves see themselves in Daniel and feel empathy and pity. This is the suffering of a community where ‘alienation . . . from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen . . . by the master’ is replaced by tentative, interpersonal kinship structures.48 As Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo has argued in a similar vein,‘Mary Prince, as she presents herself in the narrative, clearly embraces both the idea of a black community and the need for the members consciously to manifest and act on that notion of community.’49 Or in the words of Prince herself, ‘In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow slaves—for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs.’50 Indeed, Prince does not make a difference; she feels as much for old Daniel and old Sarah on Grand Turks as she does for ‘a French Black called Hetty’, who dies under the hands of Captain I while Prince works there, or for ‘a mulatto called Cyrus’ or Jack, ‘an African from the coast of Guinea’.51 This suggests ‘that her conception of that community is not limited by geographical boundaries. It indexes a willingness to conceive of herself as linked to a world broader than her own ‘native place’ and ‘an interest in, knowledge of, and engagement with the world at large with the embrace of a racially based notion of community’.52 The way Prince speaks of herself and her fellow slaves as a community, a collective even, on Grand Turks and beyond, helps us understand the way Black social death or non-being in the Plantationocene jostle against contested, contingent community. The pain of the plantation system, what it does to the body and the environment, is thus, if not halted, then at least temporarily eased. The horrors of the salt fats link her to other slaves, and she is able to build a network of knowledge, community and territories across the Caribbean archipelago, bound together by shared histories of the middle passage and the presence of slavery’s ‘ongoing disaster’.53 As Prince harvested salt, the residue of ocean water,her own trauma was allayed by shedding tears for others,signifying a graceful and empathetic engagement with the world around her. Salt water, then, can also point towards a dissolution of harmful, isolating structures, signalling instead more forgiving textures of life under slavery. She lived a life despite, in spite of, the forces that strove to make her life unliveable. 245

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‘From Mary’s Own Lips’: Authorship Versus Censorship Within the History After ten years on the Turks and Caicos Islands,Prince escaped and put herself in the service of a Mr John Wood and his wife, who took her to Antigua. This period in her life is marked by the rapid deterioration of her health but also by the opening up of new spaces of community: she joined the Moravian Church,was almost freed multiple times and,to the consternation of her owners,married a free Black man called Daniel James. When the Woodses travelled to London, she accompanied them in her function as household slave. Mary was keen to go because she hoped she would be cured of her rheumatism there. Instead, when they ‘drew near England’ her rheumatism ‘seized all [her] limbs worse than ever, and [her] body was dreadfully swelled’.54 The Woodses took no notice and treated her worse than ever, which led Prince to eventually leave them. This step was facilitated by the English chapter of the Moravian Church and the Anti-Slavery Society in East London. This was not an easy decision, as she felt wholly alone in England:‘I knew that I was free in England, but I did not know where to go, or how to get my living; and therefore, I did not like to leave the house.’55 Even though she could technically seize her freedom any time, freedom also meant to never return to the Caribbean. This ambiguous sense of freedom, tied to feelings of loneliness and helplessness (‘for I am a stranger in this country’), appears in many of the slave narratives of the time.56 When Frederick Douglass, for example, tried to describe his feelings about freedom, he phrased his response in similar terms as Prince: after the initial exaltation, his excitement ‘very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness’.57 Referencing yet another mid-nineteenth-century slave narrative, Erin Dwyer notes, like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs . . . found herself simultaneously battling loneliness, and plagued by concerns about whether she could trust people in her new environment. Jacobs was slow to fnd people she could trust, and even after she had gained more acquaintances she noted that she ‘well remembered what a desolate feeling it was to be alone among strangers’.58 At play here, in the slave narratives of Prince, Douglass and Jacobs, are the complicated, intersecting oppositions of freedom and isolation, slavery and community, touched upon throughout this chapter. In fact, the History’s textual and paratextual setup itself functions as documenting this interplay of loneliness and contested community. The following section pivots away from an analysis of the content of Mary Prince’s story and towards a consideration of the production and reception processes of the History as a text that should be located within a contested community of other texts and other writers. In the preface to the History, Thomas Pringle, Prince’s editor and employer, makes a case for the veracity of the story to follow; this is not unusual for the genre, as Black narratives speaking out against slavery could not stand on their own but needed the offcial support network of white abolitionist. Still, the way Pringle frames his patronage is telling: The idea of writing Mary Price’s history was frst suggested by herself. She wished it to be done, she said, that good people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered . . . The narrative was taken down from Mary’s own lips . . . It was written out fully, with all the narrator’s repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology . . . It is essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible.59 246

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In the postscript to the second edition, however, which appeared in the same year, Pringle explains that Mary Prince has been afficted with a disease in the eyes, which, it is feared, may terminate in total blindness . . . the condition of the poor woman, thus cruelly and hopelessly severed from her husband and her home, will be one particularly deserving of commiseration.60 The paralleling of eloquence and agency with the loss of sight and utter isolation raises questions pertaining to containment, restriction and mediation. Prince seems to have found a social, political community interested in preserving, even broadcasting, her humanity, yet she seems to remain an ultimately lonely fgure, receding into the pages of the text. Thinking about these issues reveals yet another layer of how this example of early Black life writing is deeply implicated in matters of Black being and social death. It enables us to draw further conclusions about the work that needs to be done when we want to attend to loneliness in Black life-writing in the context of slavery and emancipation in the early nineteenth century. First, there is the problem of language: as Pringle states so anxiously, Prince’s ‘exact expressions’ and ‘peculiar phraseology’ need to be made ‘clearly intelligible’. This is an act of authorization and authentication of Prince’s voice, which, at the same time, questions her ability not only to speak for herself but also to be understood by others. Jenny Sharpe notes that ‘Prince probably spoke patois, the creolized speech of slaves that combined English, Spanish, French and West African languages. The need to render her story into standard English is a comment on the perceived inferiority and unintelligibility of her speech’, and erases the shared language of a community.61 Another ellipsis concerns the subject matters addressed by Prince—what exactly she could speak of and what better remained unspoken. The objective of slave narratives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, as this chapter has shown, the portrayal of slaves as human beings whose right to exist had been violated, if not outright denied. But to ‘fulfl this objective’, such narratives were ‘obliged to privilege the Christianized, morally upright, and obedient worker over the Africanized, ungovernable, and troublesome slave’.62 What is left out of Prince’s narrative are issues too ‘uncouth’ for a white Victorian readership, such as her voluntary and enforced sexual relationships with white and Black men in the Caribbean.63 Mentioning them would have unsettled the image the abolitionist tried to paint of Prince as respectable, disciplined and moderated. The editing process by Pringle and Strickland excludes aspects of Mary Prince’s existence that do not ft the agenda. The History thus presents a complicated and contentious relationship between the slave, her readers and the ones facilitating that encounter. As Jessica Allen puts it, [T]he main confict is control of representation—of the text, of slavery, and of Prince herself. Pringle attempts to represent the History as entirely Prince’s, but the very editorial decisions he minimizes suggest that his priority is not acknowledging Prince’s agency, subjectivity, and humanity, but creating anti-slavery propaganda . . . Pringle’s ‘pruning’ of the text may have transformed the oral narrative into more palatable propaganda for white English audiences, but its effectiveness is at odds with Prince’s assertion of authorial control over her own narrative.64 Assertions and contestations of authorial control and agency are further refected in those elements of the text which ostensibly place Prince’s story in company with, in community with, other people on her side, the anti-slavery society abolitionists—a community represented by a large paratextual apparatus that is part and parcel of the History. 247

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The weight of the paratext almost overwhelms Prince’s slim share of the book. When it was published in 1831, the text encompassed Pringle’s preface, Prince’s story itself, another editorial supplement, the second edition appendix, and the narrative of Louis Asa-Asa, ‘a captured African’. As Salih, the editor of the most recent critical edition, notes,‘page-to-page in the Penguin edition, “the history” is almost exactly matched in length by the “supplementary” texts, which total thirty-two printed pages to “the history’s” thirty-one printed pages.’65 This swathe of additional material de facto verifes Mary Prince’s narrative: truth becomes ‘contingent upon corroborating, extra-textual evidence . . . It is easy to forget that the aim of this long sequence of interconnected texts is to confrm Prince’s reliability as a witness of slavery.’66 What Salih and other have recognized, consequentially, is that the book is in fact a composite of different, linked documents and not one cohesive, single-authored autobiography. This impossibility to locate a stable subject also calls into question Prince’s status of an autonomous author. The sheer amount of paratextual layers, as well as repeated instances of censoring and ‘pruning’, effectively bury Prince’s story under an avalanche of other discourses, ambitions and objectives. This is another kind of control, of Black social death, implemented under the banner of abolitionist propaganda where the political aims of the group, to create empathy and solidarity for enslaved and formerly enslaved people, seem to shroud the voice of Mary Prince herself. As this brief analysis of the complicated contextual, intertextual and paratextual dynamics of the History has shown, the text’s editorial and publication context is steeped in and steered by the anti-abolitionist community that Prince found herself in in London. This community seemed to have, though not consciously, transposed the feelings of loneliness, social isolation and systemic alienation experienced by Prince throughout her life into the structures and textures of the History as a textual object.

Communities Beyond the Frames of the Text ‘Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know’ (Edouard Glissant).67 Despite the censorships described in the previous section, there is another path available to approach the question of loneliness and community in the History’s intra- and extra-textual confgurations. While the fgure of Prince seems to disappear behind layers of paratext and edits, we should not forget that she is also accompanied by other stories, written by Black writers just like herself, who constitute an alternative kind of community. One obvious historical example for this is the other slave narrative that is part of the History:‘The Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa: A Captured African’, which is almost never mentioned in scholarship on Prince. It tells the story of a West African slave’s arrival in England aboard a French slave ship after a journey across the Black Atlantic, related in a four-page frst-person account.68 Asa-Asa was kidnapped as a child and ‘sold six times over’ by slave traders until he was stranded in England.69 ‘Like Prince, Asa-Asa was separated from family and community and had to choose between returning to them, and the possibility of recapture and re-enslavement, or remaining alone in England.’70 His story is much shorter than Prince’s yet conveys important contextualizations of the transatlantic slave trade and the trauma of the middle passage. He reports, for example,‘The slaves we saw on board the ship were chained together by the legs below deck, so close they could not move.’71 Asa-Asa’s description of the hold of the slave ship, a space of terror and of ‘slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding’, as Christina Sharpe would say, materializes the past, and with that the very fact of Mary’s life, born already enslaved across the Black Atlantic in Bermuda.72 This is then not an ‘unrelated narrative’,

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as some critics have argued,73 or merely a ‘convenient supplement’, as Pringle claimed,74 but in fact a story of relation and relationality. It is unlikely that the two ever met, but here they are, standing side-by-side and speaking in unison from out of their textual confnes and into the world their longing to belong. Another one of Mary Prince’s companions is the contemporary poet Gale Jackson, read here as an example of the generations of Black (female) writers coming after Prince.75 In Jackson’s poem ‘mary prince bermuda. turks island. antigua. 1787’ (1992), a lyrical ‘I’ speaks in frst-person singular as Mary, narrating her life in fragmentary, lyrical chants: i was born given into slavery as a child given as a pet . . . mary hired out as a young woman and then sold76 Just as the slave narrative from which they draw, the stanzas relate the traumatic events of Mary Prince’s life, conveyed through an intimate perspective emphasized by the lower-case spelling of ‘I’ and the poem’s idiosyncratic punctuation. A chorus consisting of the lines ‘oh mary don’t you weep don’t you moan / oh mary don’t you weep don’t you moan’ is repeated after every section, shortened to exclamations of just ‘oh mary’ the further the story progresses, and the more pain has to be endured. Importantly, however, Jackson also includes other, alternative histories in this version of Mary’s account. Here, it is not the genre conventions of the slave narrative as couched within white Anglo-American abolitionist publishing networks but the orally transmitted legends of slave revolts, which drive the narrative forward: ‘from haiti we heard past the mask of silence / in haiti they built Black armies burned the slave’.77 In Jackson’s retelling, the community of slaves Prince established through experiences of shared suffering expands vis-à-vis stories of resistance and escape as they must have circulated among slaves throughout the Caribbean at the time:‘burned nat turner alive gabriel they hung / then fred his remains but slaves swear / they got away’.78 These overt references to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the Virginia revolts led by Nat Turner (d. 1831) and Gabriel Prosser (1776–1800) pay tribute to a wider, worldlier web of infuence in the Caribbean. These examples, supplemented by more local, individual acts of rebellion (‘lula burned at the stake for making poison’),79 evoke a different kind of Black Atlantic relationality. Of course, as Jenny Sharpe notes, since Nat Turner’s rebellion occurred after Prince left the West Indies, the poem does not offer a faithful chronology of events in the past so much as remind contemporary readers of oral stories that exist outside the frame of reference of The History of Mary Prince.80 These stories, powerful in their insistence on rebellion and survival (‘they got away/slaves swear they got away’),81 pull together historical fact and the inventiveness, capacity and necessity of fction to imagine other worlds. By foregrounding the transmission of stories—what was heard and not simply what was spoken—the poem reminds us of the community of slaves to which Prince belonged in the West Indies and without which she was lost in England.82

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Defantly, the poem ends with the following lines: god knows what’s in store from here on but when they tell the story they gots to begin with mine.83 Here, the fctionalized yet immediate and unfltered voice of Mary Prince asserts itself as the very starting point and lynchpin of her own narrative. Poems like Jackson’s unfold the possibility of transmitting and imagining other kinds of stories, stories that encompass living in and through the wake despite. While the historical Mary Prince had been ensnared within storytelling conventions that inadvertently formed her into a perfect foil for the fght against abolition (and rendered her invisible in the process), there are also other trajectories of imaginative tradition available. For embedded within Prince’s story are the communities of other slaves, of freed Black people and maroons in the West Indies. Art and literature can spin a fabric of stories of resistance, solidarity and community across centuries: indeed, when we look beyond the immediate production and reception context and beyond the narrative itself as it is constrained within the confnes of the anti-slavery pamphlet, Prince’s story grows and blooms into a tangle of relationships. The pain, grief and loneliness which reside at the very heart of Prince’s History, even if they can never be fully understood or repaired, are refected and mediated by generations of Black writers and artists who speak Mary Prince’s life, its struggles and resistances, into the future.

Notes 1 Michelle Speitz, ‘Blood Sugar and Salt Licks: Corroding Bodies and Preserving Nations in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself’, in Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic, ed. Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin (Dec. 2016), Pars. 1–25, https://romanticcircles.org/praxis/ circulations/HTML/praxis.2011.speitz.html. 2 Sara Salih, ‘The History of Mary Prince, the Black Subject, and the Black Canon’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Carey Brycchan, Ellis Markman and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 124. 3 All citations are from The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave: Related by Herself (1831), ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin, 2000), 4–5. 4 History of Mary Prince, 7. 5 Gillian Whitlock,‘Prince, Mary’, The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Henry Gates, Oxford African American Studies Centre, May 2017, https://oxfordaasc. com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-74861. 6 History of Mary Prince, 11. 7 Ibid. 8 Whitlock,‘Prince, Mary’. 9 Ibid. As Sara Salih outlines, Prince reappears in the correspondence of her amanuensis Susanna Strickland. Salih also includes in her appendix material on two libel cases, which refect on empire’s proslavery interests in the Caribbean plantation system and which feature Prince’s statements. History of Mary Prince, vii-xxxiv. 10 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 16. 11 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), 57. 12 Gates, Loose Canons, 62. 13 Sharpe, In the Wake, 20.

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Loneliness and Contested Communities 14 Ibid.,2. For further discussion on black death,see Orlando Patterson,Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1887); Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, ed. Hortense Spillers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–9; Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020). 15 Paul Youngquist,‘The Mothership Connection’, Cultural Critique 77 (2011): 7. 16 Sharpe, In the Wake, 5. 17 Ibid., 13. 18 Ibid., 17. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1. 21 History of Mary Prince, 7. 22 Ibid., 7–8. 23 Ibid., 10–11. 24 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 7–8. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Gates, Loose Canons, 63. 27 History of Mary Prince, 10. 28 Elizabeth A. Bohls, Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 170. 29 Susheila Nasta, ‘The Loneliness of the Lonely Londoners’, Solitudes: Past and Present, 26 Oct. 2020, https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/the-loneliness-of-the-lonely-londoners/. 30 Cynthia M. Kennedy, ‘The Other White Gold: Salt, Slaves, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and British Colonialism’, The Historian 69, no. 2 (2007): 218. 31 Kennedy,‘The Other White Gold’, 219. 32 Ibid., 220. 33 Ibid., 216. 34 History of Mary Prince, 19. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Ibid., 21. 37 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1986), 47; Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gómez and Gregg Mitman,‘Plantation Legacies’, Edge Effects, 22 Jan. 2019, https://edgeeffects.net/plantation-legacies-plantationocene/. 38 Ibid. 39 Katherine McKittrick,‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 2. 40 Sapp Moore et al.,‘Plantation Legacies’. 41 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xiii–xiv. 42 Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing and Nils Bubandt, ‘Anthropologists Are Talking-About the Anthropocene’, Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 556–7. 43 Speitz,‘Blood Sugar’, par. 3. 44 Kennedy,‘The Other White Gold’, 217. 45 Ibid. 46 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 6. 47 History of Mary Prince, 21. 48 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 7. 49 Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 166. 50 History of Mary Prince, 22. 51 Ibid., 13–15. 52 Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism, 162. 53 Sharpe, In the Wake, 5. 54 History of Mary Prince, 31. 55 Ibid., 33. 56 Ibid., 34.

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Jennifer Leetsch 57 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, [1845] 2003), 93. 58 Erin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: The Emotional Politics of Slavery (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2012), quoting Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., [1861] 2001), 138–9. 59 History of Mary Prince, 3. 60 Ibid., 4. 61 Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 129. 62 Ibid., xxiv. 63 Cf. Gillian Whitlock,‘Autobiography and Slavery: Believing the History of Mary Prince’, in The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000), 8–37; Moira Ferguson, ‘Introduction to the Revised Edition’, in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave: Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, [1993] 1997), 1–51. 64 Jessica Allen, ‘Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition’, Callaloo 35, no. 2 (2012): 518. 65 Salih,‘The History of Mary Prince’, 130. 66 Ibid., 132. 67 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6. 68 Notable exceptions are Juliet Shields, Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Sue Thomas,‘New Light on Louis Asa-Asa and the Publication of His Slave Narrative’, Notes and Queries 64, no. 4 (2017): 604–7. 69 History of Mary Prince, 69. 70 Shields, Mary Prince, 17. 71 History of Mary Prince, 69. 72 Sharpe, In the Wake, 14. 73 A.M. Rauwerda,‘Naming, Agency, and “a Tissue of Falsehoods” in The History of Mary Prince’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (2001): 399. 74 History of Mary Prince, 66. 75 Within the scope of this chapter, I can only reference Gale Jackson’s poem, but I would also like to point towards other examples of writing and imagining Prince into the future, such as the video and sound installation Black Mary; or Molly, ‘Princess of Wales’ (2016) by the artist Jocelyn Gardner, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s 2019 autotheoretical photo-essay ‘Saltworks’, or the touring theatre show SOLD: The Mary Prince Story (2021), by Amantha Edmead and Kuumba Nia Arts. 76 Gale Jackson,‘mary prince bermuda. turks island. antigua. 1787’, Kenyon Review 14, no. 1 (1992), 6. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 7. 79 Ibid. 80 Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 136. 81 Jackson,‘mary prince’, 7. 82 Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, 136. 83 Jackson, 8.

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17 SOLITUDE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN-SPEAKING EUROPE Heidi Hakkarainen

The German word Einsamkeit translates both as loneliness and solitude. As in English, in the German language, loneliness meant originally physically being alone, ‘oneliness’ or ‘singleness’, that was often framed as a religious experience, a communion with God.1 Luther’s translation of the Bible established a new semantic feld for the word Einsamkeit that was understood in terms of isolation and being alone instead of communion or togetherness. The secularization and modernization of society further created new meanings for Einsamkeit that became a key concept for the dynamics of individualization that shaped modern Western culture in particular. A new cultural signifcance given to solitude, selfhood and an inner self was fostered by expanding literacy and print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Texts and the invention of print culture enabled not only new means of communication but also new tools for self-study, and for the cultivation of the self.2 The German middle classes, who were gaining a new foothold in society, adopted the ideal of positive solitude into their emotional culture. As meanings related to Einsamkeit became increasingly secularized, it gained also new importance in German-speaking Europe, not least from around 1800.3 The Romantic era in German-speaking Europe was paradoxically characterized by a cult of solitude (Einsamkeit) and a cult of sociability (Geselligkeit). The aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, emerging modern civil society and rising nationalism shaped public discourse and created ongoing cultural refections on the relationship between the individual, society and nation.4 The press played a major part in this, becoming an important cultural forum for debates on the right kind of means of cultivating and educating citizens for the needs of modernizing and secularizing society. This chapter investigates loneliness and solitude (Einsamkeit) in the German-language press before 1850. By framing loneliness in the context of early-nineteenth-century literary culture, it demonstrates how new print cultures shaped new cultural meanings related to the ideal of solitude and the cultivation of the internal self. Instead of so-called ego-documents, such as diaries or biographies, this chapter focuses on the press, the major public forum of the time, which, by the mid-1800s, had adopted an important role in shaping subjectivity and emotions. The main source material is provided by the full-text searchable digital databases of the Austrian National Library and Bavarian State Library. The ANNO Austrian Newspapers Online electronic reading room of the Austrian National Library contains over 20 million pages, of which about 90 per cent is available for full text search. The digiPress collection of the Bavarian State Library is considerably smaller, containing in June 2021 approximately 7.8 million pages. The collections DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-20

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partly overlap, especially in the case of eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century material and contain a comprehensive corpus of the press material from the period under investigation, though a vast number of periodicals that appeared in German-speaking Europe before 1850 are missing from these digital databases. Recently, due to large national and international digitalization projects, and new approaches in the feld of digital history, historical newspapers and periodicals have attracted a great deal of attention as an under-researched historical source material that can provide novel insights into the production of knowledge and structures of feeling in the long nineteenth century.5 The body of literature exploring emotions from a historical perspective has emphasized that emotions are always dependent upon their historical and cultural context. The body, in which emotions are born and felt, is always shaped by the conditions of a shared social world and thus deeply historical by nature.6 Instead of understanding emotions through ahistorical biological or psychological models, the historical approach to the study of emotions is interested in ways in which emotions give shape and are shaped by cultural patterns and social formations that change in time. Because the processes of identifying, valuing, regulating and expressing emotions are deeply cultural, it is signifcant to look into the cultural forms and social practices that sustain them. The newspapers and periodicals were not only associated with the new bourgeois public sphere, but they were also privately read, interpreted—and felt. By addressing the various meanings of loneliness and describing ways of cultivating loneliness into sublime solitude, the newspapers shed light on the performative aspects of loneliness, and how it is culturally and historically constructed at various points in time.

Expanding Print Culture in German-Speaking Europe German-speaking Europe was a politically and culturally fragmented area before the unifcation of Germany in 1871. Early-nineteenth-century German states, which consisted of numerous small kingdoms and city-states, were organized in 1815 under the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), which was an alliance that existed until the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866. The German Confederation was created at the Congress of Vienna,as a means of establishing new political order and stability in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). As part of this process, supranational censorship regulations, the Carlsbad Decrees, were established in 1819. Despite censorship and economic obstacles, from the eighteenth century onwards, the number of newspapers increased. They played an important role as mediators of information and producers of knowledge, by serving as forums for political discussion and negotiation on cultural attitudes, meanings and ideas among the rising German middle classes.7 The expansion of modern print culture had vast ramifcations in early-nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe. Up until this point, German-speaking Europe was an important centre for the spread and development of printing technology, as well as the largest media market in the world, in terms of number of newspapers and journals.8 Research on the German press has emphasized its vast diversity and local character before the unifcation of Germany in 1871, when the frst national newspapers started to appear.9 Yet by the early nineteenth century, new printing technologies and the development of the infrastructure of roads and postal networks enabled German-language publications to circulate in a heterogenous and cross-border media space that included German-speaking areas within and beyond Central Europe.10 In addition to the press, book markets were expanding as well, and books shaped new understandings on emotions. The Swiss doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann had been preoccupied with the theme of solitude since the 1750s, and one of his treatises came out already a year before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) 254

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became a literary phenomenon in German-speaking Europe. However, it was more than a decade later when Zimmermann’s main work, a book titled Über die Einsamkeit (1784–85), became an immense success. Reprinted several times, and often cited and commented on in the press, it became the authoritative work on the dynamics between loneliness and solitude well into the nineteenth century.11 The new cultural evaluation of solitude and loneliness has often been framed in the context of the political history of early-nineteenth-century German-language Europe. The aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars were marked by disillusionment, the repercussions of the experience of violence and a shared disappointment in fellow human beings.12 These painful experiences echoed in the press for a long time, as they emerged, for example, in a feuilleton text, translated from French to German and published by Der Adler in 1840, in which a man withdrew from the company of other people after the French Revolution and retreated voluntarily to loneliness instead.13 According to Annette Richards, a fascination with interiority, melancholy and solitude marked northern German culture in the second half of the eighteenth century, characterizing the culture of the politically repressed and excessively ordered bourgeoisie. The internal world of thought and emotion provided freedom that was lacking in daily political and social life.14 In addition to political retreat and repression, the focus on the internal self was also attached to ideas about social transformations and development. In an era of new pedagogical ideas and educational reforms, self-development and self-cultivation were understood as social forces and as a way of improving society. In German-speaking Europe, in particular, the ideal of Bildung, as a means of internal self-development, gained huge cultural importance.15 The cultivation of the self became a signifcant part of the newly emerging modern bourgeois culture.16 The ways in which solitude was discussed in early-nineteenth-century German-language periodicals are related to the fact that newspapers and magazines were mainly created by nonprofessional correspondents and writers, who often had an academic background or worked as teachers alongside their journalistic activities. Before 1848 and the professionalization of journalism, the structures and practices of the modern press were still under development. As the learned networks of academics and teachers across German-language Europe started to shape the German press, interest in the theme of solitude intertwined with the newly emerging notion that journalism should not just serve to aid communication but also self-refection and self-observation of society.17

Romanticism and Solitude One of the main intellectual and cultural movements that shaped the meaning of loneliness was Romanticism (c. 1790–1850). The German Romantic movement was preoccupied with the theme of solitude, and loners, hermits and pilgrims became signifcant literary and pictorial fgures.18 At the same time, loneliness and solitude became increasingly associated with nature, gaining religious meanings in pastoral literature that emphasized God-in-nature.19 In England, for example, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold (1812) infuenced romantic notions of solitude.20 The German-language press transmitted these ideas to the public sphere, where they surfaced retrospectively for decades. In 1833, the Wiener Theater-Zeitung published an article dedicated to Byron’s views on solitude.21 Although the Romantic movement is strongly associated with fction, the press participated in the network of texts that gave it impetus. Early journals and newspapers included all sorts of material, and texts conveyed feelings and intellectual ideas.22 From the eighteenth century onward, loneliness was celebrated in the press in a variety of genres, including poems and lyrics such as ‘Ode to the Solitude’, published by the Berlin-based Neue Mannigfaltigkeiten in 1776.23 255

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In this context, especially in the early 1800s, Einsamkeit was predominantly understood as solitude instead of loneliness and was often associated with art, creativity, imagination, philosophy and religion. It represented an escape from the rules and games of the social world and was described in terms of peace and quiet, as the ‘healer of the soul’.24 Especially for a writer, solitude was described as essential, as a precondition for developing thoughts, ideas and the scope of imagination. This idea was shared widely, and for instance, in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [From My Life: Poetry and Truth] (1811–1833), Goethe emphasized solitude as a creative state and a precondition for artistic work.25 The German nineteenth-century discourses thus contributed in a signifcant way to the long historical tradition of associating solitude with creativity.26 Moreover, the experience of solitude was something to be shared in art. In music, it could be seen as a source of comfort.27 Similarly, lines of lyric poetry were seen as a way of sharing solitude, as words transmitted an emotional experience of the poet to the reader, who could recognize and share the feeling despite distance in space or time.28 For example, an article published in the Illustrirte Zeitung in 1843 depicted how readers were able to hike at the Kickelhahn mountain in Thüringen, and there be alone in their solitude above the world, reminiscent of the famous lines of Goethe from the poem ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ (1780):‘O’er all the hilltops / Is quiet now, / In all the treetops / Hearest thou / Hardly a breath; / The birds are asleep in the trees: / Wait, soon like these / Thou too shalt rest’.29 The association between nature and solitude was part of the wider cultural framework of the Romantic movement. The idea of losing oneself in nature was especially infuenced by JeanJacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1782).30 German Romanticism heavily emphasized individual experience of nature and retreat from society. In periodicals, too, solitude was associated with nature and far-away places, in contrast to urban life.31 The German ‘Waldeinsamkeit’, which literally means ‘forest loneliness’ was one of the key concepts of the era, signifying a connectedness with the nature. It was mentioned in the press in various texts including poems and historical narratives.32 Solitude also became increasingly represented in visual form. For example, the iconic painting of Caspar David Friedrich, ‘The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ (Figure 17.1), presented an embodiment of the cultural meanings related to nature and solitude, displaying a rejection of sociability. As the art historian Johannes Grave has pointed out, despite being one of the most well-known images portraying solitude, it is not an isolated example but a part of a larger visual tradition, in which fgures turn their backs to the viewer and make them spectators of loneliness.33 In the modern era, and in the Romantic period in particular, different medias multiplied understandings of solitude, transforming it into a shared cultural experience that was staged and performed along the lines of a continuum of cultural representations that portrayed what being alone looked and felt like.34

Solitude as a Cultural Practice Jan and Aleida Assmann have approached solitude as a way of understanding the dynamics of individualization that has shaped the modern Western culture in particular. The invention of print culture played a major role here, as it enabled not only new means of communication but also new tools for self-study and for the cultivation of the self. Solitude became increasingly supported and sustained by texts and textuality (schriftgestützte Einsamkeit). Print enabled communication without interaction (interaktionsfreie Kommunikation) and established a new kind of understanding of solitude that was embodied by the fgure of a lonely reader in the company of books.35 256

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Figure 17.1 Caspar David Friedrich (1744–1840), Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817/1818). Oil on canvas. © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk. Source: Photo by Elke Walford. Image reproduced courtesy of the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The linkage between reading and experiencing loneliness was thus signifcant in the early-nineteenth-century discourses that were built upon a new interest and evaluations of books and textuality and an understanding of their didactic function in shaping and cultivating the self. The training and education of emotions was a vital part of the German-language discussion that was heavily guided by the notion of Bildung.36 Accordingly, in terms of Einsamkeit, readers were advised to cultivate loneliness into a positive, ennobling solitude as part of their quest for personal growth and self-development. In addition to publishing articles on the benefts of solitude, the press also circulated advertisements for guidebooks that contained advice on themes such as ‘what is good for the youth’ and ‘how to use the lonely hours’.37 257

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The Austrian periodical Österreichisches Bürgerblatt für Verstand, Herz und gute Laune published in 1824 a series of articles dedicated to solitude and concluded with a text that celebrated the many benefts of solitude as a masculine virtue that supported social life: I am not talking about any monastic separation from the world, not of a completely secluded life; I’m talking about a man who seeks his exquisite joy in his room, and does not appear too often outside of his house, so as not to seem idle.38 Like many other texts on the subject, this piece of writing emphasized the dangers of a wrong kind of company and the contagiousness of harmful emotions and practices on a young vulnerable person. Instead of engaging with the wrong kind of company, young men were advised to concentrate on their studies and work, on their own rooms and daily routines. Solitude was especially to be sought in nature; walking in the countryside at a beautiful time of the year, summer mornings and bright nights and moonlight were mentioned in association with the search for the virtuous solitude that was good for the soul, strengthening the character of a young man. From the eighteenth century onwards, the mention of Einsamkeit often took place in religious contexts, in addition to reports on state affairs and social life. The frst mention of ‘Einsamkeit’, which appeared on digiPress Bayern, was in the 1699 Historische Remarques über neuesten Sachen in Europa from Hamburg, where it was used in the context of the religious life of a Dominican monk.39 In 1731, the newspaper Wiener Zeitung published an advertisement for a book by a Jesuit priest that guided spiritual exercises (geistliche exercitia) in solitude for 15 minutes a day.40 This kind of religious training drew from the Jesuit tradition of Christian meditation and contemplation in silence and solitude as described by Ignatius Loyola’s sixteenth-century Exercitia Spiritualia. However, in the early nineteenth century, the meanings of spiritual retreat, ascetism and religious training gave way to a more secularized cultivation of the self for the sake of the society and social life with fellow human beings. Even daily papers could give advice on how to seek solitude and use loneliness for self-development and cultivation of the self, such as the Augsburger Tagblatt did in 1833: ‘So search for loneliness from time to time, you will surely always return to the circle of your fellow beings calmer, stronger and more determined’.41 The newspaper advised readers to use loneliness to adjust to the change of emotions and steer through emotional turbulence caused by social life, just as self-help literature later shaped selfhood and subjectivity. The German cultural theorist Thomas Macho discusses solitude as an experience that requires cultural practices through which it is confronted and coped with but also constructed and sustained. By drawing on ideas of the technology of the self by Michel Foucault and bodily techniques by Marcel Mauss, he suggests that solitude as a cultural practice requires a doubling of the self (Selbstverdobblung). In order to come to terms with loneliness and being alone, a person has to create some kind of a relationship with themselves, which requires certain techniques of being alone in one’s own company without losing one’s mind. Furthermore, as Macho reminds us, all cultural techniques have to be learned and trained. Texts are vital for this practice.42 The expanding print culture and increase of literacy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries played an important role in shaping solitude as a cultural technique. It has been estimated that the literacy rate increased from about 15 per cent around 1800 to 40 per cent in the 1840s.43 The new cultural evaluation of reading has often been referred to as a zest for reading (Lesesucht). At the same time, literary culture established a canon of literary texts, which were cited and referenced in the press. Engaging in a conversation with the literary-philosophical canon of solitude, by citing writers such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), not least his observation of feeling most alone in a crowd of other people, served also as means of social distinction of the learned.44 During the 258

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Napoleonic Wars, historical accounts associated solitude with historical fgures, such as Socrates, which resonated with the contemporary fascination with ancient Greece and the German identifcation with Greek instead of Roman culture.45 Later in the 1840s, virtuous solitude was associated with both past and contemporary philosophers and writers such as Fichte, Locke, Milton, Rousseau and Byron, who were said to have preferred solitude, especially in their youth.46 There was thus a strong literary-philosophical tradition that shaped the meanings of loneliness in the frst half of the nineteenth century. However, at the same time, new bourgeois associations, reading societies and civic organizations were taking shape and shaping the modernizing society.47 The Zeitung für die elegante Welt, for instance, celebrated in 1813 learned associations that prevented misanthropic solitary melancholy and supported sociability.48 Accordingly, the ongoing the dynamics between solitude and sociability became one of the main characteristics of early-nineteenth-century German culture.

Solitude and Sociability The existing scholarship has unravelled the many ways in which in the early nineteenth century’s two modes of human existence,solitude and sociability,gained signifcance in relation to one another. Around 1800, the contrast between the ideals of solitude and sociability became a major paradox of the time, both within and beyond German-speaking Europe.49 Zimmermann’s texts played an important part in this process, affecting the way in which solitude and sociability were juxtaposed and defned in relation to each other. Moreover, there were two wider traditions, suggests Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, that emerged in the discursive feld surrounding loneliness and sociability, the idea of zoon politikon (‘political animal’, social being) from antiquity and the Christian religious tradition that emphasized retreat and solitude.50 The quest was to fnd a balance between the two. Zimmermann suggested that man was made for sociability but needed solitude in order to be happy. In the same vein, in periodicals it was often suggested that both modes of existence were vital for Bildung and cultivated humanity in different ways; the pseudonym M. from Göttingen suggested in the Hanauisches Magazin in 1794 that while sociability was vital for learning social mores, moral codes and practices of everyday life, loneliness cultivated the soul.51 This idea of the importance of both internal and external cultivation persisted long into the nineteenth century. Understanding loneliness as a mode of internal cultivation of the self was attached to new theories of emotions, in which especially moral sentiments and virtuous emotions were highly evaluated and distinguished from harmful passions.52 Because the cultivation of the self was so intimately attached to new theories on emotions, it mattered a great deal why a person sought to be alone. Already, Zimmermann drew a distinction between benefcial retreat to solitude and withdrawal from social life for the wrong reasons, such as shame, failed projects, shyness, melancholia and other diseases of the soul. All of these would cause a negative loneliness that was bad for the human spirit. It was important to avoid negative emotions, and especially hatred, and cultivate noble and virtuous feelings instead.53 In earlynineteenth-century press articles, loneliness was often evaluated in accordance with the motives for retreating from the company of other people. Good solitude arose from noble feelings and aimed for the virtuous cultivation of the self (Tugendmittel), whereas misanthropy, shyness and such negative emotions as hatred or excess melancholy were seen as dangerous and created the wrong kind of loneliness. However, even negative loneliness was better than bad company: Happy are those whom God lets to live in the company of good, friendly people. But wisdom, equity and love for our own good require that we are not too strict in our demands on those among whom we want to live our lives. For complete isolation from 259

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the world is a far greater evil than the company of mediocre people. Yet, loneliness has also its advantages, which cannot be overlooked. Instead of living with evil, harmful, malicious, insidious people, would loneliness certainly be a lesser evil.54 The theme of bad company preoccupied contemporaries and it was considered dangerous for young people, and for young women in particular. Moreover, as positive solitude was understood as a distinctively masculine virtue, the solitude or loneliness of young women was rarely mentioned in the press. Instead, as the weaker sex, women were seen as constantly allured by the superfcial entertainment of social life.55 For example, the popular Illustrirte Zeitung, which was known for its visual illustrations, published in 1843 an article titled ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ (Die Blumen des Waldes), a story of lonely fowers in the wood that want to be in a garden instead, in order to be seen and admired, presenting thus an allegory of young women who long for the social life (Figure 17.2).56 Towards the mid-century, new publications in the felds of medicine and popular psychology started to challenge the philosophical-literary tradition that had dominated the discussion of ‘Einsamkeit’. For instance, in the 1830s, the Austrian Populäre österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung took a strong stand for the benefts of sociability, criticizing Zimmermann’s idealized or positive view of solitude and doctors who ‘forbid sociability’.57 In another issue the journal wrote that socializing only with the dead by reading books could ruin the health of young men who should associate themselves with the living instead: ‘Man is made for man. Night and loneliness create only ghosts’.58 The article saw loneliness as a problem whereas joyfulness and sociability were signs of good health. Moreover, state of mind was seen as dependent on the performance of the body, including digestion and circulation of the blood. Mind and body were thus not seen as separate, but physical stimulation and bodily practices were essential in creating and managing inner feelings.59 Consequently, although Zimmermann’s ideas on the benefts of solitude were highly infuential, understandings of loneliness became more nuanced and complex due to the emergence of new popular psychology that intertwined with new educational ideas and co-existing theories on emotions. For instance, in the frst decades of the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to suggest that solitude was necessary for the growing up in balance with the world, and being alone soothed excess nerve stimuli.60 Yet at the same time, it was pointed out that shutting a child alone in a room in a forced solitude could be harmful for its development,61 an argument that resonates with contemporary understandings that loneliness in childhood is often harmful and can lead to loneliness as an adult.62 The case of loneliness presents an example of how ideas of the human psyche change over time. Although the modern pathologization of loneliness as a mental affiction in medical literature did not exist before the late eighteenth century, solitude was discussed in the medical literature and attached with positive and negative connotations.63 The 1800s was a transitional era from the pre-modern to modern understanding of loneliness.64 Medical discourse changed its focus from the old humoral tradition, dating from the antiquity, towards modern psychology, but it also incorporated contemporary dietetics, which emphasized the relationship between body and soul.65 Moreover, in an era of industrialization and modernization, loneliness was newly understood in terms of psychosocial isolation. One distinctive theme in the discussion on solitude in German-language newspapers and periodicals was the distinction between forced and voluntary solitude. Forced, involuntary solitude or loneliness was often associated with prisons. As prison sentences became increasingly preferred over corporal punishments, there was new public debate and awareness around prison sentences

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Figure 17.2 The fowers of the forest. Illustrierte Zeitung 26 August 1843. Source: Image reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Finland.

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and their effects on prisoners.66 New trade journals in the felds of law and health science, which evolved from more general academic publications, formed a new platform for the discussion on legal aspects of prison sentences and what kind of effect loneliness and long-term isolation had on inmates.67 Medical journals and those in the feld of popular psychology also paid attention to the issue.68 For example, the Populäre Österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung reported in 1839 that a French commission had investigated the isolation practices that were used by the United States prison system, reporting that these were causing grave harm to the prisoners, leading to a variety of emotional disturbances, from emotional coldness and lack of feeling to revengefulness and despair.69 Moreover, the negative effect of loneliness and isolation on the emotional life, mind and psyche of the prisoners surfaced in general newspapers, which reported from different countries, such as United States and Russia, providing international perspective and comparisons on the subject.70 Prison sentences were justifed at the turn of the nineteenth century as a means of fostering moral subjects through isolation that enabled self-conversation and self-awareness through which the wrongdoers became sensitized to the ‘voice of good’. At the same time prisons, suggests Michel Foucault, signify a transition from the punishment of the body to the punishment of the soul.71 Early-nineteenth-century discourses on loneliness shed light on the complex meanings of this transition. While voluntarily solitude was seen as vital for the ideal of cultivating an autonomous subject, forced solitude could easily lead to violating humanity. Forced solitude was thus a very grave punishment in a culture that evaluated the balance between sociability and solitude as means of pursuing the full potential of human selfhood and experience.

Conclusion This chapter has investigated the ways in which solitude, as a recognizable experience and a term, came to existence in the German-speaking Europe around 1800, entangling with new ideas about subjectivity and individuality on the one hand and the ideal of sociability on the other. Johann Georg Zimmerman’s Über die Einsamkeit (1784–85) circulated widely in the German-speaking Europe, fnding also wide resonance in the growing press. In the early nineteenth century, solitude emerged as a new cultural practice and technique, which was sustained and supported by reading and growing textuality. It was understood increasingly as a secular mode of existence within the society, as a cultivation of the self. The fragmented German-speaking Europe, which consisted of different small states, kingdoms and city-states, was joined together by a newly emerging literary culture that created textual networks and reading communities across state borders and fostered new shared identities.72 The practices of writing and reading were thus not only means of cultivating selfhood but also communication and connection across time and space. Scholars in the feld of media history have emphasized the bond between media and nationalist practices in the German lands.73 Benedict Anderson’s famous idea of nation states as ‘imagined communities’ suggests that the construction of the nineteenth-century nation depended on cultural representations and material culture, which supported a national imaginary that tied people together and gave them a shared identity.74 It could be further argued that nation, as an imagined community, can also be seen as an emotional community as people who do not otherwise meet are bound together by media representations.75 Where the British press has been associated with a new ‘emotional public opinion’ that helped to construct national community and identity around shared emotional norms and values,76 so too the early-nineteenth-century German-language press can be approached as an important vehicle that circulated novel ways of understanding emotions that spread synchronically to a wide geographical area.77 262

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The discussion on solitude was connected to the political, social and cultural history of the German states in the aftermath to the French Revolution. During and after the Napoleonic Wars, the understanding of loneliness and solitude intertwined with Romanticism’s emphasis on subjectivity and interiority. The rising middle classes that still lacked political infuence paid growing interest to human interiority and subjective experiences. At the same time, training and cultivating emotions were a vital part of the bourgeois Bildung and pedagogical reformations of the early nineteenth century. Cultivating loneliness in accordance with the ideal of solitude was addressed in various periodical publications that cited not only Zimmermann but also other literary-philosophical texts on loneliness and solitude. On the other hand, Zimmerman’s ideas about solitude were also contested in various periodicals, which increased towards the mid-century, and as they started to specialize in various felds, such as medicine or popular psychology. The literary-philosophical tradition still persisted in the German-language discussion on solitude and affected the ways in which being alone was understood and evaluated among the literate reading public. The press provides thus not only new insight into the changing cultural and secular meanings of solitude in the early-nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe, but it also sheds light on how mass-produced periodicals and expanding print culture have helped to shape ideas about selfhood and subjectivity in the modern era.

Notes 1 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 10, 18–19. 2 Aleida Assman and Jan Assman, ‘Einleitung: Schrift, Gott und Einsamkeit: Einführende Bemerkungen’, in Einsamkeit. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation VI, ed. Aleida Assman and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 13–14. 3 ‘Einsamkeit’, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (DWB). Trier Center for Digital Humanities, accessed 11 June 2021, http://dwb.uni-trier.de/de/; Kathrin Wittler,‘Einsamkeit: Ein literarisches Gefühl im 18. Jahrhundert’, Deutsches Vierteljahrschrift für Literatur und Geisteswissenschaft 87 (2013): 188–9. 4 Susanne Schmid, ‘Einleitung’, in Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit um 1800, ed. Susanne Schmid (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), 7–8, 11–12. 5 See the seminal study of Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). On German case, see Matt Erling and Lynne Tatlock, ‘Introduction: “Distant Reading” and the Historiography of Nineteenth-Century German Literature’, in Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Matt Erling and Lynne Tatlock (New York: Camden House, 2014), 1–25. The notion of the ‘structure of feeling’ was originally coined by Raymond Williams in the 1960s. 6 See further Monique Scheer,‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have History?) A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220. 7 On censorship and the emergence of newspapers and periodicals in the German-speaking Europe, see further Rudolf Stöber, Deutsche Pressegeschichte. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3rd edn (Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2014), 141–2; Frank Bösch, Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015); Konrad Dussel, Die Deutsche Tagespresse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 2nd edn (Berlin: Lit, 2011), 12–18. 8 Bösch, Mass Media, 2, 13. 9 See further Dussel, Die Deutsche Tagespresse; Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 10 Also, German-language publications in foreign countries, such as Wiburgs Mancherley, a very small-scale publication from the Scandinavian frontier of the Russian Empire, could echo the German discourses surrounding solitude. See ‘Monrepos’, Wiburgs Mancherley, 1 July 1821, The National Library of Finland, Helsinki. 11 Johann Georg Zimmermann, Von der Einsamkeit (Hannover and Leipzig, 1780). 12 On the emotional culture during and after the French Revolution, see further William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

2001), 139–210. On the impact of the French Revolution on German Romanticism, see also Asko Nivala,‘Enlightenment, Revolution and Melancholy’, in The Routledge Companion to the Cultural History of the Western Word, ed. Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge and Hannu Salmi (New York: Routledge, 2020), 372–87. ‘Feuilleton. Die beiden Verlassenen. (Frei, nach einer französischen Erzählung)’, Der Adler 3 Feb. 1840. Annette Richards,‘The Music of Solitude’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 80. See Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994), 143–8; Michael Maurer, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Ein Leben als Werk (Cologne: Böhlau, 2016), 168–9. See, for example, Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 35 and passim. Thomas Birkner, Das Selbstgespräch der Zeit. Die Geschichte des Journalismus in Deutschland, 1605–1914 (Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2012), 17, 86. Antje Arnold, Walter Pape and Norbert Wichard, ‘Vorwort’, in Einsamkeit und Pilgerschaft. Figurationen und Inszenierungen in der Romantik, ed. Antje Arnold, Walter Pape and Norbert Wichard (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), vii–xiii. Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 22. See, for example, Frederic Burwick,‘Solitude’, in Romanticism: Keywords (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 296–9. ‘Byron’s Ansichten von der Einsamkeit’, Wiener Theater-Zeitung (Bäuerles Theaterzeitung) 9 Sept. 1833. Cf. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 17–18. ‘Ode an die Einsamkeit’, Neue Mannigfaltigkeiten, 16 Nov. 1776. ‘Von der Einsamkeit’, Österreichisches Bürgerblatt, 27 Oct., 11, 14 Dec. 1846. ‘Meine Sachen, die so viel Beifall gefunden hatten, waren Kinder der Einsamkeit’. Cited in Wittler, ‘Einsamkeit’, 202. Cf. Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016); Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 7, 12. ‘Winkelzüge und Streifereien im Gebiete der Tonkunst’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 12 Sept. 1844. ‘Blätter aus Böhmen’, Sonntagsblätter, 29 Sept. 1844. ‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’, / In allen Wipfeln spürst Du / Kaum einen Hauch—/ Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde—/ Warte nur—/ Balde ruhest Du auch’. ‘Deutsche Bäder II. Ein Besuch im Ilmenau’, Illustrirte Zeitung, 30 Sept. 1843. Originally the poem ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ (1780) was written on a wall of a hunting lodge on the mountain. English translation from Wanderer’s Nightsong II by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Roger Paulin, ‘Die Einsamkeit des Gelehrten: Friedrich Schlegel zwischen Welt und Studierstube’, in Einsamkeit und Pilgerschaft, ed. Arnold, Pape and Wichard, 197, 202. For example,‘Das Landleben und Stadtleben’, Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 4 July 1811;‘Eine Erzählung vom Meere’, Wiener Theaterzeitung, 6 Nov. 1830. See, for example, the poem dedicated to Ludwig Tieck, the poet who coined the word ‘Waldeinsamkeit’, ‘An L. Tieck. Promenaden eines Berliners in seiner Vaterstadt’, Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 23 Sept. 1824; ‘Der Berggeist and die Histionen’, Ansbacher Tagblatt für Stadt und Land, 30 May 1845, ‘Poesie. Tristan und Isolde’, Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 25 Feb. 1843. Cf. ‘Waldeinsamkeit’, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (DWB). Trier Center for Digital Humanities, accessed 11 June 2021, www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/waldeinsamkeit. Johannes Grave,‘Beobachtete Einsamkeit: Zum Verhältnis von Rückenfgur und Betrachter bei Caspar David Friedrich’, in Einsamkeit und Pilgerschaft, ed. Arnold, Pape and Wichard, 183–96. See Assmann and Assmann,‘Einleitung’, 26; Schmidt,‘Einleitung’, 10. Assmann and Assmann,‘Einleitung’, 13–14. Wittler,‘Einsamkeit’, 200–4. The BLAST tool for digital text reuse detection makes it possible to track down what kind of texts were reprinted and reused in the early-19th-century newspapers and periodicals. For example, the Klagenfurter Zeitung advertised a book titled Der geistliche Führer der Jugend in 1846–47, http://viral.utu.f/ cluster/57537, and Wiener Zeitung promoted Lehren und Erfahrungen für junge Frauenzimmer zur Bildung des Herzens in 1830–35, http://viral.utu.f/cluster/276988. Viral Culture, interface of the project ‘Viral Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe’, based at the University of Turku, Finland, accessed 1 June 2021, http://viral.utu.f.

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Solitude in 19th-Century German Europe 38 ‘Ich rede da von keiner mönchischen Absonderung von der Welt, nicht von einem ganz einschichtigen Leben; ich rede von einem Manne, der sein vorzügliches Vergnügen und seine Freude auf seinem Zimmer sucht, der sich nicht gar zu oft außer seinem Hause sehen läßt, um kein Müßiggänger zu scheinen’. ‘Auch einige Gedanken über Einsamkeit oder einsameres Leben’, Österreichisches Bürgerblatt für Verstand, Herz und gute Laune, 8 Mar. 1824. 39 ‘Deutschland’, Historische Remarques über neuesten Sachen in Europa, 21 Mar. 1699. See also ‘Aus dem Brandenburgischen’, Reichspostreuter 9 July 1771;‘Gelehrte Sachen’, Reichspostreuter, 2 Apr. 1767. 40 ‘NB. Bei dem Verleger’, Wiener Zeitung, 1 Mar., 12 Dec. 1731. 41 ‘Suche also von Zeit zur Zeit die Einsamkeit, du wirst gewiss jedesmal b e s s e r, r u h i g e r, k r ä f t i g e r und e n t s c h l o s s e n e r in den Kreis deiner Mitmenschen zurückkehren’. ‘Nutzen der Einsamkeit’, Augsburger Tagblatt, 27 May 1833. Original emphasis. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise. 42 Thomas Macho,‘Mit sich allein. Einsamkeit als Kulturtechnik’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 27–8. 43 Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1973), 61–2, 70, 85. 44 Zimmermann, Von der Einsamkeit, 2. On the solitude and loneliness of the learned and educated see, for example, Roger Paulin,‘Die Einsamkeit des Gelehrten’, 169–82. See also Schmidt,‘Einleitung’, 14. Cf. Barbara Taylor, ‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal 89 (2020): 1–21. 45 ‘Einsamkeit’, Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 26 Sept. 1816. 46 ‘Von der Einsamkeit’, Österreichisches Bürgerblatt, 10 Dec. 1846. 47 Schmid,‘Einleitung’, 12. 48 ‘Was beabsichtigen gebildete Stände bei der Stiftung geselliger Vereine’, Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 6 Sept. 1813. This periodical alone gave 440 hits for the key word ‘Einsamkeit’ in ANNO database between 1801–1825, https://anno.onb.ac.at/anno, accessed 1 June 2021. 49 Schmid,‘Einleitung’. 50 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, ‘Unheilbare Phantasie und heillose Vernunft: Johann Georg Zimmermann: Über die Einsamkeit (1784/85)’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 268. 51 ‘Die Einsamkeit’, Hanauisches Magazin, 1 Jan. 1794. Cf. Tilman Borsche,‘Die Einsamkeit des Denkens’, in Einsamkeit, ed. Assmann and Assmann, 52, 63–4. 52 Frevert,‘Defning Emotions’, 1–31. Cf. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 53 Zimmermann, Über die Einsamkeit (Troppau, 1785), 44, 84–91, 119. 54 ‘Glücklich ist der, den Gott in Gesellschaft guter, freundlicher Menschen leben läßt: aber Weisheit, Billigkeit und Liebe zu unserm eigenen Besten erfordert es, daß wir in unsern Forderungen an Andere, mit denen wir zusammen leben wollen, nicht zu strenge feyn. Denn gänzliche Absonderung von der Welt ist ein weit größeres Übel, als die Gesellschaft sehr mittelmäßiger Menschen. Dennoch hat auch die Einsamkeit ihre Vortheile, die nicht zu verkennen sind. Ehe man mit bösen, schädlichen, schadenfrohen, heimtückischen Menschen leben soll, wäre freylich die Einsamkeit ein geringeres Übel. . . . Auch einige Gedanken über Einsamkeit oder einsameres Leben’, Österreichisches Bürgerblatt für Verstand, Herz und gute Laune, 5 Mar. 1824. 55 See also Zimmermann, Über die Einsamkeit, 11, 26–7. 56 ‘Die Blumen des Waldes’, Illustrirte Zeitung, 26 Aug. 1843. 57 ‘Geselligkeit. Nach Dr. Unzer’, Populäre österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung, 24 Dec. 1834. See also ‘Gefahren der Einsamkeit’, Populäre österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung, 31 Oct. 1836;‘Miscellen: Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit’, Populäre österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung, 24 Sept. 1838. 58 ‘Der Mensch ist für den Mensch geschaffen; Nacht und Einsamkeit schaffen Gespenster’. ‘Über den allseitig verderblichen Einfuss der Furcht auf den Menschen, und über die Mittel sie zu beseitigen’, Populäre österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung, 17 Sept. 1831. 59 Cf. Zimmermann, Von der Einsamkeit, 7, 27. The idea of stimulating and controlling emotions through bodily action links to the early-nineteenth-century ideas on dietetics, physical exercise and bodily training as means of emotional cultivation. See further Heikki Lempa, Beyond Gymnasium: Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007). 60 An anonymous review of a book Malerische und historische Reise in Spanien by Alexandre de Laborde. Zeitung fur die elegante Welt, 22 Dec. 1809. 61 ‘Erziehungsbilder’, Österreichisches Bürgerblatt für Verstand, Herz und gute Laune, 20 Feb. 1824.

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Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 10. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 21. Wittler,‘Einsamkeit’, 187–8. Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness, 26–7. See further Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: University Press, 1996), 240–84. See C.J.A. Mittelmeier, ‘Der neueste Zustand der Gefängnisseinrichtungen in England und englische Erfahrungen über Einzelnhaft’, Kritische Zeitschrift für Rechtwissenschaft und Gesetzgebung des Auslandes: Beilage (1851). ‘Einige Bemerkungen über das zu Ratheziehen der Aerzte bei Einrichtung der Strafhäuser’, Populäre österreichishce Gesundheits-Zeitung, 30 Mar. 1840. ‘Miscellen’, Populäre Österreichische Gesundheits-Zeitung, 14 Feb. 1839. ‘Das östliche Bußhaus in Philadelphia’, Transsilvania (Beiblatt zum Siebenbürger Boten), 7 Apr. 1843; ‘Das pennsylvanische Strafsystem betreffend’, Vereinigte Ofner-Pester Zeitung, 21 Apr. 1844. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 122–3. For instance, Zimmermann used the word ‘Germany’ (Teutschland) when discussing solitude. Zimmermann, Über die Einsamkeit, 26. Bösch, Mass Media. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 1–7. Barbara H. Rosenwein,‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1, no. 1 (2010): 12; Jan Plamper,‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010): 253. Katie Barclay, ‘Emotions, the Law and the Press in Britain: Seduction and Breach of Promise Suits, 1780–1830’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2016): 267–84. Ute Frevert, ‘Emotional Knowledge: Modern Developments’, in Emotional Lexicons, ed. Frevert et al., 268–9.

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18 ‘AS AN ONLY CHILD I MUST HAVE BEEN LONELY THOUGH I WAS NOT AWARE OF IT AT THE TIME’ Only Children’s Refections on the Experience of Loneliness in Britain, 1850–1950 Alice Violett

In the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a noticeable increase in the proportion of one-child families in Britain.1 This sparked concern about the quantity and quality of the population and ultimately resulted in the growth of a number of stereotypes about only children, one of which was that they experienced loneliness. During the same period, there was a change in the defnition of the word ‘lonely’ that imbued it with new, negative connotations. While, according to historians David Vincent and Fay Bound Alberti, it had originally referred to the state of being alone, it became increasingly indicative of neuroticism and a lack of meaningful connection with other people.2 This made the supposed loneliness of only children seem even more of a danger. These new ideas about only-childhood and loneliness infuenced some only children born between 1845 and 1945, writing or speaking as adults, to incorporate considerations of whether or not they had been lonely into their narratives of their early lives, even when they did not remember feeling lonely.3 At the same time, while Vincent and Bound Alberti have shown how in public discourse the defnition of the word ‘lonely’ shifted from neutral to negative at around the turn of the twentieth century, some of the narratives of only children included in this study demonstrate that its everyday usage remained ambiguous, expanding upon Bound Alberti’s statement that:‘loneliness is not the state of being alone . . . though it is often mistaken as such.’4 The proportion of couples who completed their family with one child rose from 5.3 per cent in the 1870s to 25.2 per cent in 1925.5 This increasing prevalence and visibility of only children, particularly among middle-class couples, who were initially more likely than their working-class peers to be aware of, communicate about and use birth control methods, caused concern among contemporary commentators.6 Eugenicists were naturally worried by this apparently worsening ‘imbalance’ between stocks of ‘superior’ middle-class children and ‘defective’ working-class children, considering it a symptom of the ‘degeneration’ that would harm the British Empire’s standing on the world stage.7 By the 1930s, however, sociologists and statisticians were worried by declining family sizes across the class spectrum.8 Growing numbers of only children and the concerns they provoked about population quality also appeared to infuence the writers

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-21

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of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century childrearing manuals. These ideas additionally reached the public through popular fction, radio talks, magazines and journals, psychology clubs, lectures, courses, newspapers, book reviews, teachers, social workers and other professionals, as well as word of mouth.9 This chapter originated in a PhD thesis, which argued that only-childhood was never the sole, and only ever a minor, determinant of only children’s experiences, with several factors exerting more infuence.10 For the purposes of this research, an only child is defned as ‘a person who either had never had any siblings of any kind, had step- or half-siblings who had never co-resided with them, or had lost an older or younger sibling they had either never known, or only known for a short amount of time (usually defned as two or three years)’.11 It is based on an analysis of 81 autobiographies and 63 oral history interviews of only children and of 32 autobiographies and 24 oral history interviews of a control group of non-only children. These autobiographers and interviewees were born between 1845 and 1945 and grew up in Britain. They were drawn from a combination of the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent’s The Autobiography of the Working Class bibliography; Paul Thompson’s Edwardians oral history interview collection; the British Library catalogue and Sounds website; and the Essex public library catalogue.12 They were selected systematically, in order to create as fair a balance of decade of birth, gender and social class as possible. The retrospective nature of these sources means that this chapter concerns adult only children’s recollections and interpretations of their childhoods as a whole, rather than accounts of how they felt at the time. This is partly due to the impossibility of accessing and distilling how adults felt when they were children—as Ludmilla Jordanova says, ‘there can be no authentic voice of childhood speaking to us from the past because the adult world dominates that of the child . . . we cannot capture children’s experiences in a pure form.’13 It also makes these sources eminently suitable for discovering how popular myths have infuenced some only children to use only-childhood as a lens through which they explain their childhood experiences. Whichever defnition of ‘lonely’ they used, only children might consider the very question of whether they were lonely, assume they had been lonely on the basis that they were only children, or attribute any loneliness they did experience to only-childhood without appearing to consider alternative explanations, such as an individual preference for company, their parents’ reluctance to let them mix with other children, or geographical isolation. This work, therefore, particularly builds upon that of the contributors to Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel’s The Myths We Live By, which demonstrates how, in oral history testimonies, ‘we can see how it is precisely where memory diverges most clearly from fact that “imagination, symbolism, desire break in”’, and interviewees adapt their stories to take into account pervasive myths.14 As Julie-Marie Strange writes,‘inevitably, adult authorial identities shaped the telling of life stories. This is not a weakness of autobiography; it is its great strength.’15 This work also takes inspiration from Peter N. Stearns’ fndings that the increasing expectation, originating in the late nineteenth century, that childhood should be a ‘happy’ time prompted adults, when refecting upon their formative years, to evaluate the happiness of their childhoods.16 They did this even if they had grown up before expectations altered, so their own parents had not faced pressure to prioritize their children’s happiness above all else.17 This chapter presents evidence that adult only children who have imbibed negative ideas about only-childhood are prone to incorporate them into refections upon their formative years and conclude they would have had better experiences had they not been only children. Such is the power of stereotypes that they attribute their experiences to only-childhood despite the presence of alternative explanations, doubt their positive memories of childhood, and anachronistically apply contemporary ideas about only children to their experiences. It additionally concurs 268

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with the fndings of social scientists about only children who judge themselves or have been judged to have stereotypical characteristics. Researchers such as Toni Falbo and Ann Laybourn, who, among others, have challenged the stereotype that only children are lonely, have discovered that only children commonly attribute characteristics in themselves, such as self-centredness, to only-childhood and do not consider alternative explanations.18 This supports this study’s fndings that, as they learned that only-childhood was associated with loneliness, only children altered how they felt about and portrayed their childhood experiences. As mentioned earlier, Bound Alberti and Vincent have argued that around the turn of the twentieth century, the word ‘lonely’ developed negative connotations.19 This pathologization of loneliness, both historians have argued, reached particular heights towards the mid-twentieth century. Bound Alberti remarks that ‘the association of solitude with mental illness—which was always a potential risk in classical and early modern understandings of the humoral body— became more persistent in the modern age.’20 Vincent dates this conception of loneliness to the 1930s and 1940s, when ‘the resonance of loneliness was enhanced by contemporary developments in the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry. Increasingly large claims were made for the impact of states of mind on physical wellbeing.’21 The emergence of this new perspective on loneliness can also be traced through contemporary childrearing manuals. Childrearing manuals are a particularly appropriate source from which to uncover contemporary feeling about only children due to their accessibility and survivability. Furthermore, historians such as Harry Hendrick, Julia Grant, Daniel Beekman, Cathy Urwin and Elaine Sharland have argued that whether or not parents actually read them or took their advice, they refected dominant public attitudes and altered their approaches in response to changing national concerns.22 Manual writers’ use of the term ‘lonely’ largely refects Bound Alberti and Vincent’s fndings: those writing in the earlier part of the period under discussion focused on the purported ill effects of ‘isolation’ or ‘solitariness’, while writers from the 1920s onwards used the word ‘lonely’ to portray the apparent sadness of the only child who spent too much time alone. Writers across the period, ranging from doctor and bacteriologist Alfred Donné (writing in 1860), child psychologist William Forbush (1912), psychiatrist Douglas Thom (1927) and child psychoanalyst Edith Buxbaum (1949) expressed concern that only children, lacking interaction with their peers, failed to learn how to adapt themselves to others, be part of a group or deal with failure.23 These statements refected a wider contemporary concern with producing well-socialized children. In the nineteenth century, an ideal developed in British public schools—and therefore in government—that boys who participated in and succeeded at team sports made for productive, mentally healthy adults as they developed, ‘the soft skills of courage, co-operation and honour which would ft the individual for leadership of the world’s largest empire’.24 While, unlike boys, middle-class girls were regarded as at risk of becoming dangerously socially confdent if they socialized too much, the expectation that they would grow up to serve husbands, sons and other male relatives meant they were nonetheless expected to work well with others and ‘ft in’.25 In the twentieth century, middle-class husbands and wives were increasingly expected to share interests and friends, and women’s social skills were required to facilitate these activities and inter-family relationships.26 While there was less emphasis on sport for girls, one of its aims was to teach moral qualities that would beneft their social interactions, reputations and mothering skills.27 In the interwar period, it became even more crucial that children interacted well with others, as child psychologists and manual writers came to regard solitariness—and the loneliness and social maladjustment it apparently engendered—as dangerous to children’s mental health and their future success as adults.28 It was also around this time that manual writers started to use the word ‘lonely’ in its modern, emotionally loaded sense. While they continued to detail the consequences of loneliness, statements 269

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by medical doctor Mary Scharlieb in 1927 that ‘only and lonely may also be diffcult’ (her emphasis) and paediatrician Karl König in 1958 that ‘it is not too diffcult to understand the special position of such a lonely bird’ were designed for high emotional impact.29 As Bound Alberti puts it, by this time, ‘loneliness’ had become ‘a shorthand for the absence of happiness, for a sense of disconnect, for depression and alienation, for social isolation’.30 Unlike some of their contemporaries, who recognised that parents could create opportunities for only children to socialize, Scharlieb and König presented the loneliness of the only child as inevitable and unavoidable. This association between only-childhood and loneliness is further demonstrated by responses to the 1949 Mass Observation ‘Ideal Family’ questionnaire. Several respondents cited loneliness as a reason not to have an only child, making statements such as ‘one child is lonely’, ‘only children are either spoilt or selfsh or lonely’ and ‘[the only child] is too often lonely’.31 Other respondents alluded to the only child’s ‘lack of ’ or ‘missing’ companionship and the ‘very solitary life’ of an only child.32 The stereotype of the lonely only child also appears to have infuenced the work of historians of childhood and the family. Leonore Davidoff ’s work on sibling relationships, while excellent, implies that to have no siblings was a grievous disadvantage. Davidoff laments the decline in family size that started in the late nineteenth century as regretful, citing the ‘sibling companionship, help and competition’ children from smaller families missed out on.33 Between them, Davidoff and Claudia Nelson, who has also produced enlightening work on this topic, list several important functions of siblings, most notably ‘emotional and social interaction’ and helping one another.34 These assumptions of disadvantage also appear in edited collections of autobiographies and oral histories, where historians have tended to present examples of only children who appeared to ft stereotypes and used only-childhood as the main explanation for their experiences. They also come out in oral history interviews, where some interviewers, upon discovering that the interviewee is an only child, asked follow-up questions based on stereotypes. Occasionally, interviewees measured themselves against stereotypes without additional prompting from interviewers. This study reused existing oral history interviews, and when such spontaneous questions and statements arose, they offered additional insight into how stereotypes affected both interviewers’ and interviewees’ immediate reactions when only-childhood came up in conversation.

Were Only Children Actually Lonely? While we cannot reconstruct the childhood feelings of only children, we can locate the increasing infuence of only-child stereotypes on how they made sense of their lives, as well as the complexities of usage of the word ‘lonely’, in their subsequent refections. Actress Julia Neilson, born in 1868, wrote,‘Lacking brothers and sisters, I suppose my childhood’s days must have been lonely ones; but solitude does not seem to have afficted me with a shortage of spirits.’35 Neilson was writing in 1940, yet her confation of loneliness with solitude and her claim to have been both lonely and high-spirited suggest she was still using the word in its original, neutral sense. Ballet critic Arnold Haskell, born in 1903, wrote, ‘As an only child I must have been lonely though I was not aware of it at the time.’ It was only as an adult that he refected that his desire to have a ‘small sister’ might have been born of loneliness.36 Poet James Kirkup, born in 1918, showed a similar lack of conviction:‘I was a lonely child, though I was not conscious of loneliness; in fact, I preferred being on my own.’37 Unlike Neilson, Haskell and Kirkup, writing in 1951 and 1957, respectively, implied that loneliness was something one could feel, suggesting that they were using ‘lonely’ in its contemporary, emotionally loaded sense. Author Arthur Machen, born in Gwent, Wales, in 1863, described himself as ‘ “set” to loneliness’ and ‘a lonely child’ in his 1922 autobiography Far Off Things.38 However, he also wrote at length about the joys he derived from playing on his own in the remote Welsh countryside, 270

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suggesting he was using the word in its original sense of simply ‘being alone’. He made it clear that he did not feel disadvantaged by the lack of company and even preferred solitude: There were no children’s parties for me, no cricket, no football, and I was heartily glad of it, for I should have abhorred all these diversions with shudderings of body and spirit. My father and mother apart, I loved to be by myself, with unlimited leisure for mooning and loafng and roaming and wandering from lane to lane, from wood to wood.39 Machen summarized his childhood as one of contented solitude in nature. Terms at boarding school, which he attended from the age of 11, were ‘a sort of interlude amongst strangers’, at the end of which he ‘came home to my friendly lanes, to my deep and shadowy and secret valleys, as a man returns to his dear ones and his dear native felds after exile amongst aliens and outlanders’.40 Until the age of 17, when he left Wales and school for London and offce work, ‘solitude and woods and deep lanes and wonder . . . were the chief elements of my life.’41 Machen’s experiences are echoed in Bound Alberti’s personal recollections. In A Biography of Loneliness, she describes how, growing up on an isolated Welsh hilltop in the 1970s, she was set apart from her neighbours by geography and cultural differences. Like Machen, she did not feel lonely in the emotional sense:‘a natural introvert, I spent my days in the woods, making up stories, plotting alternative lives’. As she grew older, her experiences of loneliness changed, and living in such a situation no longer suited her.42 Similarly, while Machen continued to refer to long, solitary walks he undertook and enjoyed as he moved into adulthood, his description of ‘tramping, loafng, strolling along interminable streets and roads lying to the north-west and the west of London, a shabby, sorry fgure; and always alone’ in his early 20s, at a time when he was particularly impoverished, paints a different picture to that of his solitary childhood explorations in the countryside.43 As Bound Alberti also points out, context is key to whether someone who is on their own feels lonely; in Machen’s case, the element of choice and the contrast between communing alone with nature (to which Wordsworth pays so much tribute with Daffodils) and aimlessly wandering uninspiring urban streets made solitude welcome in childhood and unwelcome in adulthood.44 Geographical location, family circumstances and individual inclinations towards and against solitude are a few factors, alone or in combination, that continually set one only child’s recollections of loneliness apart from another’s, disproving the notion of a singular, universal only-child experience. In 1993, lawyer Anthony Mallinson, born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1923, used the word ‘lonely’ in what appeared to be its neutral sense when he was interviewed for the British Library’s City Lives oral history collection, further demonstrating how its everyday use has often differed from public defnitions. Accepting the stereotype to some degree, Mallinson stated that ‘being an only child, um, perhaps one does have a tendency to live a rather solitary, lonely life unless you actually set out—or your parents set out—um, to give you some other sort of sort of life’, yet he had only positive things to say about his experiences of solitude as a child.45 While not unhappy in the company of other children, during his childhood Mallinson actively sought out solitude, retreating upstairs to read as the mood took him when family and neighbours visited at Christmas time and, like Machen, welcoming boarding school holidays as a retreat from company: When going home for the, for the holidays, um, I wasn’t thinking ‘how marvellous, I’m going to see X or Y tomorrow’. I was thinking ‘how marvellous, I’m going to’, you know,‘be away from all these other people’ . . . I never accepted an invitation to go and stay with anybody. I never suggested that my parents should invite anybody to come and stay with us.46 271

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Mallinson’s changing attitude towards loneliness as he grew older is similar of those of Machen: I suppose the frst time I became I got a very slight feeling that I was missing out on something by not being, um, a gregarious character would actually have been when I frst came to London. Not even in my university days when, um, when I had quite a lot of university friends but I didn’t yearn to be with them the whole time.47 Machen’s and Mallinson’s boarding school attendance marks them out as middle-class, and at home, they had more space to be alone then their working-class counterparts—Machen in nature and Mallinson in his own bedroom and sitting room.48 Mallinson’s account also shows how parental attitudes and gender could differentiate the experiences of only children. His family might have been far less tolerant of his unsociability had he been a girl. Daughters of his class and time were expected to practice, in controlled settings, the social skills they needed to become successful wives and hostesses and not deter potential suitors by being too bookish.49 But as the 1946 autobiography of author and political activist Dorothy Crisp, born in Leeds in 1906, shows, middle-class only children did not have the monopoly on either solitariness or enjoying their own company. Crisp’s upper-working-class parents had aspirations for their only daughter, and this manifested as such strict control over her social contacts that ‘only one little girl my own age was approved as a playmate, and she not until I was ten or eleven.’50 Crisp’s use of the word ‘lonely’ was particularly ambiguous; she referred to having been ‘an imaginative and lonely child’ and ‘a great deal alone, and lonely’ and how ‘I had the keenest desire, no doubt intensifed by the loneliness of my home life, to form great friendships.’51 However, she also wrote, Well-meaning doctors and whatnot may inveigh against the ‘loneliness’ of the only child, but thought comes only through solitude, and those who would lump children in a romping, laughing mob together are catering far more for their immediate pleasure than for their ultimate happiness . . . soon, of course, solitude, far from being irksome is a boon . . . it is to those lonely—but so full—days and nights [when she spent most of 48 hours by herself] that I owe most of my plans and the courage necessary to their execution. Moreover, it is only through solitude that one achieves any measure of independence.52 Whether or not she felt lonely, in its contemporary sense, at the time, Crisp’s account of her childhood can tell us a great deal about the variety of factors that could work, individually and in tandem, to differentiate one only child’s experiences from those of another. It might be argued that her parents’ particular treatment of her was a result of her being an only child in the respect that she was born late in their marriage, ‘some years’ after they had a stillborn son.53 However, this was not an experience she shared with all other only children; many of the couples who contributed to the increasing proportion of one-child families during this period did so out of choice.54 Only children who reported that their parents had lost other children through miscarriage, stillbirth or illness were very much a minority in this study, and not all those who had lost siblings were as coddled as Crisp. Crisp’s story also shows that, while an only child might come from a working-class family and lived in a working-class area, it did not necessarily follow that they had a more sociable life than their middle- and upper-class peers. While many working-class only children included in this study described themselves as far from starved for company, there were parents like Crisp’s whose dreams of social mobility led them to keep to themselves and prevent their children from playing in the street, where they might pick up bad habits from insalubrious peers. This practice 272

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was not necessarily limited to parents of only children; Elizabeth Roberts and Anna Davin have identifed such families as a distinct subsection among the working class.55 As Roberts and Ross McKibbin have written, this behaviour only increased with the massive expansion of suburban council housing following the First World War, which carried with it an air of aspiration and ‘standards’.56 Crisp’s gender may also have been a factor in her treatment, as her parents’ middle-class aspirations could have led them to adopt middle-class practices for raising daughters that placed limits on social contact.57 For some only children, loneliness, as a word and as an experience, was far less ambiguous than it was for Machen, Mallinson and Crisp yet still not a necessary outcome of only-childhood in itself. Suffragette and magazine proprietor Margaret Haig Thomas, who was born into an upper-middle-class family in 1883 and mainly lived in Monmouthshire, Wales, as a child, stated, ‘I was an only child and therefore a lonely child’, in her 1933 autobiography.58 She evoked the emergent ideal of the happy child when she wrote,‘superfcially I was perhaps a bit too lonely to be quite as happy as a child can be. Always I longed for other children to play with. Every night when I went to bed I prayed for a little sister’.59 By contrast, the six weeks Thomas spent with her cousins at her grandparents’ home in Powys each summer were an experience of ‘intoxicating joy’ as she ‘mixed not only with one child, carefully imported to keep me company, but [also] with eight or ten others’.60 While Machen painted an idyllic picture of the joys of being alone in nature, Thomas’ account of summers at Pen Ithon portrayed an opposite, equally valid version of happiness:‘all day long we played games, climbed trees, bathed in the rocky pools of the brown stream that ran through the valley below the house, rode ponies over the moors.’61 Bound Alberti has written that ‘loneliness can be restorative as well as destructive, but only when it is a choice.’62 While the experience proved to be the former for Machen, Mallinson and (as an adult, at least) Crisp, Thomas’ more sociable nature and personal preference for company meant that she found solitude painful and did not revise her opinion of it as she grew older: Being an only child . . . one gets time to think. Too much time, perhaps . . . that is not good for any child. At least it teaches it to withdraw into a world of unreality; at worst it can become an overpowering disease like drink or drug-taking, which makes all contact with the visible world illusory.63 By the time she reached adolescence, Thomas’ tendency to ruminate led her to experience existential crises.64 While she labelled overthinking as a trait particularly associated with only children, other only children did not report this, further highlighting the importance of individual personality and preferences in differentiating their experiences. But there were additional factors that made Thomas’ childhood particularly isolated: location, gender and class. While she did not dislike her main childhood home, the grand Llanwern House in Monmouthshire, Thomas found it eerily quiet during the autumn and winter months, and as an upper-class girl taught by governesses, her solitude and loneliness were intensifed by a lack of contact with her peers.65 This set her experiences apart from those of her upper-class male peers. For centuries, well-off parents had sent their sons to tutors or boarding school at a far earlier age than their daughters, if they even sent their daughters at all.66 When Thomas fnally persuaded her father to let her go to boarding school in St Andrews, Scotland, at the age of 15 (after two years at a day school), where she was lucky enough to have an inspiring housemistress and make good friends, her loneliness was relieved. Even when only children were lonely, this feeling did not necessarily defne their entire childhood.67 Thomas’ class differentiated her experiences from those of Agnes Gilbey, a working-class housewife born in Shalford, Essex, in 1897, who, speaking in 1972, referred to having ‘a lonely life 273

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really . . . being an only child’.68 Like Thomas, Gilbey grew up in an isolated location—‘I lived up there—that house there, and there’s no other houses near me for—oh half a mile, a mile, and I had no playmates at all’—but unlike Thomas whose family occupied a grand country house, Gilbey’s father was employed as a groom and gardener on such an estate.69 Like Crisp, Gilbey’s parents had lost another child in infancy, and Gilbey felt that her loneliness was compounded by her mother’s reaction to this experience. She suggested that her parents were unwilling to let her wander as far afeld as other children because, ‘after losing the—other baby, they thought I might—they might lose me, I think’.70 She nonetheless described visiting friends’ houses, attending birthday parties and singing in the church choir alongside other children, implying that she was afforded occasional relief from her loneliness in what her parents considered safe, controlled settings. Crisp’s and Gilbey’s experiences were not typical of only children in this study, either in terms of how they came to be only children or how they were treated by their parents. The case of upper-working-class teacher Florence Dart, who was born in 1895 and grew up in Southsea, Hampshire, is instructive. Dart lived in an area where there were plenty of other children she could play with and ‘played out’ at every available opportunity because she was neither an especially wanted nor coddled child.71 While some parents of only children in the period under study had intended to have more than one child but did not do so for reasons such as miscarriage, stillbirth, loss of a child to illness or accident, or their own health or age, others had not wanted to have any children at all but had one as a concession to the pressures of society to reproduce or due to contraceptive failure.72 It appears that Dart’s parents were among these. Speaking in 1971, she reported that her mother ‘didn’t like children’ and her father ‘wasn’t a lover of children’, and it was for this reason that they did not have more and did not allow her to invite friends home. While Dart’s basic needs were taken care of, and her parents took an interest in her education, she felt unwelcome and restricted at home. By contrast, in the street or the school playground, she enjoyed the company of other children and the freedom to make noise, talk to whoever she wanted and ‘be cheeky’.73 Elizabeth Blackburn, a working-class millworker born in Blackburn in 1902, would not have been an only child had her mother not had ‘a number of miscarriages’.74 However, this does not seem to have affected her freedom to socialize with other children outside of the home as she was growing up. She had the run of other families’ houses, romanticized the street and played with neighbouring children at various locations including a hen pen, felds, canal towpaths and a brickworks.75 In fact, in contrast to Crisp’s and Gilbey’s parents, Blackburn described her mother as taking a pragmatic view of her reproductive misfortunes:‘that my mother did not regret this circumstance as much as she might have done, was infuenced by the fact that to bring up a family on a cotton weaver’s wage at that time was an almost intolerable burden.’76 This does not necessarily mean that Blackburn’s parents were hard-hearted; they could have simply borne their losses differently considering their material circumstances. They might also have reacted differently had they lost children after birth. Blackburn’s and Dart’s cases nonetheless call into question the sweeping statement made by a number of modern sociologists, journalists and other commentators that only children in the past were more likely than their present-day peers to have had miserable childhoods because their parents’ unhappiness with their low fertility infuenced the atmosphere in their homes and their parents’ behaviour towards them.77 Individual personalities, parental attitudes, family circumstances, geographical location, class and gender were therefore all factors that explained whether or not an only child described themselves as having been lonely. The quality of any sibling relationship is also dependent on a huge variety of infuences: age, gender, birth order, family size, family circumstances, compatibility of personalities and interests, and whether one child is favoured over the other, for example. Loneliness is not the preserve of only children. A particularly illustrative example emerges from this 274

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study’s control group of non-only-children. Upper-middle-class banker and diplomat George Baring, who was born in 1918 and grew up in Marylebone, London, was set apart from his two older sisters by age gaps of seven and ten years, respectively; they had a ‘happy’ relationship but were by no means ‘close’. In his 1990 oral history interview, he described holidays at the family’s second home in Somerset: I had really a rather lonely upbringing, because my parents were not at all social, and we never had any children to stay or anything. I used to go down on my bicycle when I was old enough to do so, and play golf. And then we had a pony up on the hills and so on, and it was a fairly solitary life really.78 Like some of the only children we have seen in this chapter, then, Baring’s childhood experiences of loneliness hinged on parental attitudes, as well as periodic geographical isolation. However, he took a philosophical approach to this experience:‘I’m saying that as a matter of fact, not particularly with any regret, it was, it was just the way it was.’79 Baring’s lack of regret could indicate that he used the word ‘lonely’ in its older sense; this is supported by his subsequent description of partaking in pursuits he clearly enjoyed and his probable use of ‘solitary’ as a synonym. Alternatively, as someone with siblings, he may not have felt the need to interrogate his experiences of loneliness as a child to the quite same extent as an only child refecting upon their childhood in light of the impression that they ‘should’ have been lonely. A fuller exploration of the life stories of people who described themselves as lonely in childhood could shed further light on different types of sibling relationship and the infuence of the factors this study has identifed as instrumental in whether only children felt lonely. This could include sibling relationships where, unlike in Baring’s case, children were close in age but were antagonistic or indifferent towards one another. After all, Professor Lars Andersson has defned loneliness as follows: An enduring condition of emotional distress that arises when a person feels estranged from, misunderstood, or rejected by others and/or lacks appropriate social partners for desired activities, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy.80 The presence of other people, similar in age, does not guarantee a social connection. Just as onlychild myths infuence how only children assess their capabilities and portray their experiences, the corresponding ‘sibling myth’ may be just as damaging. As psychologist Dorothy Rowe writes, The constant reiteration in the media and by politicians that the closeness of family members is of prime importance leaves many people feeling inadequate and guilty because they do not enjoy the close relationship with their siblings that seemingly most people enjoy with theirs.81

Conclusion The phenomenon of one-child families, the attachment of new connotations to the word ‘lonely’ in public discourse and the association between only-childhood and loneliness all emerged and grew from the late nineteenth century onwards. This affected how only children interpreted their childhood experiences and told their stories. Some questioned their own memories by stating that they ‘must’ have been lonely because they were only children. Others clearly had a solitary 275

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existence yet took joy from it. Others still were unquestionably lonely in an emotional sense, but closer analysis of their accounts reveals explanations not necessarily related to only-childhood; this is supported by the narratives of only children who were neither solitary nor lonely. It may be suggested that individual personalities, parental attitudes, family circumstances, geographical location, class and gender could have just as much sway over whether children with siblings were lonely, opening up potential avenues of research concerning childhood loneliness in history. While agreeing with Bound Alberti’s and Vincent’s broad argument that, from the late nineteenth century onwards, public defnitions of the word ‘lonely’ shifted from ‘the state of being alone’ to an emotional state connoting sadness, lack of meaningful connections and mental illness, this chapter has largely focused on everyday usage.82 Its fnding that a subset of only children born between 1863 and 1923 used the word ‘lonely’ in both its neutral and contemporary senses and, ambiguously, throughout the years between 1922 and 1993 expands upon Bound Alberti’s statement that ‘loneliness is not the state of being alone . . . though it is often mistaken as such.’83 Further work on ego-documents may further quantify how often people used the word ‘lonely’ in its neutral sense after its offcial meaning had shifted and, if they did so as commonly as this chapter suggests, whether they could truly be described as ‘mistaken’.

Notes 1 Title quote from Arnold Haskell, In his True Centre (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1951), 33. Michael Anderson, ‘Highly Restricted Fertility: Very Small Families in the British Fertility Decline’, Population Studies 52, no. 2 (1988): 178. 2 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 35; David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 20–1. 3 Alice Violett,‘The Public Perceptions and Personal Experiences of Only Children Growing Up in Britain, c.1850–1950’ (PhD dissertation, University of Essex, 2018) [supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number 1372509], 159, 171, 172, 174, 175, 180, 183. 4 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 5, 35; Vincent, History of Solitude, 20–1. 5 Anderson,‘Highly Restricted Fertility’, 178. 6 Wally Seccombe,‘Men’s “Marital Rights” and Women’s “Wifely Duties”: Changing Conjugal Relations in the Fertility Decline’, in The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970, ed. John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly and David Levine (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 69–70; Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 106–15; Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–4, 230, 252. 7 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Penguin, 2009), 115; R.A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 52, 138. 8 Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Defciency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c.1870–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73–5. 9 Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 2, 89; Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychiatry, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Cathy Urwin and Elaine Sharland, ‘From Bodies to Minds in Childcare Literature: Advice to Parents in Inter-War Britain’, in In The Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940, ed. Roger Cooter (London: Routledge, 1992), 193; Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–22, 32, 34, 114–15; John Stewart, Child Guidance in Britain (London: Routledge, 2013), 31, 33, 40, 62, 71, 97, 133. 10 Violett,‘Only Children Growing Up in Britain’. 11 Ibid., 84. 12 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 31 Dec. 2020, www.oxforddnb.com/; John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, eds, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Biography (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1989); P. Thompson and T. Lummis, Family Life and

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Work Experience before 1918, 1870–1973 [computer fle], 7th edn, (Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], May 2009), SN: 2000; ‘Explore the British Library’, The British Library, accessed 31 Dec. 2020, https://explore.bl.uk;‘British Library Sounds’, The British Library, accessed 31 Dec. 2020, https:// sounds.bl.uk/;‘Essex Libraries Catalogue’, Essex County Council, accessed 31 Dec. 2020, https://library catalogue.essex.gov.uk/. Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Children in History: Concepts of Nature and Society’, in Children, Parents and Politics, ed. Geoffrey Scarre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel,‘Introduction’, in The Myths We Live By, ed. Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1990), 7. Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12. Peter N. Stearns,‘Defning Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 2 (2010): 166–7, 169, 170, 172–3, 175–81, 183; Peter N. Stearns,‘Childhood Emotions in Modern Western History’, in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 158, 159, 163, 164, 167–8, 169–97. Stearns,‘Defning Happy Childhoods’, 178–9. Toni Falbo,‘Only Children: A Review’, in The Single-Child Family, ed. Toni Falbo (New York: Guilford Press, 1984), 15; Ann Laybourn, The Only Child: Myths and Reality (Edinburgh: Stationery Offce Books, 1994), 113. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 35; Vincent, History of Solitude, 20–1. Albert, Biography of Loneliness, 213. Vincent, History of Solitude, 228. Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31; Julia Grant, ‘Parent-Child Relations in Western Europe and North America, 1500-Present’, in The Routledge History of Childhood, ed. Fass, 108, 113; Daniel Beekman, The Mechanical Baby (London: Dobson Books, 1979), 185; Urwin and Sharland,‘From Bodies to Minds’, 183–5, 189. Alfred Donné, Mothers and Infants, Nurses and Nursing (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1860), accessed 13 Sept. 2020, https://archive.org/details/mothersandinfan01donngoog, 209; William Forbush, The Coming Generation (London: D. Appleton & Co., 1912), 41; Douglas Thom, Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1927), 179–80; Edith Buxbaum, Your Child Makes Sense: A Guidebook for Parents (New York: International Universities Press, 1949), accessed 13 Sept. 2020, https://archive.org/details/yourchildmakess00buxbgoog, 179. Vincent, History of Solitude, 53; Alex Renton, Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), 143–8, 150–5; James Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood 1800–1914 (Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 81; G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Effciency (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 9, 11, 13, 54, 66, 99. Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981), 11, 12, 26, 44, 138; Anthony Fletcher, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1800–1914 (London:Yale University Press, 2008), 30, 31, 50. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90. Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 81. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 35, 37, 213; Vincent, History of Solitude, 228; Deborah Thom, ‘Wishes, Anxieties, Play, and Gestures: Child Guidance in Inter-War England’, in In the Name of the Child, ed. Cooter, 210; Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 166; Stewart, Child Guidance in Britain, 16. Mary Scharlieb, The Psychology of Childhood: Normal and Abnormal (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1927), 89; Karl König, Brothers and Sisters: The Order of Birth in the Family: An Expanded Edition (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2012), 25. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, vii. M—O A TC 3 Family Planning 1944–49, 3/3–4—A Surveys; 3/3–4—C Surveys. M—O A TC 3 Family Planning 1944–49, 3/3–4—A Surveys; 3/3–4—B Surveys; 3/3–4—C Surveys. Leonore Davidoff,‘The Family in Britain’, in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950,Volume 2: People and their Environment, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 118. Leonore Davidoff, Thicker Than Water (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54; Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 99.

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Alice Violett 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

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Julia Neilson, This for Remembrance (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1940), 20–1. Haskell, In His True Centre, 33. James Kirkup, The Only Child (London: Collins, 1957), 38. Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), accessed 27 Sept. 2020, www.gutenberg. org/fles/35153/35153-h/35153-h.htm, 23, 104. Ibid, 23. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, viii–ix. Machen, Far Off Things, 126. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, viii–ix, 5, 157, 207, 221, 237. Interview with Anthony Mallinson by Katherine Thompson, 1993, NLSC: City Lives, C409/089 tape 1, © The British Library. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 14, 44, 73, 132; Fletcher, Growing Up in England, 30, 47, 50, 244; Davidoff, Thicker Than Water, 99; Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939–1979 (London: Little, Brown, 2016), 164. Dorothy Crisp, A Life for England (London: Dorothy Crisp & Co., 1946), 4. Ibid., 4, 5, 9. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 4. Anderson,‘Highly Restricted Fertility’, 183. Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Learning & Living: Socialisation Outside School’, Oral History 3, no. 2 (1975): 20; Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 47–8. Elizabeth Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 212; McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 190. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 11, 12, 26, 44, 138; Fletcher, Growing Up in England, 30, 31, 50. Viscountess Rhondda [M.H. Thomas], This Was My World (London: Macmillan and Co., 1978), 40. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 4. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 221. Rhondda, This Was My World, 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 6. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 14, 44; Fletcher, Growing Up in England, 30, 244. Rhondda, This Was My World, 15, 42–57, 77. Thompson and Lummis, Family Life and Work Experience before 1918, Interview 313. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Anderson,‘Highly Restricted Fertility’, 188, 194. Thompson and Lummis, Family Life and Work Experience before 1918, Interview 405. Elizabeth K. Blackburn, In and Out the Windows (Burnley: self—pub, 1980), 8. Ibid., 12, 20, 42. Ibid., 8–9. Falbo, ‘Only Children, A Review’, 3; Laybourn, The Only Child, 108; Bill McKibben, Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Very Small Families (London: Anchor, 1999), 22–3, 45; Lauren Sandler, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 163–4; Susan Newman, The Case for the Only Child: Your Essential Guide (Florida: Health Communications Inc., 2011), 223. Interview with George Baring by David Philips, 1990, NLSC: City Lives, C409/043 tape 1, © The British Library.

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As an Only Child I Must Have Been Lonely 79 Ibid. 80 Lars Andersson, ‘Loneliness Research and Interventions: A Review of the Literature’, Ageing & Mental Health 17 (2003): 165. 81 Dorothy Rowe, My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds (Sussex: Routledge, 2007), 297. 82 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 35; Vincent, History of Solitude, 20–1. 83 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 5, 35.

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19 LONELY IN A CROWD The Transformative Effect of School Culture in Schoolgirl and College Fiction Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer

When Kathleen O’Hara is sent by her aunt from a remote part of Ireland to the Great Shirley School in England, the unfamiliar environment results in a visceral longing to return home:‘Her heart was beating wildly; she had a strange medley of feelings within. She was desperately, madly lonely. She was homesick in the most intense sense of the word’.1 L.T. Meade’s school story, frst published in 1902, refects the familiar pattern of a new girl at a school, fnding her way into acceptance by existing friendship groups. The culture of schooling extended beyond formal lessons into the values and expectations of both pupils and teachers and indeed the traditions of the school or college itself. While the signifcance of associated codes of behaviour may have been recognisable to pupils, such codes might be indecipherable to those trying to establish a sense of personal well-being in their new institutional surroundings. As with many similar narratives, Kathleen makes many mistakes and irritates her peers and her teachers. She counters the despair of loneliness by setting herself up as a rebel, unwilling to ft in to the expectations of school traditions. However, after a series of misadventures, she overcomes her sense of dislocation from her new environment and is accepted into the school community, her individuality modifed but not lost. The closing chapter asserts that she became the ‘most popular girl in the school. Her talents were of the most brilliant order; her very faults seemed in one way to add to her charms’.2 All parties are transformed for the better by their encounter that was initially compromised by the emotion of loneliness. The rise of literacy and wider provision of state-funded schooling from the end of the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States encouraged leisure reading that can be examined in relation to the moral or emotional education that it provided. Maria Nikoljeva argues that we engage with literary characters’ emotions because ‘our brains can simulate other people’s goals in the same manner as it can simulate our own goals, irrespective of whether these “others” are real or fctional’.3 The girls’ school and college story in the frst half of the twentieth century has been parodied, dismissed and neglected as a form of informal education for a wide readership.4 The consistency and popularity of the genre offers an insight into the construction of girlhood and its emotions that were recognized as relevant to its young teenage audience. The following chapter explores the way that individual characters are portrayed as being alone or lonely within fctional institutional settings. The chapter is informed by Montserrat

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Guibernau’s notion of communities of belonging.5 It draws on examples from popular literature in both the United States and Britain to identify how loneliness, as well as its resolution, was presented to readers with a range of schooling experience, all of whom were in the process of learning to negotiate the complex and changing terrain of female sociability.6 The chapter argues that despite the changing context of young girls’ reading over 50 years, including two world wars and signifcant developments in women’s roles, the emotion of adolescent female loneliness is remarkably consistent across time and place. The chapter considers how seven fctional characters present to their readers the emotional turmoil that isolation and loneliness induces and offers to readers experiencing similar emotions resolutions to their unhappiness. The single-sex communities of learning that provided the setting for the school and college genre refect the gender expectations of their time; the powerful emotion of loneliness is examined as one aspect of the relationships that emerge in the girls’ school and college stories. Fay Bound Alberti’s Biography of Loneliness emphasized the signifcance of age in terms of the impact of loneliness: ‘Crucially loneliness forged in childhood and adolescence seems to set a pattern for loneliness in later life’.7 This observation makes the investigation of how young girls might have learned how to combat or avoid loneliness in adolescence all the more pertinent. School and college stories offered a window into learning about loneliness. Individual readers, perhaps coping with their own sense of alienation from unfamiliar or uncongenial school environments, might have found some solace within their sense of belonging to fctional school communities. Bound Alberti defned loneliness as ‘a blend of different emotions that might range from anger, resentment, and sorrow to jealousy, shame, and self-pity’.8 The experience of loneliness as exemplifed by Meade’s Kathleen is described as both psychological and physical.9 The examples that follow demonstrate how authors created characters whose sense of dislocation led them to display diffcult behaviour. They also showed how existing members of the communities induced such feelings in those who did not conform and policed the behaviour of existing members. While unwelcoming behaviour directed to new members of the community might appear heartless and not in tune with the feminine trait of care for others, those who exclude newcomers may do so in order to protect existing communities from disruption and change. In the fctions, it appears that loneliness is dispelled by acts of friendship and redemption. Signifcantly, in narratives across the period, both the lonely individual and the community are changed by the initial crisis brought about by the introduction of the new girl or a perceived transgression by an established student and made stronger by her resultant integration. Guibernau articulated the expectations that entry into a community demands from the individual who is expected to conform and follow its rules, to be loyal to its principles and aims, and to accept its dogmas and hierarchy so that a sentiment of solidarity can emerge . . . self-identifcation with the community’s values and objectives becomes paramount.10 The stories illustrate how the authors assumed that readers would recognize the strength and discomfort of the emotion of loneliness. Plotlines highlighted how being excluded could overwhelm a member of that community until they learned the beneft of giving up ‘a substantial degree of personal freedom in exchange for the security and warmth associated with group membership’.11 There are two sides to the emotion of loneliness that can be found in the stories—the selfimposed loneliness of the girl who sets herself apart from the community and the isolation

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imposed by the community, or a powerful subgroup of its members, on the individual who is thought to have transgressed the community norms. A frequent trope in the British stories was that of ‘sending to Coventry’, where those who refused to conform were ostracized until they were willing to return to the fold. Although not named as such, the American stories highlighted similar behaviour to ensure compliance to established codes within the community. The examples come from a range of school and college novels from Britain and the United States that portray loneliness, either self-imposed or enforced by the community, in a variety of ways. They are presented in chronological order, published across the frst half of the twentieth century, and demonstrate how authors used the intensity of loneliness to generate emotional engagement with their readers.

Priscilla Peel, by L.T. Meade (1891) At the end of the nineteenth century, characters in the stories of elite girls’ schools and colleges were disenfranchised and unlikely to anticipate earning their own living. Many of their readers, who were possibly further down the social scale, would have recognized in the school and college stories a world outside their own practical experience, but the emotional turmoil of belonging negotiated by the fctional girls might well have touched a chord. In England, stories about middle-class girls’ day high schools and elite boarding schools would have reached a readership whose own experience of education might have been either a private governess or a state-funded elementary school. In the United States, readers would have been likely to have attended public primary school and could have gone on to secondary education, as access to both expanded rapidly from the mid-nineteenth century into the frst decades of the twentieth. However, the negotiation of friendship among peers and entry into society beyond the home could be very real concerns about the process of growing up and the stories explained how feelings of isolation might be managed or understood. Bound Alberti observed that ‘Victorian novels were full of lonely characters, in search of psychological growth and freedom while pitted against a hostile and uncaring world’.12 Many of Meade’s prolifc output of stories for girls drew on such settings, and in Sweet Girl Graduate, she sets the context of the plot as the antagonism between Priscilla (the poor new arrival at the exclusive girls’ college of St Benet’s) and those who are led by the clever but mean-spirited Maggie.13 Loneliness is central to the plot as an emotion to be both recognized and overcome. Priscilla’s younger sister Katie wails,‘I am so lonely’, at the prospect of being left behind but is admonished: ‘But you are not going to be selfsh, darling’. Priscilla echoes Bound Alberti’s sense of self against the world as she anticipates her new life: ‘She was going out into the world tomorrow, and she was quite determined that the world should not conquer her, although she knew she was a very poor maiden with an especially heavy load of care on her young shoulders’.14 Priscilla’s reason for attending St Benet’s was to gain an education so that she could provide a home for her orphaned family, placing her at a disadvantage to the other more moneyed girls. But initially, it is Priscilla herself who, as a self-protection measure, stands aloof from her peers. On arrival, she feels awkward, homesick and out of place, and her intense feeling of loneliness makes uncomfortable reading: I feel sick and lonely and horrid . . . I’m positively shaking, I can scarcely speak, I can scarcely think properly . . . Don’t I just loathe myself! How hideously I do my hair, and what a frightful dress I have on! . . . I wish I weren’t going to dinner, I wish, oh, I wish I were at home again.15

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Meade describes the physical and the psychological effects of alienation in an unfamiliar environment, and although Priscilla’s sense of being out of place is partially resolved, the end of the story sees her give up an academic future in favour of ‘duty before inclination’.16 Priscilla has set herself apart from the other girls (who have also contributed to this exclusion), creating a self-imposed emotion of loneliness. Her personal experience of the loneliness of leaving home eventually benefts both the family to whom she willingly returns and the institution that she leaves.

Grace Harlowe, by Jessie Graham Flower (1911) In the American school stories, girls experience loneliness most often caused by the actions of other students. The author Josephine Chase (1883–1931) wrote two school and college series under two different pseudonyms—Jessie Graham Flower, A.M., and Pauline Lester.17 Each of the two series featured a central character and her satellites. In Grace Harlowe’s Sophomore Year of High School, basketball is the main device used to move along the narrative. The reader is presented with a plot whereby the heroine reluctantly chooses self-imposed loneliness in order to stand for sense of justice. This served to remind the reader that unthinking conformity to a powerful, if misguided, crowd was not an easy way out of isolation. Teams representing each class (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) in the high school compete against one another. The biggest rivalry is between the sophomore and junior classes. Grace has been elected captain of the sophomore team, much to the dismay of Miriam Nesbit, although Grace’s status among her teammates is secure. ‘The members of the team adored their gray-eyed, independent young captain’.18 However, rough seas lay ahead for their intrepid leader. The juniors won the frst game of the series decisively. Grace feels that every time she used one of their secret signals, the juniors knew what play had been called. The juniors won convincingly, outscoring the sophomores 17 to 2. To add injury to insult, Julia Crosby, the junior captain, slyly tripped Grace as she drove to the basket, causing a serious ankle injury.19 A few days later, while the team is visiting Grace as she recuperates, Miriam declares that the juniors had obtained the list of plays Grace had written down and given to Anne. Grace stops an accusation from being levelled and holds a meeting of the team when she returns to school. At the meeting, Grace explains that Anne had innocently lost the list of plays. But Miriam plants seeds of doubt among her teammates and sets them against Grace. Grace defends Anne, which costs her not only her popularity but also threatens her position as team captain. As Grace explains to Mrs Gray (an elderly friend and benefactor), I frmly believe that all will come right in the end, and I think the girls will get tired of their grudge and gradually drop it. Of course, it hurts to be snubbed, but I guess we can stand it. We have some friends who are loyal, at any rate.20 The second game against the juniors takes place shortly after Thanksgiving and the sophomores narrowly win, thanks to an undeniably brilliant play by Miriam that lays the groundwork for her attempt at a coup for the captaincy. Grace is increasingly made peripheral to class activities.21 This loss of social status and infuence leads to Grace feeling lonely, as she is separated from class and team gatherings. Miriam is determined to oust Grace from the captain’s role but enlists her supporters to do the deed. A group of team members gather to write a letter to Grace demanding her resignation. Grace’s friends Nora and Jessica encounter them en route to the meeting and agree that their classmates are up to no good. Nora exclaims, Those girls have given Grace the cold shoulder more than ever, since the game. They have been following Miriam about like a lot of sheep. Grace notices it, too, and it makes her unhappy, only she’s too proud to say so.

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Meanwhile, Grace discusses the team with Nora and Jessica, saying: I am so proud of my team, even though they haven’t been very nice to me lately. My whole desire is for them to win the fnal game. I suppose a captain has about the same feeling toward her players that a mother has toward her daughters. She is willing to make any sacrifce in order to make fne girls of them.22 This comment seems to point to a specifcally feminine view of community as family that would be understood by and engage with a young female readership. Anne compliments Grace’s leadership, and Grace’s response underscores the feeling of separation from her team and the loneliness that ensued from it. Grace is ‘pleased with the words of praise from her friend, for the bitterness of her recent unpopularity had made her heart heavy’.23 Soon after this conversation, Grace receives a note from several members of the team, requiring her resignation as captain. After a spirited defence from Anne, Grace speaks to the team, refusing their demand and reluctantly setting herself at a distance from the rest of the team. There is no sacrifce I wouldn’t make to keep up the team’s good work, and that is the reason why I am going to make a sacrifce, now, and decline to resign. If I had been a poor captain, you would have had a right to ask for my resignation. But I haven’t. I have been a good, hard-working, conscientious captain, and I have made a success of the team. None of you can deny it. If you took a new captain at this stage it might ruin everything, and I tell you I have thought too much about it; I have set my heart on it so frmly that it would just break if we lost the deciding game.24 Grace adds, it will be a sacrifce for me to keep on being your captain when you don’t want me. It’s no fun, I can assure you. Perhaps none of you has ever felt the hurt that comes of being turned out by people who were once fond of you. I hope you never will. I am still fond of all of you, and some day, perhaps, you will see that you have made a mistake.25 The team members feel ashamed of their action and one by one cross their signatures from the letter. Miss Thompson, the high school principal, overhears Grace’s speech and describes how proud she is of the stalwart captain and her defence of her principles.26 Despite her brave stand, Grace does not fully return to the fold and Anne remains under suspicion. The entire story demonstrates the complex negotiations that occur between individuals in the mitigation of loneliness and the continued strength of a community through the integrity of its members. One fnal step remained to restore Grace to her popular status and end her self-imposed loneliness. As the fnal rivalry game unfolds, in typical school-story fashion, Grace cannot join her team because she has been locked in a classroom. Grace breaks a window, climbs out on a ledge and is rescued by two friends who have come to look for her. She gets back in time for the start of the game, which the sophomores narrowly win. Grace’s redemption is complete, as she is lauded by her classmates and praised by the principal.27 The community of schoolgirls becomes whole again, having learned from their judgment of Grace and Anne. Grace had staked her position based on her beliefs and commitment to her friend, which had led to her exclusion

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from the team and the larger school community, resulting in deep loneliness, even as a small group of friends stood by her. Ultimately, Grace’s heroic status is reclaimed as she is rescued from the loneliness of exclusion.

Gwen Gascoyne, by Angela Brazil (1914) Angela Brazil (1868–1947), like Meade, wrote a vast number of stand-alone school stories that introduced a new set of characters to a British audience in each novel.28 Readers did not have the opportunity to see the depth of character development available to affcionados of the series books such as the Grace Harlowe school and college stories, but each novel contains a clear moral lesson in learning to be part of a day- or boarding-school community. The stories set in day schools offer an insight into the overlapping and sometimes contradictory worlds of home and school, as the heroines learned to face the world beyond the safety of their family. The sense of disjuncture that could engender the emotion of loneliness within the school community is the vehicle for the plot of Brazil’s The Youngest Girl in the Fifth. This novel departs from the trope of the new girl’s acceptance into a new community to explore the hierarchical structure of school life. Guibernau identifes the importance of community structures and hierarchies, and in this story, Gwen’s academic prowess results in her promotion to the next class in the middle of term. Such a challenge to the hierarchy of the community creates anxiety amongst the existing ffth form who decide that Gwen should be ‘sent to Coventry’ in order to emphasize the enormity of her transgression (through no fault of her own). In all the annals of the school such a case had never occurred before. It had been hitherto an inviolable though unwritten law which they had believed was as strict as that of the Medes and Persians, and here was the headmistress actually breaking it, and in favour of a girl only fourteen and a quarter.29 The ffth form not only challenge convention but also question how the headmistress can go against tradition and community norms. Brazil uses the plot to explore Gwen’s coming of age as she makes her way among the older girls and ultimately also fnds a new role within her family that requires her to give up her schoolwork and possibly her dream of college. The reader sees Gwen display the emotions of anger, resentment, sorrow, jealousy, shame and self-pity that Bound Alberti defnes as contributing to a sense of loneliness. Ignored by both her old friends in the junior school and her new classmates, Gwen fnds life very lonely. At lunch her peers, ‘behaved as if unaware of her presence, and talked to each other across her as though she was non existent’.30 Gwen’s reaction is to assert her independence which further annoys her new peer group. When another fellow pupil observes that she has not been welcomed, Gwen snaps, ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to talk to them, thanks! The Form can please itself whether it’s friendly or leaves me alone as far as I’m concerned’.31 Gwen’s isolation is reprieved after she uses her frst aid skills to help the schoolmistress leading a geological trip who has broken her leg. By doing this, Gwen is seen to be contributing to the community and there is a thaw in her classmates’ attitude towards the girl who ‘had so long been left out in the cold’.32 As Gwen starts to be accepted, Brazil notes the importance of belonging and the signs that showed how Gwen had become part of the community: ‘It was a new thing to be asked to lend her dictionary to Hilda Browne, to compare chemistry papers with Iris Watson, or to play a game of tennis with Elspeth Fraser.’33

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Parallel to her acceptance at school, Gwen also fnds her place in the family less awkward as she gives up school for three weeks to manage the household during her sister’s illness. Gwen tells herself: Look here Gwen Gascoyne, it’s rather a big sacrifce, but you’ve got to make it for once. With four daughters, Dad has a right to expect somebody to keep the house comfortable, and just at this critical moment you’re the only one available. It’s hard, but it’ll have to be. Your little ambition, my dear, must take a back seat for the present.34 This subplot of Brazil’s novel also highlights the gendered nature of belonging. By giving up her chance to succeed academically in order to take domestic responsibility, like Prissy in Meade’s story, Gwen loses her sense of dislocation from her family and contributes to the greater good. However, unlike Prissy, Gwen’s setback is temporary, and the book ends with her collecting academic prizes, her acceptance complete: Half-dizzy with emotion, Gwen returned to her place—these were the very same schoolfellows who, only one short year ago, had allowed her to walk down the hall without a sign of recognition or appreciation. From being the outcast of her Form, she had risen to the height of popularity.35 She had transcended the loneliness imposed by her schoolmates to triumph academically and to become part of the school community.

Daphne Maitland, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1921) Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s (1885–1970) imaginary school, the Jane Willard Foundation, provided the backdrop to the Dimsie stories and drew heavily on her own experience as a pupil at Clarence House School in London.36 The novels took Dimsie from nervous new girl, through the ffth form, to the role of head girl and ultimately to wife and mother. Each of the stories presented a different stage in the dilemmas facing girls and young women in the mid-twentieth century. Fairlie Bruce drew on societal concern over the heightened emotion of the ‘schoolgirl crush’ in the interwar period in the Dimsie series.37 Dimsie and her friends set up the Anti Soppist Society in order to combat the problems of over-emotional attachment to senior girls. This plot line served two purposes: it demonstrated to the reader the meaning and importance of true friendship in relation to the wider community and its accompanying sense of belonging and it discouraged exclusive friendship between two individuals that acted to exclude others to the detriment of the wider community.38 Even in a fctional school setting young girls were bound by a strict set of rules and a code of behaviour established by those in authority, yet they were still able to exert the power to isolate an individual if they disapproved of her actions. Guibernau’s discussion of belonging resonates with the themes that Sarah J. Sneddon identifed as common to the school story:‘the government of a community, the dilemmas of leadership, the importance of an individual’s adaptability and the extent to which conformity is part of communal living’.39 A signifcant plot line in the frst of the series, Dimsie Goes to School, centres around the new headmistress’s decision to reduce the amount of time devoted to games. When Dimsie’s cousin, Daphne, a senior prefect, supports the headmistress, the senior girls decide that she will be persuaded to change her mind if she is ignored inducing a sense of isolation and loneliness. ‘[P]opularity meant a lot to Daphne Maitland, and hitherto she had always been popular’.40 Daphne’s experience of being sent to Coventry by her 286

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peers demonstrates awareness by the author and her readers of the effect of isolation imposed by others can have on an individual. Initially ‘made thoroughly miserable’ by the actions of her peers, she then reacts angrily to the note sent informing her that she will be ignored ‘until that list of yours is removed from the noticeboard in the Hall’. Daphne reacts ‘bitterly’ and proclaims, ‘Nothing on earth shall induce me to take down that notice now.’41 She is described as being both ‘sore’ and ‘sensitive’ as her imposed isolation is enforced; one of the juniors observes how ‘humiliated’ she must feel. When one of her friends does engage her in conversation, Daphne reminds her that she is currently a ‘social outcast’.42 As the plot unravels it becomes clear that it is in fact the girl who imposed the sentence on Daphne, Nita Tomlinson, who is the real loner, exhibiting jealousy and more concerned with revenge for imagined slights than a desire to conform. Nita’s self-isolation from her classmates and the unhappiness of loneliness continues in Dimsie Moves Up. It is only in the closing pages that Nita shows any redeemable qualities when she saves Dimsie from drowning. Her comments demonstrate the loneliness that is created by unpopular acts when she observes to Dimsie:‘I know all you kids think me a pretty average villain. . . . I don’t think much of anybody in this precious establishment, on the whole, you’re the least offensive.’43 Nita will never fully be accepted by her peers, and the reader may learn that jealousy is itself a sign of loneliness. In the end, Sylvia Drummond, Daphne’s great friend and the head girl, returns to Jane’s after a lengthy illness. She enlightens her form mates about how wrong they have been about Daphne. As the school celebrates Armistice Day, a cheer is raised to Daphne, who is embraced by the entire school, her false exclusion and its incumbent loneliness at an end.

Leslie Cairns, by Pauline Lester (1922–1926) The most extreme example of being cast out with the loneliness that accompanied it in the Marjorie Dean novels was the long saga of Leslie Cairns. Readers frst encountered Leslie when Marjorie went off to study at Hamilton College. Readers followed Leslie as she moved from being at the heart of the in-crowd, to being ostracized, to leaving college, to returning to hover on the periphery of college life, to ultimate redemption and being embraced by those she once shunned.44 The transformation of Leslie from vile villain to cherished friend evolves over ten of the books in the fourteen-book series. Marjorie and Leslie frst cross paths in Marjorie Dean, College Freshman. Leslie is the leader of a group of very wealthy, snobbish students who dominate campus life. Marjorie seeks to bring a democratizing infuence to the campus and crosses swords with Leslie and her group. The wealthy San Soucians, and their leader in particular, do not want to lose their control on campus, and they resent anyone who was not their social (and economic) equivalent. Multiple skirmishes between the two groups form part of the narrative, coming to a head in Marjorie Dean College Sophomore. Leslie’s determination to derail the efforts of Marjorie and her friends leads to the Sans effectively kidnapping Marjorie. Marjorie, keen to endorse the importance of belonging to the college community, does not report the hazing incident. But Leslie’s worst fears come to pass when a former member of the Sans, who had been ousted from the group for not being discreet about their actions, sends a letter to the college president detailing the events and those who had been involved in them. When called before the board of trustees, Marjorie admits that she had been captured by a group of students but does not name any specifc perpetrators, upholding her personal code of honour. Nonetheless, only a few months before their graduation date, Leslie and the remaining members of the Sans are expelled.45 She, of course, blames Marjorie for this event, refusing to acknowledge that her own actions led to her fate. 287

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Leslie continues to harbour resentment against Marjorie and returns to the town of Hamilton to plot her revenge. Meanwhile, Marjorie and her friends, known as the Travelers, have become aware of the plight of less-fortunate students and have begun to raise money to help them fnancially. They also determine to build a dormitory that would be available to these students at subsidised rates and would be located closer to campus than boarding houses in town. Leslie learns of plans to purchase a site on which to build the dormitory and promptly undercuts those plans by purchasing the site and planning to build a garage for student cars on it. If Leslie Cairns had been graduated from Hamilton College, instead of having been expelled from it she would have probably lost all interest in it. Her contrary disposition caused her to value, too late, that which she had irretrievably lost by her own unworthiness. Not for worlds would she have confessed that she cared a button about the forfeited diploma. Nevertheless, she cared. The diploma would have meant her father’s proud favor. It was galling to her to know that she had been the one to close the gates of Hamilton College against herself. That particular bitter refection boosted her interest in Hamilton as nothing else could have done. It also strengthened an ignoble desire toward any malicious mischief which her willing hand might fnd to do.46 Leslie starts to realize that she has created her own lonely state by her actions. The author engages the readers’ emotions in order for them to empathize with Leslie, who had recognized what she has lost and how it has led to her exclusion and loneliness. Feeling lonely, Leslie ends up sneaking into a campus dance, in which everyone wore a disguise, and when she is on the verge of being discovered, she is rescued by Marjorie Dean, now a postgraduate, on site to oversee the philanthropic efforts of the Travelers. Determined to prove herself to her father, Leslie begins to change, especially once she learns that Marjorie had saved her at the dance. ‘In spite of the wilful [sic] and malicious attempts she had made against Marjorie’s welfare and peace of mind, “Bean”, it now appeared had no grudge against her.’47 When the two meet by chance off campus, Leslie apologizes to Marjorie for all she had done. ‘ “I’ve just one thing to tell you. I wish you’d believe me. I’m all through trying to make trouble for you at Hamilton or any place else.” Leslie’s earnestness was unmistakable.’48 Leslie’s journey, as yet incomplete, has brought her from a lonely exile back into the company of other college women. Leslie credits Marjorie with her transformation, but it has not occurred without a lot of thoughtful soul searching on her part. A friendly act on Marjorie’s part, the prompting of a broad tolerant spirit had been the magic which had worked a well-nigh unbelievable change in Leslie. It is often the small, seemingly unimportant happenings in life which frequently are instrumental in working the most amazing transformations.49 Marjorie has come to believe there was good in Leslie and helped Leslie fnd that quality in herself. Leslie reconciles with her father, a successful businessman, and assures him,‘I’m going to lead a noble life from now on.’50 He challenges her to fnd something that will beneft the college to be built on the land intended for the garage. Ultimately, Leslie offers to build a playhouse and present it to Hamilton College. Addressing her change of heart and direction, ‘ “Blame it on Bean”, Leslie said with a shadow of her old satiric smile. “She can change anything. She even put over the great transformation on me”.’51 A friend of Marjorie’s and Leslie’s predicts Leslie’s redemption, saying, ‘The way will open for her. You’ll see. She is trying earnestly to think of 288

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everyone but herself. And that is truly the only sure road to the heart’s desire.’52 Leslie has come full circle, overcoming her own fawed and despicable character to become a full member of the college community and a force for good. Her self-imposed loneliness is mitigated by her return to the community, and both she and the college are improved by this transformation.

Nancy Greer, by Ethel Talbot (1930) Ethel Talbot’s (1880–1944) Nancy—New Girl describes the experiences of the title character as she endures a self-imposed loneliness. In this case, she demonstrates to the reader the inadvisability of trying to ft in by pretending to be something they are not. To ft in to a community requires a genuine change of heart rather than superfcial lip service to community expectations.53 The book opens with a classic school story description of a hockey match, in which, ‘Nancy Greer, the youngest centre forward any Captain of St Bride’s had ever selected for its frst team, was the most noticeable player on the feld. Alive, alert, all there, every scrap of her was given to the game.’54 She scores the only goal that gives St Bride’s the win over a rival school and is celebrated by the entire school. Everything at St Bride’s is about games, and Nancy and her schoolmates focus on little else. Nancy returns home still triumphant, but her elation is cut short when she sees how ill her father is. They have a conversation, which would prove to be their last. Her father encourages her and says,‘I hope, darling, that you’ll get all the good that’s to be got out of school’. He continues, reminding her not to let herself be blinded by focusing on one thing at the expense of others.55 Nancy realizes that there was more to school than games and resolves not to be ‘blinded’ by games when she returns to school. It turns out that Nancy would not be returning to St Bride’s, as her aunt, now her guardian, explains. The family cannot afford for her to continue at St Bride’s, so she is to go to St Mary’s, a school closer to home. Her aunt assures her that she chose this school ‘because it’s a school that’s specially keen on games’.56 On her journey to St Mary’s, Nancy resolves to recast herself: ‘I shan’t think of games all the time.’57 Her resolve is tested almost immediately, as she falls into conversation with a group of girls on the train. When asked if she were keen on games, Nancy replies,‘No, I’m not fearsomely keen’, a statement that would mark her as different from the other girls.58 Refecting on her time at St Bride’s, Nancy ‘had never felt lonely there, never, not from the beginning. That her interest in games had been the touch-stone of her success at St Bride’s Nancy realized now to the full.’59 Nancy regretfully takes her stand and confrms to Dorothy, the games captain, that she will not be playing hockey at St Mary’s despite her previous success at games.60 Other girls in her dormitory are angry at Nancy, who they think told Dorothy that they had mistreated her on the train ride to the school. They had ignored her and dismissed her when she said that she was not keen on games. Nancy, left to herself and feeling as much like a stranded desert-island as Robinson Crusoe himself—only worse; for loneliness in multitudes is far worse than loneliness in solitude; and, somehow, Nancy felt very much apart from the girls of her new school.61 If one is lonely on a deserted island, there is no alternative to that condition (save changes to one’s outlook). But being alone while surrounded by others offers constant reminders of one’s situation and underscores its emotional impact. Nancy has a conversation with Gertrude, who plays the violin and holds herself apart from any connection to games. The two have become companions. But Nancy has agreed to coach Sylvia, the weak centre forward, to help the school. Gertrude considers that Nancy has abandoned her, and Nancy tries to explain, ‘I left games altogether, because it seemed all-in-all or 289

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not-at-all. I couldn’t see a middle way. Now I do, I think, or I’m beginning to.’62 Nancy realised ‘that the games half of her was as strong as ever, yet it wasn’t all of her, and she didn’t want it to be all of her’.63 By helping the school by coaching Sylvia, who is of course instrumental in a huge victory for the team, Nancy understands that she no longer needs to hold herself apart from games, recognizing that her skills and knowledge can beneft both herself and her new community. Her participation in the preparation for the big game provides a path to her reintegration with her schoolmates. At the end of the book, she tells Dorothy that she will put herself down for games next term. Moreover, Gertrude fnally lowers the walls she has built and agrees to provide the music for the form’s play that they are performing for charity. Talbot’s novel offers a prime example of self-imposed loneliness, as well as showing how characters can be redeemed from loneliness and returned to the greater group.

Eustacia Benson, by Elinor Brent Dyer (1930) Elinor Brent-Dyer (1894–1969) authored the Chalet School series.64 The series generated a fan club and a series of newsletters that ran from 1959 to 1969 and offers some insight into the informal emotional or ethical effect that the novels had on their readers.65 While the plots were fction, the attitudes of their characters clearly resonated with their avid readers with one commenting that they ‘are not just school stories: they are an entire way of life’.66 Brent-Dyer introduced another schoolgirl who creates her own loneliness by holding herself apart from her form and the school: the strikingly arrogant Eustacia Benson of the Chalet School. The opening line of Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School begins quite differently from most other books in that series: ‘There is no disguising the fact that Eustacia Benson was the most arrant little prig that ever existed.’67 Eustacia is the only child of an Oxford professor of classics and a doctor—who essentially allowed Eustacia to raise herself. She is well read but emotionally immature. Both of her parents died and Eustacia goes to live with her aunt and uncle (and their fve sons), who determine to send her away to the Chalet School to which Eustacia goes in due course, though not happily. Eustacia does not ft in well at the school, with her superior attitude and disregard for rules that inconvenienced her, quickly seeing herself pitted against a community she does not understand. Eustacia would much rather read than participate in communal winter walks; as Brent-Dyer explains, ‘In common with many bookish people she had a hatred of exercise, and loathed the idea of a long walk’.68 She seeks out a place to read, taking the key to the science lab from the staff room and lets herself into the lab. She knocks over a jar of clear liquid and screams—one of the other girls comes running and thinks it was hydrochloric acid, so she too panics. They run for Miss Wilson, the science mistress, who determines that it is a jug of distilled water. Once the girls calm down, Eustacia is interviewed by Miss Annersley (the head) and Miss Wilson. Eustacia does not see that she has done anything wrong, even when the mistresses explain that she had betrayed the trust between the staff and the pupils that underpinned the values of the community. Eustacia keeps repeating,‘ “I wanted somewhere to read”’.69 Eustacia is sent off to bed and cries herself to sleep. When Matron comes by with her supper, she sees the sleeping child and feels sorry for her. ‘The domestic tyrant of the School set down her tray, and drew the clothes around Eustacia with a softer expression than most people had seen on her face.’70 Matron sees the effect of Eustacia’s self-imposed loneliness and recognizes the deep effect this separation from other schoolgirls will have. After a series of adventures that set the girls even more against Eustacia, she decides to run away and return to England, where she would announce how terrible the Chalet School is. She 290

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leaves a note blaming Jo, the central character of the entire Chalet series, for all her woes. But Eustacia’s plans go badly awry, and she is almost swept away in a food when heavy rains cause a dam to break. She manages to climb onto a rock ledge but slips into unconsciousness. As a result of her misadventures, she has a severely injured back, that requires her to be on extended bed rest, where she begins to see herself in a new light, determining to be a better member of the school:‘the new Eustacia wasn’t sure that, even with her beloved books, she could altogether make light of her sentence’.71 She decides to become Stacie and start anew, a journey Jo vows to help her navigate. In The Chalet School and Jo, we meet a new Eustacia, now known as Stacie. Her injuries and lengthy recovery have brought about a change in disposition, and she has begun to make connections and build friendships among the other students. Jo, now head girl, proposes that Stacie take on the work of editing the school magazine during her recuperation. The prefects do not immediately embrace this idea, but Jo realizes that acceptance by other schoolgirls would be a valuable part of Stacie’s recovery. The prefects remain reluctant, asking Jo: ‘why Stacie?’ ‘Because she’s got brains when she cares to use ’em’, returned Jo. ‘She can write when she likes. She’s fearfully methodical. . . . Last of all, she made a rotten beginning, and she’s got a nice punishment for it all! I want to give her a hand if I can, and I think this would be a decent way of doing it’.72 Stacie’s transformation from the ‘arrant prig’ who frst arrived at the Chalet School to a girl who appreciates her schoolmates and seeks to join in with them makes it possible to recognize her intellectual prowess as a positive attribute and gives her a place in the school community.

Conclusion This analysis of examples from British and American school and college novels for an adolescent female readership reveals a strikingly consistent portrayal of the emotion of loneliness in the frst half of the twentieth century. The stories demonstrate that there are two nuanced aspects to the construction and experience of loneliness. In all of these stories, the lonely character is ultimately redeemed and welcomed into or restored to a place in the community with shared values. While the stories do not suggest that individuality is undesirable, they do stress the importance of a cohesive community and the potential for individual contributions to transform the community and themselves to mutual advantage. Belonging is central to the worlds created in school and college stories. Those who do not belong, whether they have been isolated by their own choice (Prissy, Nancy and Eustacia) or excluded by their peers (Gwendolyn, Grace, Leslie and Daphne), must negotiate their entry or re-entry so that it, and they, can become whole. Firstly, there is the loneliness that is self-imposed by those who do not wish to conform or feel that they do not ft in to the community in which they fnd themselves. Decisions about schooling were unlikely to have been made by the pupils themselves, and on frst sight, they may have felt overwhelmed by a community with complex or apparently unintelligible codes of behaviour. Leisure fction provided a vehicle for them to recognize that their emotions were not unique and offered them an insight into the community perspective whose members might have been wary of the challenge presented by the values or attitudes of a newcomer. The resolution of the stories ended with the newcomer recognizing how their skills could beneft the community and the advantages that belonging brought with it. At the same time, the community also accepted some change to their ways of being as a result. 291

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Secondly, the stories demonstrated a loneliness that was imposed either on a newcomer or, more often, by one existing group on an individual member who appeared to transgress dominant forms of behaviour and values. On closer inspection, in the fctions, this is usually because the newcomer or the central character challenges the way the community itself has moved away from its original modus operandi. While this was unlikely to affect readers directly, the resolution of the story that brings the community to recognize the admirable qualities of the one who was made to feel lonely or isolated would reassure readers that the individual voice could still be heard, and that conformity should only be expected if the core values of the institution were sound. This chapter has explored how authors of the school and college genre recognized that an effective method of connection with their readers was through careful manipulation of the representation of emotions. This device created empathy and engagement with their audience. The emotion of loneliness is used across time and place as one with which the reader might identify and would certainly recognize. That authors were able to translate these ideas into the widely read school and college story genre confrms that these stories offered an informal and important vehicle for the education of readers in emotional intelligence and experience.

Notes 1 L.T. Meade, The Rebel of the School (London & Edinburgh: W.R. Chambers, 1902), 35. 2 Ibid., 378. 3 Maria Nikolajeva, Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 83. 4 See, for example, Arthur Marshall, Giggling in the Shrubbery (London: Harper Collins, 1985). 5 Montserrat Guibernau, Belonging: Solidarity and Division in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 6 See, for example, Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Bullen, eds, Children’s Literature and the Affective Turn: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (London: Routledge, 2018), 9. 7 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 10. 8 Ibid., 6. 9 Ibid., 177. 10 Guibernau, Belonging, 1. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 32. 13 L.T. Meade wrote more than 200 books and is remembered primarily for her school stories. She is considered a pioneer of this genre. See Robert Dunbar, ‘Meade, L.T.’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), accessed 9 June 2021, www-oxfordreference-com.winchester.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780195146561.001.0001/ acref-9780195146561-e-2167?rskey=FmHA2d&result=2149. 14 L.T. Meade, Sweet Girl Graduate (London: Cassells, nd [fp 1891]), 11–12. 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 288. 17 Little biographical information is available about Chase, who seems to have maintained her anonymity right up until her death. The censuses for 1920 and 1930 indicated that she shared a house with her unmarried sister and worked as a writer (1920) and author (1930). See Josephine Chase in Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line] (Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010), accessed 12 May 2021, www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryui-content/view/68907631:6061? and in Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line] (Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002), accessed 12 May 2021, www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryui-content/ view/54078787:6224?. The obituary that appeared in the New York Times noted that the ‘author of the Grace Harlowe stories, that have thrilled schoolgirls for two decades, died suddenly’. The obituary included a curious statement from Chase: ‘ “The only time people will ever know I’m an author will be when I die and they write my obituary”, she once said’. See ‘Youths’ Author Dies at 46’, New York Times, 11 Feb. 1931, 22.

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Lonely in a Crowd 18 Jessie Graham Flower, A.M., Grace Harlowe’s Sophomore Year at High School (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1911), 51. 19 Ibid., 58–65. 20 Ibid., 109. 21 Ibid., chapters VIII–XI (85–121). 22 Ibid., 123–4 and 124. 23 Ibid., 125. 24 Ibid., 128–9. 25 Ibid., 129. 26 Ibid., 129–31. 27 Ibid., 182–99. The fnal resolution of the novel involves the end of the enmity between Miriam and Grace. 28 Angela Brazil is credited with establishing the genre of the girls’ school story, writing more than 40 novels, each with a separate cast of characters. As Rosemary Auchmuty notes, her ‘work is characterized by leisurely, episodic plotting, [and] a focus on character development’ and often featured travel and cultural experiences. See Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘Brazil, Angela’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), accessed 9 June 2021, www-oxfordreference-com.winchester.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780195146561.001.0001/ acref-9780195146561-e-0405?rskey=csRV1p&result=402. 29 Angela Brazil, The Youngest Girl in the Fifth (London: Blackie & Sons, 1914), 15. 30 Ibid., 33. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 Ibid., 190. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 282. 35 Ibid., 296. 36 Dorita Fairlie Bruce was a prolifc author of three series of school stories, including the Dimsie series. Deeply involved with the Girls’ Guildry, she lived in England and retired to Scotland. Rosemary Auchmuty writes,‘All Bruce’s fction deals with the conficts of community life, with particular emphasis on moral responsibility and intergenerational friendships’. See Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘Bruce, Dorita Fairlie’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), accessed 9 June 2021, www-oxfordreference-com.winchester.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195146561.001.0001/acref-9780195146561-e-0457?rskey=QfmzmK&result=454. Eva Margareta Lofgren, Schoolmates of the Long Ago: Motifs and Archetypes in Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Boarding School Stories (Stockholm: Symposium Graduale, 1993), 86. 37 See also Fairlie Bruce’s contemporary Elsie Oxenham’s story for The British Girl’s Annual, ‘Dicky’s Dilemma’ (London: Cassells, 1927). 38 Dorita Fairlie Bruce, ‘Dimsie Moves Up’, in The Dimsie Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). 39 Sarah J. Sneddon, ‘The Girls’ School Story: A Re-Reading’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998), 3. 40 Dorita Fairlie Bruce,‘Dimsie Goes to School’, in The Dimsie Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 114. 41 Ibid., 116. 42 Ibid., 131. 43 Dorita Fairlie Bruce, ‘Dimsie Moves Up’, in The Dimsie Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 253. 44 The books, written by Pauline Lester, appeared in two series that traced Marjorie’s high school years (New York: A.L. Burt, 1917) and college years (New York: A.L. Burt, 1922), followed by six postgraduate novels published between 1925 and 1930). See note 29 for biographical information. Pauline Lester was another pseudonym used by Josephine Chase, the author of the Grace Harlowe series. 45 Pauline Lester, Marjorie Dean College Junior (New York: A.L. Burt, 1922), 236. 46 Pauline Lester, Marjorie Dean Post-Graduate (New York: A.L. Burt, 1925), 157–8. 47 Pauline Lester, Marjorie Dean’s Romance (New York: A.L. Burt, 1925), 136. 48 Ibid., 172. 49 Ibid., 184–5. 50 Ibid., 192.

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Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer 51 Ibid., 222, 224. 52 Pauline Lester, Marjorie Dean Macy (New York: A.L. Burt, 1926), 26. 53 Ethel Talbot wrote adventure, Girl Guide and school novels. According to Dani Hall, ‘Her characters, both male and female, are well delineated emotionally, and she is particularly sensitive to the strong relationships that sometimes develop between younger and older girls’. See Dani Hall, ‘Talbot Ethel’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), accessed 22 Apr. 2021, www-oxfordreference-com.winchester.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195146561.001.0001/acref-9780195146561-e-3137?rskey=RCmVIQ&result=3116. 54 Ethel Talbot, Nancy: New Girl (London: Frederick Warne and Co., Ltd., 1930), 1–2. 55 Ibid., 10, 11. 56 Ibid., 15. 57 Ibid., 17. 58 Ibid., 22. 59 Ibid., 27. 60 Ibid., 30–2. 61 Ibid., 41, in a chapter called Loneliness. 62 Ibid., 94. 63 Ibid., 107. 64 Elinor Brent-Dyer wrote the 59-volume Chalet School series. She drew upon her experiences as a teacher and headmistress and, like her central character Jo Bettany, also wrote historical and adventure tales. See Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘Brent-Dyer, Elinor Mary’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), accessed 9 June 2021, www-oxfordreference-com.winchester.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780195146561.001.0001/ acref-9780195146561-e-0413?rskey=sVbvjI&result=410. 65 Chalet Club Newsletters (Radstock: Girls Gone By publishers, 1997). 66 Helen McClelland, Behind the Chalet School (Bognor Regis: Anchor, 1986), 180. 67 Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1956; reprint of 1930 edition), 9. 68 Ibid., 103. 69 Ibid., 146. 70 Ibid. 106–7. 71 Ibid., 314. 72 Brent-Dyer, The Chalet School and Jo (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1955), 48.

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20 ‘A PURER FORM OF LONELINESS’ Loneliness and the Search for Community Among Gay and Bisexual Men in Scotland, 1940–1980 Jeff Meek

In a recent Huffngton Post feature ‘Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness’, Michael Hobbes painted a grim portrait of the experiences of some gay men. According to Hobbes,‘while half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety’.1 What Hobbes suggests is that increasing legal recognition has not eliminated the otherworldly experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people (LGBT) and has not eliminated homophobia, the sense of isolation, experiences of anxiety or the social ostracism that have been a ubiquitous part of their lives. Further, as Hobbes concludes,‘There will always be more straight kids than gay kids, we will always be isolated among them, and we will always, on some level, grow up alone in our families and our schools and our towns’.2 Although, for many, the legal penalties for living as a gay or bisexual man have been removed, additional pressures to ‘ft’ in to a still-very-much heteronormative society remain. It is telling that Hobbes mentions loneliness or isolation ten times within his article, suggesting that these emotive challenges still exist and are not simply a relic of the past. What Hobbes describes are legacies of the past; a past within which loneliness, isolation, and ostracism played a central part in gay and bisexual men’s existence. These were not simply personal, introversive feelings but were shaped by a series of discourses which were dominant within mid-to-late-twentieth-century Britain. Recurring theoretical scholarship has tended to describe loneliness as a common feature of modern society in that industrialization, urbanization, post-industrialization and shifting meanings of community and friendship all have impacted upon concepts of loneliness, frmly positioning it as a quite modern phenomenon.3 Yet much of the history of emotion scholarship has tended to omit how sexuality, specifcally marginalized sexuality, shapes and is shaped by loneliness. Research focusing on the health and well-being of LGBT people has consistently found higher levels of loneliness, isolation and depression among the LGBT community.4 Indeed, older LGBT people are more likely to live alone, suffer detachment from their biological families and be child-free.5 Although loneliness and associated experiences are often described as an under-researched topic in history, it has been a consistent presence in the experiences of LGBT people in recent decades, both in terms of research focus, and in terms of common experiences.6 Jill Wilkens notes while loneliness is undoubtedly an aspect of many older people’s lives, it has DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-23

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particular salience and prevalence in the experiences of elder LGBT people.7 This is the result not only of historic legal sanctions against sex between men, which operated as a sweeping threat to the homosexual body but also as a result of the way in which homosexuality was conceptualized and discussed in the public realm. This chapter focuses on both the personal experiences of loneliness and isolation among gay and bisexual men who matured after the Second World War, and the dominant narratives attached to male homosexuality within society during that same period in an effort to understand just how loneliness became an embedded feature of male homosexual experience. It examines how homosexuality was positioned both as a result of loneliness and a cause of loneliness by examining the homosexual spy scandals of the 1950s; deliberations regarding homosexual law reform during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the manner by which the homosexual was discussed within parliaments and the press. Further, it explores just how gay and bisexual men themselves addressed these emotional and physical challenges in an effort to create a homosexual community that would offer some succour.

A Gay History of Loneliness In a House of Commons debate regarding the prosecution of homosexual offences in 1994, Dr Bob Spink, then Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Castle Point, framed homosexuality within a pejorative discourse that had been proselytised for some years. He stated that for ‘vulnerable and lonely teenage boys, homosexuality can offer immediate warmth and acceptance. There is a sense of identity and comradeship, but there is a price to pay—childlessness, instability, disease and now the mortal danger of AIDS.’8 Within this discourse, the lonely teenager may fall victim to the charms of homosexuality and embracing this will enable him to escape from despondency. But such community comes with signifcant risks. AIDS was the new moral weapon for anti-homosexual legislators in the 1980s and 1990s, but the moral and emotional dangers of homosexuality had been, for many years, thrust into moral and political discourse. The fact that such narratives were still evident in the 1990s is testament to their power. The genesis of a particular form of loneliness, gay loneliness, can in some ways be identifed as part of the shifts in society and culture that emerged from post–Second World War efforts to reset a society recovering from the ravages of war. As Lynn Abrams has noted, those women whose formative years straddled the 1950s and 1960s were part of a ‘transitional generation’ torn between social duty and the potential for self-fulflment.9 For young men, the war had disrupted family relationships, leaving many anxious about their roles within post-war society. Growing up or maturing within this culture meant being confronted with the new preoccupation of the British government, the heterosexual family and the ‘chief incubator of citizenship and community values’.10 For men who had engaged in sexual and romantic relationships with other men ‘under fre’, the return to post-war heterosexual normalcy came as more of a shock than a surprise. For some, their sexuality had been of little concern to their superiors during confict, so it was with some dismay that their sexual lives were now being conceptualized as degrading, destabilizing and immoral.11 Peter Wildeblood’s experiences perhaps offer an example of men who had come to recognize their and others homosexuality while at war but found peacetime Britain much less accepting. Wildeblood, a Daily Mail journalist, found himself embroiled in legal troubles after being arrested along with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1954 for homosexual offences. This highly publicized trial of three high-ranking members of post-war British society was the frst time that homosexuality had been given such a public and sensational airing. Not only had the trial thrust homosexuality into the public arena, but it also encouraged public discourse and offered tantalizing glimpses into the lives of British homosexuals.12 296

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Wildeblood explained in his testimony that he found comfort in his relationship with Royal Air Force (RAF) Airman Edward McNally, who provided affection to salve his ‘lonely moments’.13 After Wildeblood’s arrest in 1953, detectives seized letters between McNally and Wildeblood, which became key to the prosecutions. Loneliness is positioned as a critical factor in Wildeblood’s experience, noting in his post-prison memoir Against the Law that one of these letters was ‘a poor, trusting, foolish letter born of loneliness and a craving for affection’.14 When the letters were presented as evidence in court, Wildeblood could only remember ‘the loneliness and misery of the nights when I had written them, and my desperate hope that I could fnd, even in McNally, someone with whom to share my life’.15 This persistent reference to loneliness offered a stark representation of the homosexual man’s life in 1950s England, where Wildeblood sought affection, lamenting later,‘I was extremely lonely at that time.’16 Within this context Wildeblood’s loneliness, isolation and evident sadness fts neatly into L. Andersson’s defnition, which describes an enduring condition of emotional distress that arises when a person feels estranged from, misunderstood, or rejected by others and/or lacks appropriate social partners for desired activities, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy.17 Wildeblood’s desire to escape the emotional distress of the ‘dark territory’ he associates with his sexuality, forced him into activities which left him vulnerable to the actions of a repressive state.18 The homosexual had become a social and moral outlier whose sexual tastes were unpalatable to a British society aiming to restore the family and heterosexual domesticity as the central core of British nationhood. Loneliness here is perceived as a trigger, an emotional one, that forces the individual to seek some form of escape from his isolation. It refers to what might be termed emotional loneliness, while isolation is the result of social loneliness. Both of these concepts have a long history in the history of emotions, stretching back to Robert Stuart Weiss’ important 1973 study.19 Emotional loneliness is triggered by the absence of personal, intimate attachments, while social loneliness relates to the absence of a supportive, social connectedness.20 These links between loneliness, isolation and homosexual experience are found repeatedly in discussions and debates inside and outside of Parliament. The spy John Vassall was blackmailed into working for the Soviet Union by means of photographs taken of him in compromising position with other men. He received an 18-year sentence in 1962 for the crimes of passing information to an enemy while employed by the British Naval Attaché in Moscow in the 1950s.21 Vassall himself, in his tell-all feature in the Sunday Pictorial, identifed the root of his deception as occurring at his Boys’ School where ‘one night, after lights out in the dormitory, a boy crept into my bed to comfort me in my loneliness’.22 Whether Vassall’s loneliness here was triggered by being sent to boarding school, his burgeoning homosexuality or a lack of social support is anyone’s guess. Yet in a debate in the House of Commons in November 1962, Grenville Howard refected on why Vassall would be tempted to betray his nation by suggesting that, as a bachelor, he was lonely man and that so many of the young men working in Moscow were also bachelors.23 Within this debate ‘young bachelor’ takes on a much more loaded meaning, with such men seemingly ripe for exploitation. Homosexuality here is not viewed simply, if at all, as a sexual orientation but a means through which young men could be exploited. Loneliness here is also a trigger, which might drive ‘young bachelors’ into homosexual encounters, as in the case of Vassall, where feelings of isolation left him vulnerable to the actions of nefarious agents of the Soviet Union. The Vassall case refected wider anxieties about the dangers that homosexuals presented to the British state, prompted by the defection of Guy Burgess, another ‘homosexual spy’, to the Soviet Union in 1951.24 297

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Legislators’ evident concerns for the plight of lonely bachelors featured frequently in objections to homosexual law reform in debates in the 1960s. Stafford Northcote, Earl of Iddesleigh, commenting on the proposed Sexual Offences Bill, refected on the persistent dangers young men faced. He reminded the House of ‘how very lonely a young man of 21 may be’ suggesting that the departure from the family home and university thrust such men into environments they were not familiar with or prepared for. Such young men would be ‘lonely and a little bit in awe of life, and he would be very grateful to an older man who takes him up and shows him affection and kindness’. Nothing terribly out of sorts there other than prompting questions about why the British state would employ young bachelors in sensitive positions when they were so evidently unsuitable. Yet ‘if that older man is homosexually inclined’, Northcote continued, ‘he will have very great power to infuence that young man in the direction of homosexuality.’25 With such a scourge affecting young bachelors during the post-war period, it is very surprising that any ever left home at all. What is evident thus far is that loneliness itself has been viewed as a causal factor in immersion within marginalized behaviours and communities. However, other arguments were forwarded that suggested the manner by which homosexuality had been perceived and punished created loneliness. Leo Abse, the reforming MP for Pontypool, criticized the continued criminalization of homosexual acts in a 1966 debate on a proposed Sexual Offences Bill, citing the continued legal sanctions as being responsible for homosexual men’s intensifed social isolation through which they became ‘increasingly estranged’ and that ‘many retreat into a ghetto, cut off from involvement in the community, feeling hostility from the community’.26 Not only were homosexual men living in isolation, riddled with fear, but the illegality of their sexual lives, according to Roger Wilson, Bishop of Chichester, drove them into ‘a squalid underworld of suspicion and fear’, leading to the dangers of blackmail and ‘often enough to the tragedy of suicide’.27 Robert Boothby supplemented Wilson’s tale of woe by describing the ‘miasma of misery, squalor, tainted evidence, robbery and blackmail, which darkens the lives of too many people’.28 What is missing from these dark descriptions of homosexual life is the voice of the homosexual man, Wildeblood apart. And Wildeblood’s refections do little to suggest that the male homosexual experience in Britain was anything other than miserable. Alongside this however, a counterargument was emerging, one which painted homosexuals not as isolated, sad, lonely men but men who belonged to a supposed secret society which was organized and pernicious. Douglas Warth’s infamous series of articles,‘Evil Men’, which ran in the Sunday Pictorial between 25 May and 8 June 1952, painted a different picture, one which contrasted sharply with common perceptions of the period. Warth claimed, ‘Homosexuals support each other. Infuential ones will often go to extreme limits to compromise anybody who pries into their secret affairs.’29 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s ‘infuence’ obviously did not extend this far. Warth identifed male homosexual communities throughout England with members drawn from the ‘prominent’ to the ‘borstal boy’.30 Warth’s claims of established,‘supportive’ male homosexual communities seem at odds with many of the sad, lonely, isolated and pathetic narratives evident within parliament. If this was the case, his often-contradictory invective suggested that nonetheless the descent into moral turpitude was caused by ‘money. Then came loneliness and domestic unhappiness’.31 Again, here is the suggestion that loneliness acts as a trigger for immoral behaviour, not through a sense of victimhood but in terms of prompting predatory behaviour. Ironically, the young bachelors who fell victim to homosexual temptations became the very men who would prey on future young bachelors. Such a miserable tale seemed to lie at the heart of Lord Longford’s virulent homophobia in the late 1990s. He claimed,‘A lonely old homosexual is one of the most pathetic sights that I know. In my humble way I will do anything in my power to protest against anything that threatens the young adolescent boys of our time’.32 298

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The theme of loneliness as a representation of the homosexual experience was also evident in the parliamentary debates that followed the publication of the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (hereafter, the Wolfenden Report), which preceded the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalized sex between men in England and Wales. The Wolfenden Committee was convened in 1954 and undertook signifcant enquiries into the legal sanctions regarding homosexual offences in Britain, fnally reporting its outcomes in 1957.33 The recommendations were that all homosexual acts between consenting male adults in private be decriminalized. Yet decriminalization would only occur in England and Wales a decade later, and the report prompted signifcant discussions of its recommendations and the status of the homosexual in both Houses of Parliament. Kenneth Robinson, the MP for St Pancras North, lamented in a 1960 debate that the life of the homosexual led ‘so often to unhappiness, to loneliness and to frustration, because it entails in many cases heavy burdens of guilt and shame on those affected by it and because it seldom provides a basis for a stable emotional relationship’.34 In the House of Lords debate in May 1965, Lord Chorley remarked that the homosexual man should be afforded some sympathy as they lived in ‘deep loneliness, from which their psychological build-up prevents their seeking refuge in the sympathy and companionship of a woman. Are we to send them to prison for trying to obtain some sort of solace from their fellow men?’35 Central to these narratives is a reverse relationship between homosexuality and loneliness. Loneliness is the result of the actions of the repressive state and society; it is not the driver for homosexuality. The very state of being homosexual may create loneliness, as through punitive sanctions many men were actively prevented from forming intimate and social connections. The penalties for attempting to fnd either social or emotional connectedness ranged from frustration to imprisonment. While the opinions of legislators are helpful in building a picture of the social realities for gay and bisexual men in post-war Britain, how this discursive context shaped the experience of gay and bisexual men is less clear. Wildeblood’s focus on loneliness as a main factor in his relationship with Edward McNally may well have been shaped by the legal context in which it was delivered. Yet his book Against the Law did little to counter narratives which associated homosexuality with loneliness. Therefore, a wider analysis of gay and bisexual men’s experiences is necessary to develop a clearer picture of their experiences in post-war Britain.

A Purer Form of Loneliness When, in the mid-2000s, I interviewed two dozen gay and bisexual men who had experience of life in Scotland during the period 1940 to 1980, their testimonies painted a much richer portrait of homosexual life. Certainly, there was loneliness and isolation but there were also refections on intimacy, community, and gay homosociality. Yet the picture painted by Wildeblood and various MPs and peers of an isolated world in which gay and bisexual men moved is also refected in the recollections of Scottish men. Indeed, the ‘modern’ perspective offered by Michael Hobbes was a consistent experience for many gay and bisexual men living in post-war Britain. Samuel (b. 1947) acknowledged that his recognition of his homosexuality signifcantly differentiated and alienated him from his peers. He told me,‘I was very lonely and isolated, and they were all married and the people I knew at university, they were all in relationships or married and at 35. I was left on my own.’36 This sense of isolation or apartness was a consistent experience among the men I interviewed. When Colin (b. 1946) began to debate his sexuality internally in the early 1960s, his only points of reference had been the press coverage of the Wildeblood trial and the Wolfenden Report, both of which had occurred prior to Colin’s frst realizations concerning his sexuality: 299

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I mean some of it [his isolation anxiety] was clearly to do with the invisibility and the fact that there was no sort of . . . I mean role model doesn’t seem the right word to use, there was just nothing at all.37 What this amounts to, as Fay Bound Alberti contends, is the contradictions between modern society and the potential it affords for attachments and choices and its parallel opportunity for ‘social rejection and ostracisation’.38 The recognition of an individual’s homosexuality immediately introduces a new, barren landscape that the individual must navigate, often alone. This barren landscape had been crafted through persistent tropes which had linked homosexuality to isolated, lonely experiences, and predatory sexual behaviours, which in turn shaped young gay and bisexual men’s self-perception and thoughts about their futures. For Stephen (b. 1939), the acceptance of his homosexuality wrought considerable anxieties, all linked to a pervading fear and experience of emotional and social loneliness: Stephen—You are smiling away . . . but inside there is terror, going to bed with terror, waking up with terror. The loneliness, the isolation within. You are acting out this normal person and [wondering] how long can I act out as this normal person? The desire to be perceived as ‘normal’ was very much the result of the negative discourses concerning homosexuality that predominated in the post-war period. Joseph (b. 1959) refected on the images that homosexuality and being homosexual conjured for him the late 1960s and early 1970s: Joseph—[T]he main thing it conjured up was a feeling that you were not a part of a group, you were isolated out there, you were very much on your own . . . consciously there was always a feeling that I was, that I was very isolated and that this experience that was mine, em, very few people would relate to or understand . . .39 So powerful were these discourses of loneliness and isolation that they also affected men who were part of the homosexual law reform movement in Scotland. The Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) was Scotland’s foremost homosexual law reform organization, consistently engaging with politicians, the legal profession, Scotland’s churches, the press and public throughout the 1970s and 1980s, yet many members used pseudonyms to protect themselves and their families from hostility, suspicion and criticism. Walter (b. 1938) was a central fgure within the SMG, from its inception in 1969, but he too was affected by dominant narratives pertaining to homosexuality at this time. When I asked him if he had been ‘out’ as a gay man then, and now, he told me that he was only partially ‘out’. At the time of his involvement with the SMG, he was only out to fellow committee members but not socially or professionally. It was not the fear of legal intervention in his life that drove his decision to remain mostly in the closet but ‘a fear of being isolated’.40 These fears of loneliness and isolation were the result of minority stressors, such as homophobic victimization, explicit discrimination and violence, that many gay and bisexual men faced in the post-war period.41 As Judd Marmor described in 1980, In a society like ours where homosexuals are uniformly treated with disparagement or contempt—to say nothing about outright hostility—it would be surprising indeed if substantial numbers of them did not suffer from an impaired self-image and some degree of unhappiness with their stigmatized status.42 300

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The fear of revelation was only exacerbated by press coverage in the 1960s. Lionel Crane’s 1963 Sunday Mirror article, ‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’, offered the authorities and wider public a checklist of features to identify homosexual men. The article acts both as a criticism of the United Kingdom (UK) government in its failure to weed out potential traitors, such as John Vassall, and as a sardonic exposé of both the ‘obvious’ and ‘concealed’ homosexual men who could be found from ‘London’s Bond-street’ to ‘Rome’s Via Veneto’ to ‘Glasgow’s Sauchiehall-street’.43 Crane, in supposed consultation with a psychiatrist, offers overviews of the types of homosexual that existed, from the ‘fussy dresser’ with his detergent-white shirts to the ‘middle-aged man’ with an ‘unnaturally strong affection for his mother’.44 Crane ends his article by quoting his ‘psychiatrist’ adviser: ‘Anybody with a grain of sense can smell the homos among these men’, said the psychiatrist. Most of us have an in-built instinct about possible, or probable, or latent homosexuals. The object of this lesson is to help sharpen this instinct.45 Such press coverage which engaged in identifying, separating and condemning male homosexuals is related to what Marmor described as disparagement, contempt and outright hostility. These minority stressors are common to homosexual experience in post-war Britain and can be described as being social stressors. Social stress relates to ‘conditions in the social environment, not only personal events’ and which ‘may lead to mental and physical ill effects. Social stress might therefore be expected to have a strong impact in the lives of people belonging to stigmatized social categories’.46 The creation of homosexual ‘types’ that could be identifed, marginalized and punished undoubtedly led to isolation and experiences of loneliness among gay and bisexual men. On one hand, there is a persistent fear of being identifed as a homosexual, while on the other is an often-resultant failure to connect with other homosexuals. Samuel described ‘being gay as . . . a purer form of loneliness’ as a result of this process.47 This ‘purer’ form of loneliness is arguably the result of both emotional and social loneliness colliding quite spectacularly to rob Samuel of both opportunities for intimacy and community. Similarly, Robert (b. 1937) was conficted about being homosexual and being persistently informed by press coverage and by his peers that he was ‘different’, which resulted in social isolation: Robert—I suddenly realised that I was in a different world from my friends, and I couldn’t speak to them. I mean that self-isolation has meant that I am not being comfortably intimate with people [and I am] on the fringes of society. [This is a result of] a cultural disapproval, and the isolation that it causes is painful.48 When I asked Robert what his experience of being a gay man in 1960s and 1970s Scotland had been, he replied: ‘Lonely. Isolated is a better word.’49 Arguably, his loneliness was a result of his feelings of isolation and refected both social and emotional forms. Experiences of isolation and loneliness appear deeply entwined. Chris (b. 1958) recalled feeling lonely when he went to the University of Glasgow to study. To solve this, his partner also decided to study there, but although this partially solved his emotional loneliness, it did not solve his feelings of isolation, or social loneliness. He complained to his partner,‘[The other students] are miserable, you’ll hate it, they’re dead unfriendly, even people in the same lecture that you’ve known for 2 years are dead cold and unfriendly’.50 For Chris, the feelings of isolation were intimately connected to his sexual identity and the heteronormative environment at university. The only way to challenge his feelings of isolation was to leave: 301

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Chris—I left Glasgow University, and I left before graduation . . . there was a bar job in one of the gay bars and I applied and got it. I killed two birds with one stone: it gave me a way into the gay scene . . . and it was really different, really, really exciting and it wasn’t like anything else you could experience outside the gay scene . . . it broke down that isolation . . . Just like that.51

Coming Home Breaking down that sense of isolation also provided a means for Chris to address his social loneliness. The gay ‘scene’ played a particularly important role in this. The fact that his mother had not taken his decision to come out particularly well meant that Chris’ relationship with ‘home’ was problematic, and the commercial gay scene in Glasgow became a surrogate family. There is an apparent pattern that can be mapped on to many experiences of young LGBT people that suggests that recognition of a minority sexuality often coupled with anxieties concerning disclosing that identity to family leads to a period of loneliness and isolation.52 In the face of such challenges, the commercial scene offered acceptance, community and opportunities: ‘it wasn’t like anything else you could experience outside the gay scene.’53 It also offered him a new family: Chris—They [his new friends and colleagues] were great, they were family, and in actual fact I know I’ve heard a number of gay men describe that, but that’s exactly what it was, it was another family . . . I would consider that I was as close to them as I am to my family, in fact sometimes they’ve known much more about my intimacies, my heartbreaks, my successes, my happiness than my family have, so they’ve been incredible important and incredibly supportive.54 For Chris, working and socializing within the commercial gay scene presented him with another ‘home’, one that was protective and offered sanctuary from isolation. Such experiences are related to what other studies have suggested as a form of ‘homecoming’, whereby young gay, bisexual and lesbian people experience a ‘deep sense of shared identity or communion’.55 Duncan (b. 1946), too, found home in the gay scene, following one of the most wretched examples of how homosexuality was presented by a family member as a barren, tragic and isolating identity. His sister, on discovering his homosexuality in the 1970s, sought to condemn and stigmatize. Duncan explained her response: Duncan—‘I have suspected this a long time, that you were probably following a gay life’, she says, ‘I hope you realise that it’s a choice. You’ve made a choice, you’re choosing a very diffcult path through life and if my mother or my father ever fnds out it will be dreadful, you’ll shorten her life and you’ll kill her and she’ll never be able to accept that, you’re bringing shame on the family, do you know it’s a choice and a psychological thing?’ . . . She wrote a letter, not long after that actually, em, which was really horrible and I kept it, kept it to this day, it was telling me not to come near her children and she must have had a very prejudiced view of gay men, you know, the image of the raincoat and fashers and molesting children.56 His sister’s decision to disclose Duncan’s sexuality to his other sibling meant a fracture immediately opened within the family, and Duncan was sidelined from the family business and was not part of his siblings’ family lives for many years.

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In the face of such challenges, the commercial gay scene became his social focus. It presented Duncan with ‘a big, big, huge circle of friends . . . Lots of nights [out] and things, an’ a good lifestyle as far as I was concerned.’57 As Valentine and Skelton have noted, the commercial scene could provide ‘a transitional space where young lesbians and gay men [could] express their self-identities’ and offered ‘a space where others can validate these identities’.58 In the face of familial rejection the commercial scene became Duncan’s support network, and in the same vein as Chris’ experience, it offered some form of sanctuary with protective walls against experiences of both social and emotional loneliness. While Chris and Duncan saw the commercial scene as a new family, Joseph saw it as a form of release from the chains of isolation that had hitherto held him in thrall: Joseph—Without being too dramatic about it, it was like getting out of prison, you know, being on this commercial gay scene and if people were fucked up and screwed up it wasnae obvious [laughter]. People were socializing, people were there to go and enjoy themselves and for the frst time I realised that you could have this fairly open lifestyle. It was quite a revelation.59

The Ambivalent Scene Chris’s, Joseph’s and Duncan’s experiences are different from the experiences of other men I interviewed. Chris, Joseph and Duncan had been able to explore the established commercial gay scene in Glasgow when such places existed in the years immediately prior to and after decriminalization of consensual, adult homosexual acts in private in Scotland, after 1980. In each case, becoming integrated within a supportive scene environment reduced their feeling of social loneliness, and being part of a social network has been identifed as a key indicator of lower levels of social loneliness.60 For the older generation of interviewees, there was no established commercial gay scene. The premises that did exist in the 1950s and 1960s could not advertise themselves as LGBT-friendly or LGBT-exclusive. Thus, the relationship between these men and the scene was slightly different. Although venues catering for LGBT patrons did exist, these were secretive and discrete, and identifying them was through word-of-mouth or happenstance. Stephen learned of these venues in Glasgow through listening to his father discuss ‘pervert pubs’ with his friends. For Stephen, an anxious young man of 18 in 1957, learning of other homosexual men meeting socially was an attractive opportunity. His increasing sense of loneliness and isolation prompted considerable soul searching in an attempt to fnd some answer to his increasing terror: Stephen—When the penny sunk, em, dropped and it sunk in that I was different I was taking, eh, looking back it was panic attacks. I had to take deep breaths now and again . . . and I didn’t know anyone that was the same as myself . . . when I say a panic attack that was when they were at their height but I was continuously stressed, riddled with, governed by, fear . . . My logic was I’ll need to fnd out as much as I can here, this is what I am, I can’t change that and I’ve got to make the best of what I’ve got, of who I am.61 On visiting one of these bars, the Strand, in Hope Street, Glasgow, he discovered a ‘queer’ world flled with famboyant characters, who went by female flm stars’ names.62 These bars actively shielded a secretive community of gay and bisexual men, protected both by discretion and reputation, as Stephen explained,

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Stephen—Well, it worked . . . because it was such a taboo about being gay that your hard men of Glasgow wouldn’t generally want to go in to cause any trouble in these bars as they didn’t even want to be seen passing any of these bars let alone going into one.63 The commercial scene acted as an emotional refuge for these men, a space that provided ‘safe release from prevailing emotional norms’.64 Chris and Duncan certainly achieved some form of emotional liberty whereby they rejected the narrow and prescriptive experiences offered by heteronormative society and their families and actively sought remedies to feelings of emotional and social loneliness. The scene appeared to be a panacea for all ills. But for others, the scene was not the answer to their anxieties and loneliness. For Samuel, a spiritual man, the supposed hedonism of the commercial gay scene, combined with internal conficts about his sexuality, meant that this form of social interaction was not a comfortable option. Samuel chose instead to reply to personal advertisements in gay magazines, lacking the personal and sexual confdence to engage intimately with other men. Brief sexual encounters at public baths in Glasgow left him deeply unfulflled and ambivalent and merely increased his feelings of isolation and loneliness, refecting that ‘being gay is a tragedy of human relationships’.65 Samuel’s evident pessimism about the potential for meaningful intimate relationships was shaped by dominant and pejorative discourses of homosexuality. Furthermore, Samuel was involuntarily outed in 1981 while working as a lecturer which led to a sustained period of discrimination and victimization, which simply entrenched his isolation and loneliness, leading to a nervous breakdown. In 2008, at the age of 62, Samuel refected,‘I’ve now got my friends who care about me and need me. I’ve got it worked out, but after 40 years, what a waste.’66 The idea that pejorative attitudes towards homosexuality created signifcant diffculties for gay and bisexual men’s life experiences was also refected in Robert’s interview. Despite working for a gay men’s health project, he rarely disclosed his own sexual identity. Robert believed that his isolation and emotional loneliness was partly the result of his homosexuality, and this isolation and loneliness has impacted much of his adult life resulting in an inability to form intimate relationships: Robert—I mean the gay thing had very clearly added for me a lot of isolation which is maybe partly to do with my personality . . . I felt absolutely okay with my friends and mates as a teenager [before accepting his homosexuality] with no self-judgement or self-doubts, we just had fun, I didn’t feel less. I have never experienced that since actually, just feeling an equal member, and as good as any member of the group, I’m shocked actually . . . I’m deeply fucking annoyed that I have got to this age (70) and I’m still so unfulflled in areas of having a good connecting relationship and what fucking chance do I have now because of age and there is a bit of me that knows that I can’t do it but I do feel quite resentful that I have been deprived of that.67 Robert’s feelings of isolation and loneliness can be conceptualized roughly within the parameters of existential loneliness, social isolation and emotional loneliness. Existential loneliness refers to being ‘fundamentally separated from others’.68 As van Tilburg has noted, such a form of loneliness is ‘related to the nature of existence and, in particular, a lack of meaning in life’.69 Some aspects of this were experienced by a number of the interviewees, especially during their teens or early 20s when they accepted their sexualities and experienced a detachment from their peer groups and families. The absence of affrming narratives associated with their sexualities and the absence of a supportive peer group provoked both loneliness and isolation. While isolation and 304

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loneliness are not synonymous,70 these are often combined in the case of gay and bisexual men maturing in the post-war years.71 In Robert’s case, ageing did not diminish this sense of loneliness and isolation; it further entrenched them.

Sad Old Queens In an article, ‘The Gay Scene: Looking for Fun and Frolics, and Mr Right’, in the Irish Sunday Independent from July 1995, Stephen Costello considered the aspect of age within the commercial gay scenes in Dublin and London.72 Costello described the apparent contempt in which older LGBT people were held among the youth-dominated commercial gay scene of the 1990s. He described the ubiquity of ‘the Elephant’s Graveyard’ or ‘Jurassic Park section’ of gay bars which housed the ‘much slagged and hounded older homosexuals’.73 Criticism of older LGBT people from within the commercial gay scene is bad enough, but wider anxieties about older homosexuals were an omnipresent feature of post-war Britain. Writing contemporaneously to Costello, journalist Diana Pulson, in her ‘Woman on Woman’ column for the Liverpool Echo, condemned moves to lower the age of consent for male homosexuals from 21 to 16.74 She inveighed against such a move by claiming that young men would fall prey to older homosexuals,‘some of whom, I think, are predatory’.75 The ‘older homosexual’ seems to have occupied a moral hinterland, a mythical predatory fgure who appeared as an ever-present threat to young, lonely men’s morality. In 1966, as the House of Lords debated the forthcoming Sexual Offences Bill, Baroness Gaitskell, the Labour peer who was largely supportive of law reform, tapped into the ‘aged gay’ anxieties by arguing that a ‘more frank approach to sex will guard them [boys] against corruption from older homosexuals’.76 Yet more horror was forthcoming with Thomas Corbett, Lord Rowallan, claiming that there existed certain types of homosexual ‘whose delight it is to seduce young heterosexuals and lead them down the garden path which, as we have been told, leads to nothing but frustration, sorrow and degeneration’.77 What emerges in a multitude of debates is a confused and confusing conceptualization of the male homosexual. He is either a lonely man, isolated from family, society and community, or a predator, part of a nefarious community seeking out fresh sexual potential among the young, heterosexual bachelor population. Yet while the concept of male homosexuality was confused, what was clear was an intention by certain authority groups to keep the male homosexual a marginalized fgure, which often provoked increased feelings of isolation and loneliness. The concern that homosexuals were organizing emerges clearly after the Wolfenden Report was published. James Adair, a former Scottish procurator fscal, was a dissenting member of the Wolfenden Committee who published a minority report that disagreed with the recommendations concerning homosexual offences. Adair claimed that within fve weeks of the publication of the Report, a club in London catering for homosexuals had received nearly 50 applications for membership, as if this was symptomatic of a sea change in homosexual organization.78 Despite a brief furry of activity among the Scottish press after the publication of the Wolfenden Report, the topic of homosexual law reform appeared only sporadically in the Scottish press over the next decade, and as a result, Wolfenden featured little in the recollections of the men I interviewed.79 The general silence concerning LGBT rights in the post-war period in Scotland exacerbated feelings of disconnection. In Scotland, it was not until the 1970s that organized advocacy groups emerged which attempted to challenge the social isolation felt by LGBT people. The persistent marginalization of sexual minority groups and the manner by which homosexuality was framed and then silenced presented many gay and bisexual men with a barren hinterland to occupy. Without positive and affrming models of homosexuality, loneliness and isolation began to typify experience. Even after the formation of groups such as the SMG in 1969, attempts to 305

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form ‘community’ were regularly stifed. Despite receiving funding to develop a new gay centre housing a Gay Advisory Centre in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, critics, notably the Conservative MP Teddy Taylor, lambasted the government’s decision to fund the refurbishment of a building to provide a social club for homosexuals.80 The SMG, by 1979 now known as the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG), were involved in an ongoing dispute concerning their Glasgow premises, with fears that Glasgow City Council and Glasgow Police were attempting to remove LGBT groups and premises from the city. In communications with Gay Switchboard in March 1979, SHRG complained that ‘we have some evidence to convince us . . . of a concerted Police campaign “to close down the gay scene” [in Glasgow].’81 In 1982, attempts were undertaken to seek funding for Aberdeen Gay Switchboard to enable ‘gay men and lesbians [to speak with] someone who is not going to treat [them] with contempt and disgust’.82 Councillor Allan Wright offers a prime example of why homosexual community was being actively suppressed. His decision to reject funding of £50 was based on his fears that ‘a minority group like this, with a bit of encouragement would become a majority group’.83 Councillor Eric Hendrie also rejected the application with similar fears that such facilities would enable community building and proselytizing, stating that a gay magazine he browsed in Aberdeen Library ‘contained a fairly large part . . . for advertisements. It was an agency for every known deviant under the sun and some not under the sun.’84 Containment and isolation were common tropes used to describe appropriate societal responses to homosexuality in Scotland. These were evident throughout the period before and after the publication of the Wolfenden Report but gained new prominence as homosexuality became a topic of popular discussion in the lead-up to the decriminalization of consensual, private sex between men in Scotland in 1981. In a 1977 debate concerning the Sexual Offences (Amendment Bill), the Marquess of Lothian, Peter Kerr (a former member of the Wolfenden Committee), lamented that attempts to lower the homosexual age of consent in England and Wales to 18 ‘would lay them [young men] open to attentions and pressures of an undesirable kind’. Such pressures were presumably increasing due to ‘a much greater awareness about homosexuality and much propaganda regarding it’. Indeed, Lothian claimed, ‘homosexual societies are common and homosexual publications are becoming ever easier to obtain. I fear there is little doubt that homosexuality is on the increase.’85 The Countess of Loudoun, Barbara AbneyHastings, shared Kerr’s anxieties: Are we to encourage the infectious growth of this flthy disease by giving the authority of Parliament to the spreading of corruption and perversion among a new generation of young men and the younger boys in contact with them? . . . The psychologists have explained the reasons for homosexual behaviour, and no blame can be attached to those who suffer this handicap. But you cannot be a homosexual alone, which inevitably leads to the corruption and perversion of others, which is a symptom of the disease. So, although it would be wrong to condemn, just as it would be wrong to condemn the victim of an attack of cholera, such an outbreak must be contained and isolated, not given a licence to multiply.86 Despite the apparent fourishing of homosexuality within 1970s Britain, there were still active attempts to silence, marginalize and isolate gay and bisexual men. Lady Loudoun’s medico-moral invective used the language of pandemics to argue for a suppression and containment of this grave moral threat. There are numerous contradictions at work here. Homosexual rights organizations were battling for support and funding in an attempt to support LGBT citizens whose isolation and marginalization was creating both existential and mental health crises, yet at the same time, 306

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there were active attempts to silence and contain gay and bisexual men’s agency and community. The struggle to create agency in Scotland left a cluster of gay and bisexual men still isolated, still detached. What is evident from Samuel and Robert’s experiences is that intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, straying into existential loneliness, were the most diffcult forms of loneliness to shake off. Already isolated, these men’s feelings of disconnection were further exacerbated by the continuation of highly stigmatizing discourses. The most common fear was that entire lives would be shaped by that loneliness and isolation and that struggle to avoid that further marginalized fgure, as Stephen put it,‘those sad old queens’.87

Conclusion The legal sanctions that gay and bisexual men faced, coupled with family estrangement and the diffculties in forming social connections demonstrate the powerful intersections between sexual identity and experiences of loneliness and isolation.88 The hugely negative rhetoric that emerged after the publication of the Wolfenden Report made way for a period of silence, during which many gay and bisexual men who had been born after the war matured, increasingly detached from family and far from any supportive network of LGBT people. It is of little surprise, therefore, that many of the gay and bisexual men I interviewed spoke of a deep sense of loneliness, emotional, social and existential. As Samuel refected, this was a ‘purer’ form of loneliness due to this intersection of family estrangement, feelings of otherness and social isolation. Loneliness was not simply a personal, introspective, emotional reaction, but it was embedded within characterizations of homosexual experience in the post-war period. Whether it was Wildeblood or Vassall’s lonely moments or young bachelors in Moscow and London, loneliness was positioned as a trigger for subversion into a moral and criminal underworld. In such narratives, homosexuality is positioned not as a sexual identity but as a representation of the moral dangers that loneliness might wreak. The mythical predatory homosexual that Douglas Warth reveals seems to be positioned as an incubus, preying on the innocent heterosexual and luring him into deviance. For Warth, the homosexual is not so much a lonely fgure but one who is part of a subversive community that proselytizes and contracts. In Scotland, despite the heightened public discussions of homosexuality and the law that followed the publication of the Wolfenden Report, most of my interviewees struggled to fnd any representation of homosexuality that brought reassurance. Loneliness and social isolation were experienced by most and were often the result of detachment from the family, fear of revelation and an inability to engage intimately with other men. For some, such as Samuel and Robert, that isolation continued well past decriminalization. The persistence of loneliness and isolation has shaped their lives with thoughts of ‘wasted’ years and intense frustrations. But it is notable that gay and bisexual men who matured slightly later, into the 1970s, were presented with a different social environment that enabled them to escape or remedy feelings of both emotional and social loneliness. For Chris and Joseph, the commercial LGBT scene provided an opportunity to connect with other LGBT people who, in the absence of supportive kin, provided a new family. The history of emotions offers us an opportunity to reappraise loneliness, as it is neither a static nor uniform experience but is shaped and reshaped by multiple intersections, not least by gender and sexuality. Older LGBT people’s experiences of loneliness are often very different from heterosexual experiences; this is not to diminish those experiences but offer additional layers to our understandings. For gay and bisexual men, loneliness was not simply an emotion created through feelings of differentness and otherness, but one which was composed of several layers. The most common was a combination of emotional and social loneliness which was provoked by predominant social attitudes and familial rejection. In some cases, existential loneliness was evident, 307

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whereby an individual experienced a deeper disconnection which prevented them not just from connecting with family and peers but also acted as a barrier for more intimate connections. At heart of all of these forms of loneliness were the hugely negative and marginalizing discourses which created an image of the homosexual as an insidious threat to young bachelors, the family as the linchpin of British identity and wider morality. Within these narratives, loneliness was presented as both the cause and result of homosexual desire. Perhaps the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan captured this best when he lamented that life for some gay men in post-war Scotland was typifed by ‘a series of solitary people who were in fact gay, but [without] a sense of solidarity’.89

Notes 1 Michael Hobbes, ‘Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness’, Huffngton Post, 2 Mar. 2017, https://highline.huffngtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/. 2 Ibid. 3 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 18; K.D.M. Snell, ‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42 (2017): 3. 4 M.A Biernbaum and M. Ruscio, ‘Differences between Matched Heterosexuals and Non: Heterosexual College Students on Defense Mechanisms and Psychopathological Symptoms’, Journal of Homosexuality 48 (2004): 125–41; J.I. Martin and A.R. D’Augelli,‘How Lonely Are Gay and Lesbian Youth?’, Psychological Reports 93 (2003): 486. 5 S. Westwood, P. Willis, J. Fish et al., ‘Older LGBT+ Health Inequalities in the UK: Setting a Research Agenda’, Journal of Epidemiol Community Health 74 (2020): 408. 6 See, for example, José Alberto Ribeiro-Gonçalves, Henrique Pereira, Pedro Alexandre Costa, Isabel Leal and Brian de Vries,‘Loneliness, Social Support, and Adjustment to Aging in Older Portuguese Gay Men’, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 19, no. 5 (2022), doi: 10.1007/s13178-021-00535-4; Debra A. Harley, Linda Gassaway and Lisa Dunkley,‘Isolation, Socialization, Recreation, and Inclusion of LGBT Elders’, in Handbook of LGBT Elders: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Principles, Practices, and Policies, ed. Debra Harley and Pamela Teaster (Cham: Springer, 2016), 563–81; Hyun-Jun Kim and Karen I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, ‘Living Arrangement and Loneliness among Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Older Adults’, The Gerontologist 56, no. 3 (2016): 548–58; Jill Wilkens, ‘Loneliness and Belongingness in Older Lesbians: The Role of Social Groups as “Community”’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 90–101; Jeffrey Meek, Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lisette Kuyper and Tineke Fokkema,‘Loneliness among Older Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Adults: The Role of Minority Stress’, Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 5 (2010): 1171–80; Bob Cant, Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and Gay Life Stories from Scotland (Edinburgh: WP Books, 2008); Jeffrey Weeks and Kevin Porter, Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men, 1885–1967 (London: New York University Press, 1998); Margot Farnham, Paul Marshall and Hall Carpenter Archives. Lesbian Oral History Group, Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1989); Margot Farnham, Paul Marshall and Hall Carpenter Archives. Gay Men’s Oral History Group, Walking After Midnight: Gay Men’s Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1989). 7 Wilkens,‘Loneliness and Belongingness’, 91. 8 House of Commons (HC), Deb 14 Mar. 1994 vol. 239 cc719–26. 9 Lynn Abrams, ‘Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Confict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Post-War British Women’, Social History 39, no. 1 (2014): 15. 10 G. Field, ‘The Working Class in World War II: Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945’, International Labor and Working Class History 38 (1990): 3. 11 Peter Tatchell,‘A Gay Soldier’s Story’, WW2 People’s War, BBC, accessed 22 Apr. 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/ history/ww2peopleswar/stories/36/a2688636.shtml. 12 Jeff Meek, Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 63. 13 ‘Why the Letters to the Airman? Wildeblood Is Asked’, Sunday Mirror, 19 Mar. 1954, 1, 8. 14 Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law, with Preface by Matthew Paris (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), location 895, Kindle. 15 Ibid., location 1106.

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A Purer Form of Loneliness 16 Ibid., location 1247. 17 L. Andersson,‘Loneliness Research and Interventions: A Review of the Literature’, Aging & Mental Health 2 (1998): 265. 18 Wildeblood, Against the Law, location 1510. 19 R.S. Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973). 20 Enrico DiTommaso and Barry Spinner,‘Social and Emotional Loneliness: A Re-Examination of Weiss’ Typology of Loneliness’, Personality and Individual Differences 22, no. 3 (1997): 417–18. 21 John Vassal,‘42 Faces of the Spy Who Bares His Soul’, Sunday Pictorial, 28 Oct. 1962, 8–9. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 HC Deb 02 Nov. 1962 vol. 666 col 534, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1962/ nov/02/debate-on-the-address. 24 Fred Sommer,‘Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, Gay Spies’, Journal of Homosexuality 29 (1995): 274. 25 House of Lords [HL], Sexual Offences Bill, 21 June 1965 vol 267 c.333. 26 HC Deb, Sexual Offences (no. 2), 05 July 1966 vol. 731 col. 261. 27 HL Deb, Sexual Offences Bill, 24 May 1965 vol. 266 col. 661. 28 Ibid., col 663. 29 Douglas Warth,‘Evil Men’, Sunday Pictorial, 25 May 1952, 6. 30 Douglas Warth,‘Evil Men’, Sunday Pictorial, 1 June 1952, 12. 31 Ibid. 32 HL Debate, Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill, 13 Apr. 1999, vol. 599, col. 690. 33 Matthew Grimley,‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009): 727. 34 HC Deb, Wolfenden Report Part Two, 29 June 1960 vol. 625 col. 1455. 35 HL Deb, Homosexual Offences, 12 May 1965 vol. 266 col. 152. 36 Interview with ‘Samuel’, 17 Aug. 2008. 37 Interview with ‘Colin’, 20 Sept. 2007. 38 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10 (2018): 251. 39 Interview with ‘Joseph’, 11 July 2008. 40 Interview with ‘Walter’, 13 Apr. 2007. 41 I.H. Meyer,‘Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence’, Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003): 674–97. 42 J. Marmor,‘Epilogue: Homosexuality and the Issue of Mental Illness’, in Homosexual Behavior: A Modern Reappraisal, ed. J. Marmor (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 400. 43 Lionel Crane,‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’, Sunday Mirror, 28 Apr. 1963, 7. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Meyer,‘Prejudice, Social Stress and Mental Health’, 676. 47 Interview with ‘Samuel’. 48 Interview with ‘Robert’, 1 Aug. 2007. 49 Ibid. 50 Interview with ‘Chris’, 15 Feb. 2008. 51 Ibid. 52 See, for example, Meek, Queer Voices; Meyer,‘Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health’; G. Valentine and T. Skelton,‘Finding Oneself, Losing Oneself: The Lesbian and Gay “Scene” as a Paradoxical Space’, International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 849–66; J. Beeler and V. DiProva,‘Family Adjustment Following Disclosure of Homosexuality By a Member: Themes Discerned in Narrative Accounts’, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 25 (1999): 443–59; A.R. D’Augelli, S.L. Hershberger and N.W. Pilkington.,‘Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth and Their Families: Disclosure of Sexual Orientation and Its Consequences’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 68 (1998): 361–71; A. Muller, Parents Matter: Parents’ Relationships with Lesbian Daughters and Gay Sons (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1987); C.W. Grifn, M.J. Wirth and A.G. Wirth, Beyond Acceptance: Parents of Lesbians and Gays Talk about Their Experiences (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986). 53 Interview with ‘Chris’. 54 Ibid. 55 Valentine and Skelton,‘Finding Oneself, Losing Oneself ’, 854. 56 Interview with ‘Duncan’, 5 Oct. 2010.

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Jeff Meek 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid. Valentine and Skelton,‘Finding Oneself, Losing Oneself ’, 854. Interview with ‘Joseph’. DiTommaso and Spinner,‘Social and Emotional Loneliness’, 424. Interview with ‘Stephen’. Ibid. Ibid. W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. Interview with ‘Samuel’. Ibid. Interview with ‘Robert’. E.J. Ettema, L.D. Derksen and E. van Leeuwen,‘Existential Loneliness and End-of-Life Care: A Systematic Review’, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (2010): 151. Theo G. van Tilburg, ‘Social, Emotional, and Existential Loneliness: A Test of the Multidimensional Concept’, Gerontologist 20 (2020): 2. P. Willis, A. Vickery and T. Jessiman, ‘Loneliness, Social Dislocation and Invisibility Experienced by Older Men Who Are Single or Living Alone: Accounting for Differences across Sexual Identity and Social Context’, Ageing and Society 42, no. 2 (2022): 409–31. Ibid. Stephen J. Costello, ‘The Gay Scene: Looking for Fun and Frolics, and Mr Right’, Sunday Independent, 16 July 1995, 38. Ibid. Diana Pulson,‘Woman on Woman: It’s All a Matter of Consent . . .’, Liverpool Echo, 1 Feb. 1994, 20. Ibid. HL, Sexual Offences Bill, 10 May 1966, vol 274 c.626. Ibid., c.628. ‘Report of the Wolfenden Committee: Large Majority for Disapproval’, Glasgow Herald 27 May 1958, 3. Meek, Queer Voices, 44–6. ‘Taylor Attacks Cash for Gay Group’, Glasgow Herald, 29 Aug. 1977, 3. GD467 1/2/8,‘Letter to Gay Switchboard’, 5 Mar. 1979, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh. Maureen McDonald,‘Postbag: Sheer Prejudice’, Aberdeen Evening Express, 22 Oct. 1982, 8. ‘Grant Bid by Homosexuals Turned Down’, Aberdeen Evening Express, 14 Oct. 1982, 5. Ibid. HL Debate, Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill, 14 June 1977, vol. 384 cc.35–36. Ibid., cols. 45–46. Interview with ‘Stephen’. N. Hsieh and J.S. Wong, ‘Social Networks in Later Life: Similarities and Differences between Sexual: Minority and Heterosexual Older Adults’, Socius 6 (2020): 1–2. University of Glasgow Special Collections, Glasgow 4848/21, as quoted in James McGonigal, Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2012), 143.

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21 LONELINESS AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE Disregard and the Limits of Care in Twenty-First-Century Japan Iza Kavedžija

In recent years Japan has sometimes been described as a ‘society without ties’, muen shakai, riddled with anomie and an increasing sense of isolation. A much-viewed documentary series of this name by the Japanese national broadcasting company, NHK, brought the issue to the centre of many people’s attention in 2010. One of the cases presented in the series featured a housing estate (danchi) in Tokyo, where almost one-third of the 900 households were single households. One resident, 75-year-old Fujiwara san, had withdrawn into his apartment some 15 years earlier. He used to work as a scaffolding constructor, surrounded by co-workers, and had a son and a wife, but as his health deteriorated, he lost his job and divorced some 19 years ago. He had had no contact with his family for years and did not know where they were. Fujiwara san’s story was of course just one of many. Perhaps most shocking of all for many Japanese viewers was the revelation that some 85 per cent of the people living alone on this estate, like Fujiwara san, were over the age of 65. Muen shakai1 can be described as a society in which family, community and company ties are fading, leading to an increase in numbers of isolated people. The relatively dense relationships that once characterized life in Japan—within the family, the company and the local community— formed a system of mutual assistance. Yet such ties are today perceived as dissolving rapidly. This is related to the transformation of the family, an increase in numbers of people who do not marry, an increase in numbers of single-people households as a result of increased longevity, and changes in forms of employment and in lifestyle. The NHK television programme problematized the issue of how to foster new societal ties once the supportive function of the family, community or company is lost.2 One of the keywords singled-out in the programme was tanshinka, which can be translated as ‘atomization’. Japanese society is facing a time of increased atomization, with growing numbers of people living alone, projected by the National Research Agency to rise from around 20 per cent in 1980 to some 38 per cent of all households in 2030.3 The numbers of lonely deaths (kodokushi), of elderly dying alone, their bodies lying undiscovered for prolonged periods of time, epitomize a deep sense of abandonment and changing social dynamics. The problems of loneliness and isolation do not affect only the elderly, however. An increasing number of young people are reported to stay at home with futoko, or so-called

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-24

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‘school refusal syndrome’ and social withdrawal, not to mention the well-known phenomenon of hikikomori, or social recluses.4 Like hikikomori, but with even less social support, homeless and precariously employed men in yoseba (day-labourer quarters in cities like Tokyo,Yokohama and Osaka) tend to withdraw, fearing becoming a burden on others.5 Withdrawn, trying not to ‘cause trouble’, these fgures slowly recede from view. Discounted, perhaps even troublesome, they are barely visible, disregarded. If relations of care are still predominantly framed by institutions of family, workplace and community, an inability to fnd one’s place in these context renders one mu en—without connection or social ties—like the muenbotoke, or spirits with no one to tend their graves. Loneliness, in many of these cases, is not a psychological or medical condition but rather a symptom of disregard. It points to the limits of care, as framed by these particular forms of en, or connection. Loneliness and social isolation are not the same, of course—social isolation or disconnectedness has an objective quality and refers to a small number of interpersonal relationships, while loneliness entails a subjective evaluation of one’s situation:‘Socially isolated persons are not necessarily lonely, and lonely persons are not necessarily socially isolated in an objective sense’.6 While loneliness is subjectively experienced and felt by individuals, it should not be perceived as somehow pertaining to individuals alone, or stemming only or even predominantly from their individual characteristics or actions: the problems of lonely people cannot be regarded as individual failures only. Characteristics of the societal context, such as prevailing standards concerning matrimony and the nuclear family, the emphasis on individual fulfllment, and high expectations about romantic relationships might also be considered loneliness-provoking factors.7 In this sense, loneliness must be understood within a broader social context, with a perceived sense of social isolation often exacerbated by social inequalities and/or fnancial dependence.8 In this chapter, I argue that loneliness is a moral sentiment,9 one that traces forms of sociality that have become dysfunctional. In this sense, loneliness may be understood as a form of social critique: one that points to problems in the expected forms of social connection, while also opening up a space for alternatives.

Lonely Death: Kodokushi September 2020. Kojima [an estate cleaner] arrives at an apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo. She has been asked to clean up after a resident who died alone. The resident was a man in his sixties whose remains were discovered several days after his presumed time of death. The room is overfowing with household garbage and leftover food. ‘He probably washed his hair here. See the shampoo bottle?’ [showing the kitchen sink]. ‘I see this a lot. You see, when the bathroom is full of clutter, making it diffcult to use’. Empty medicine packets are scattered around the room, suggesting that the man suffered from a medical condition. ‘There were traces of blood on the kitchen table. He probably coughed up a lot of blood. He may have died in bed’. According to one survey, there are as many as 27,000 cases per year of people dying alone in Japan and remaining undetected for over two days. Kojima is among those paid to clean up the houses where such deaths have occurred. She handles about 150 cases a year. The resident of this home passed away in late summer; as a result, his home was infested with insects. The mattress where he was discovered is soiled with bodily fuids; a distinct stench permeates the air. The room needs to be thoroughly cleaned, disinfected 312

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and deodorized. After three days of hard labour, Kojima prepares for the fnal stage of the clean-up. She takes out a set of Buddhist implements used to mourn the dead. She burns incense, and offers a prayer for the departed.10

The term kodokushi, or lonely death, came to public attention in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1995, which confned many people to temporary housing. Some of the older people who had no family lost their social ties in this upheaval. Shocking reports of cases of people dying alone gained attention.11 Yet lonely deaths do not only happen in temporary housing in the aftermath of large natural disasters. While three-generation households, with grandparents, parents and young children, accounted for approximately half of all households in the 1980s, by 2019, 30 per cent of households with 65-year-old members were single-person households.12 About 80 per cent of the elderly are concerned about living alone in older age.13 Unaccompanied death is seen as a serious problem in Japan. Kodokushi is unambiguously represented as bad14 and is particularly troubling in a Buddhist context where an unaccompanied person at death is at risk of becoming muenbotoke, a spirit without any social ties.15 The image of kodokushi as a lonely death that remains undiscovered is one that powerfully captures people’s attention, one that points the fnger of blame squarely at failing communities and families. While the increase in the absolute number of lonely deaths is often linked with a weakening of social ties, it is also connected to the overall demographic change and population ageing, as some sociologists have argued.16 Nonetheless, the sense of perceived crisis points to an important social issue.17 We might say that it encapsulates anxiety about ageing,18 as well as a weakening of social networks.19 As the number of the lonely deaths increases, more companies take on the work of cleaning up, like the special cleaning service offered by Ms Kojima.20 Ms Kojima is an artist, as well as an estate cleaner; she makes moving dioramas of homes in which lonely death occurred, with visible trace of neglect and lonely existence. In an interview with the NHK, Ms Kojima explained that she made the dioramas in order to make people more aware of the issue but felt that photographs might be too confronting for many or give people nightmares. She also stated that she would prefer if people would not focus so much on lonely deaths but rather make sure that people are not alone before death happens: to look in more often on their neighbours and elderly relatives living alone. Her point resonates with an argument by Katsuhiko Fujimori, that lonely death is problematic predominantly as an indicator of lonely lives. No company at the deathbed is a problem, but lonely deaths point to a more enduring form of isolation, for many months and even years.21 ‘The souls of unrelated spirits are wedged between the world of the dead and that of the living. Their souls are pitied and stigmatized’.22 The concern that one might become a muenbotoke, or a spirit without social ties, affects not only those in solitary spaces, such as houses that have become solitary dwellings.23 Buddhist funerary practice in Japan involves numerous rites performed over the space of 30 years, with services performed at set intervals designed to facilitate the transition from deceased person to ancestor. Ancestor tablets are placed in the small household altar, or butsudan, where daily prayers are performed, and ancestors take part in daily life: often, daily events are recounted to them, and new family introduced, with small amounts of food, fruit or alcohol offered daily.24 Those who remain single or do not have descendants cannot be buried in the family grave.25 As many people fnd themselves in a position where they cannot rely on descendants to maintain family graves, or they simply do not wish to be interred with their relatives, new funerary practices have arisen. For example, some opt for tree burials,26 while others still choose temples that, for a one-off fee, offer burial in a communal grave and yearly memorial services in perpetuity.27 The narrow defnition of family in terms of blood relations is surpassed in these new practices, in order to allow people to be buried with those who are not their relatives or to 313

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connect with nature and with spirits, thus crafting a different type of connection altogether and refuting the disconnection implied by mu en.

Social Withdrawal: Hikikomori ‘People think of hikikomori as being lazy young people with personality problems who stay in their rooms all the time playing video games’, says Yamase [53], who lives with his 87-year-old mother and has been a recluse on and off for the past thirty years. ‘But the reality is that most hikikomori are people who can’t get back into society after straying off the path at some point’, he says. ‘They have been forced into withdrawal. It isn’t that they’re shutting themselves away—it’s more like they’re being forced to shut themselves away’.28

Hikikomori, a term coined by psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, refers to a person who has withdrawn from society and remains at home, without social contact, for six months or more. In the past, such withdrawal was often seen as affecting mostly younger people, but a recent study indicates that there might be at least as many older hikikomori. A survey conducted by the Cabinet Offce indicates that in addition to an estimated 541,000 hikikomori aged 15–39, as many as 613,000 people aged 40–64 might equally be considered social recluses, leaving their homes only when they need something from a convenience store.29 Almost half have lived in isolation for seven years or more, and to do this they rely on deliveries, internet, mobile technology and support from parents. Hikikomori is, therefore, a very broad category, and there exist a broad range of reasons for their withdrawal and long-term social isolation, such as problems in school or working environment or loss of a job, any of which might precipitate a loss of sense of belonging. It could be argued that feeling out of place, feeling different or sensing that one does not ft, in the Japanese context of rigid professional and social roles, might frequently underlie the process of social withdrawal. Often, hikikomori is represented as a largely psychological problem, one that can even be correlated with particular psychological traits, such as internet addiction.30 There is no doubt that long-term withdrawal and an absence of all social contact may have serious consequences for mental health. On the other hand, however, the widespread nature of the phenomenon, and numerous statements from hikikomori themselves, suggests instead that this is largely a social and relational problem, one that acutely refects certain pathologies of the contemporary working environments in Japan. Andy Furlong argues that rather than framing hikikomori phenomenon in terms of individual psychology, which would be to medicalize the problem and also treat it as homogenous, it should instead be understood to refect a number of societal challenges that stem primarily from the changes in the labour market.31 Companies that once offered lifelong employment and stability, for instance, now hire a much higher proportion of temporary staff on precarious contracts. In other words, withdrawal can usefully be linked to many people’s ‘constant anxiety over their inability to perform among Japan’s competitive capitalist-oriented social expectations’.32 Hikikomori as social withdrawal has for some time now been in the spotlight of national and international media. In this sense, it continues a long series of youth labels and ‘moral panics’ focusing particularly on youth which have captured public attention.33 The image of a lone individual pulling away from society, all alone in their room, in bed or on the foor, watching TV or surfng the internet, is captivating for many. It is both removed from daily life and yet seems close. In addition to this radical form of isolation, of course, there are no doubt many whose social life is seriously wanting. What of the protagonists in stories of more ordinary kinds of 314

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Figure 21.1 By the riverside. Source: Image ‘Yodogawa, Osaka’, by Noel Slattery.

loneliness—of salarymen, say, who work long hours and lack the time to socialize with friends or family, or those who lack opportunities to meet other people? The plight of hikikomori points to the ways in which social structures can entrap people in their lonely worlds, especially those who are not able to feel proud of themselves within the remit of existing social expectations and who therefore withdraw, gradually receding from view. Those day labourers who are unable to fnd stable employment and simply withdraw into their small rooms or the homeless moving their temporary dwellings ever further into invisible places are powerful examples of withdrawal that stems from disregard.

Yoseba as a Zone of Abandonment A-san, in his ffties, had lost his job in a delivery company and been evicted from the company dormitory, to fnd himself on the streets. Despite being able to work, he was unable to fnd a job, and grew lonely and isolated, with a radio as his only source of human voice. When asked how he came to be in this situation, and why he had not sought help from relatives, friends or even the state in the form of benefts, he replied that at his age he is still capable of working and should be able to provide for himself. Moreover, he stressed, he didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone (meiwaku wo kaketakunai). The producers then posed the question of what had happened to social ties of a kind where mutual support could be taken for granted, and the trouble that one may cause was forgiven, permitted by both sides. If the number of people living alone continues to increase,they go on to suggest, one must then ask what is necessary for a society ‘where one can live alone at ease (anshin shite) and where one can at ease face dying on one’s own’.34

This story, frst featured in a television programme, captures the sense of retreat from the world that comes with joblessness and homelessness. While loss of work may lead to a loss of identity 315

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and a slip into loneliness in many social contexts, the powerful framing of Japanese masculinity, of man as a breadwinner who takes care of his family, undoubtedly exacerbates feelings of shame or inadequacy. A similar sense of withdrawal, a retreat ever further into solitude, has been noted in the yoseba, or day labourer’s quarters, which are found in cities like Yokohama, Tokyo and Osaka and which could be seen as ‘zones of abandonment’35 for those who do not fulfl the criteria of productive personhood in the neoliberal context. In the wake of economic downturn, many day labourers found it diffcult to fnd work and fell into homelessness, or near-homelessness, which restricted them to living in very small rooms in their lodgings. The precarious nature of their work, which they might not be able to perform when unwell or in older age, is exacerbated by problems with social services and healthcare. Despite the fact that Japan has one of the most comprehensive and inclusive forms of healthcare in the world, Jieung Kim found that day labourers and homeless people living in yoseba often found themselves excluded from healthcare provision and turned away by social services.36 They were liable to be perceived as problematic, uncooperative, unreliable and noncompliant by the healthcare system. On the other hand, the social care system in Japan, for a long time, considered the household or family to be the primary unit in which the needs of individuals should be met before seeking any state support.37 This ‘Japanese-style welfare system’ also linked social welfare payments to the fnancial situation of the family, effectively excluding working-age men from welfare provision. Unemployed men have sometimes felt unable to seek welfare support without putting their families at risk of being contacted and requested to take care of their family members in need.38 The limits of care within the normative trajectories of en do not mean the situation is entirely hopeless. The yoseba became a zone of abandonment and the members of excluded and neglected groups withdrew further. But as a space also opened up, demarcating the limits of care, it gradually become populated by volunteers and non-governmental organizations. In a departure from clearly delineated interventions, care provided in some of these locations exceeds care for life and for the body; it moves beyond the medical. The waiting room of the local informal healthcare clinic set up by volunteer healthcare professionals, described by Kim, becomes a communal living room, where people meet and chat with each other and with the staff. Previously disregarded by the healthcare system as ‘noncompliant’, many of the local residents and homeless voluntarily decided to receive their medications and treatment for addiction in person in the clinic daily, arriving hours before the doors open. The deeply relational practice of care here aids recovery and prevents recidivism, creating long-standing relationships in yoseba.39 Moving beyond bare life, these relationships transcend the limits of a lifetime. Care extends beyond the moment of death— some of the patients’ memorial tablets are held in an altar area in the clinic, and staff and other patients visit and clean the gravestones where they are interred.40 Even though their remains are held in the communal grave, they are clearly not without social ties. While the ties enacted here are not those of family or kin, care in the yoseba generates and nurtures relationships—‘some kind of connection’.

Disregard: Loneliness as a Social Critique In order ‘not to cause trouble’, the day labourers, the unemployed and the homeless all recede from view:‘the endemic othering of underclass men that not only denies them access to healthcare, but entraps them in a state of “invisibility”’.41 The members of excluded underclasses, according to Kim, were not only rendered invisible; they also actively avoided the gaze and feared ‘being seen’. Unable to enact care by the normative standards of obligation and duty, these people withdraw, pulled away. Their isolation is structural, even if their loneliness is their own. 316

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The agents of the harm inficted on them are not easy to locate. If the burden of their care is allocated to their families, as some of the older social welfare models in Japan assume, this is not necessarily what they want or feel they are able to demand, nor are their families always willing or able to help. It would be a mistake to see this violence as simply a failure of family, mirroring the (quintessentially neoliberal) transfer of responsibility away from the state and onto family and community. The loneliness of those who do not ft in the networks of familial and productive personhood is the fipside of disregard. In Japanese, a shakaijin, or fully fedged adult member of society, refers to a person in productive employment. This places those who are precariously employed, unemployed or homeless, or even those who see themselves as unable to ft in to the workplace (as some hikikomori might), in a position of disregard. To regard someone is to see them, to acknowledge them with respect; disregard, as an inverse of care,42 is in this case, arguably, a form of structural violence. All these solitary fgures receding from view, vanishing, withdrawing, pulling away, stand as a grim counterpoint to the more ‘visible’ forms of vanishing, as it were—the disappearing forms of culture and sociality that capture the attention of media. Certain traditional cultural forms have long been perceived as vanishing, but they are simultaneously actively preserved and cherished.43 Marilyn Ivy calls them phantasma, due to their simultaneous presence and absence.44 They are expected and required, but not quite fully there in the envisaged form. The space or gap opened up by the receding lives of the hikikomori, the homeless, the muenbotoke, traces the limits of en in these particular confgurations of sociality. Just as lonely death, or kodokushi, signals a limit case of kinship as a default model of sociality’, the social recluses like hikikomori, or the invisible lonely underclass in yoseba, capture the limits of care in the workplace, in school or in the family.45 In this sense, loneliness in contemporary Japan might best be understood as a form of social critique, one that points to the limits or failures of care. The key types of connections in the idealized, phantasmic versions of family and society can all be described in terms of en: ‘[K]etsu-en (“blood-en”) and chi-en (“land-en”), are perhaps

Figure 21.2 A view from afar. Source: Image ‘Yodogawa, Osaka’, by Noel Slattery.

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most centrally important to Japanese social organization as they directly pertain to the mapping of people onto a relationship of group-based rights and obligation anchored to social institutions: kinship and locality’.46 Nozawa adds sha-en, or ‘associational-en’, connections stemming from belonging to organizations, such as companies or educational institutions. It is precisely these (non-voluntary) forms of group belonging, framed by institutions, that comprise the en that is absent in mu en.47 However, en can, of course, be a very different kind of connection—one can feel a connection with non-kin, with nature or with a place.

En Ga Aru—Connections and New Spaces of Care ‘I have known Yanagi san since high school. . . . We made friends in the second year, there was another girl, too. The three of us were always spending time together, having fun. Our ways parted, but there is some kind of connection (en ga aru). We are joined by a red string (akai ito) [of fate]’. Miyazawa san, a youthful woman in her 60s, smiled faintly, as she stirred her cup of tea. ‘My sister suffers health problems, so she always needed a lot of support. She is single and I spend most of my days caring for her. I live with my husband, we have two sons, but they are independent now, so I cannot complain that I worry about them. But my sister’s health is deteriorating and her legs are giving out now. Sometimes she leaves the house at night, once she fell and an ambulance had to be called out. I dread receiving an early morning call, at night, saying something happened to her. Now we have some staff looking after her, she receives a lot of support from the state, which is fortunate. But it is not ideal. I spend a lot of time with her, you know, we do not have any relatives, my parents are gone and I don’t have many friends’. After a short pause, Miyazawa san continued. ‘Yanagi san lived abroad. We haven’t really kept in touch much, apart when she visited. Then she returned to Japan and ever since we have been doing things together, meeting like this for tea or for lunch. Yanagi san has herself had many issues surrounding the care of her parents, so [it means a lot] to be able to tell her my worries’.48

I met Miyazawa san in 2019 during my research visit to the Kansai region of Japan. For Miyazawa san, the burden of care made it more diffcult to fnd time to socialize. Without relatives who could help her with care, she was feeling the pressure of her caring responsibilities, despite the support offered by the state and the local government. Over the years, though, care took its toll and made her isolated—the Japanese-style welfare system relies heavily on family care, and without relatives, Miyazawa san felt largely alone in her care duties. The tenor of these duties removed her from the lives of her acquaintances, whose lives felt different. She was also not left with much time to create new social ties or links to other people. While she is married, her husband, like so many others, works long hours. All this left Miyazawa san feeling lonely. Her close friend’s return to the area meant a lot to Miyazawa san. Her high school peer Yanagi san herself had some experience of care for family members. Either way, she was always ready to listen. Despite the years apart, with not much contact at all, they found themselves relying on each other. Miyazawa san felt this was an important relationship, that they had a connection (en). Through her use of the phrase akai ito de tsunagatteru,‘linked by a red thread’,49 she alluded to a sense of fatefulness. In contrast to mu en (as in muen shakai or alienated society; or muenbotoke spirits without social ties), en in this story is neither one of kinship or of local community. Indeed, in conversation, it is rarely referred to with reference to en kinship, as it is taken for granted.50 In other words, when the connection is mentioned, it goes beyond the usual expectations. En ga aru implies that there is a (special) connection where there need not be one; it does not have to be 318

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there. It also need not be specifed what kinds of entities are connected. En ga aru captures the inchoate and ineffable rather than the given and expected—the feeting, accidental or fateful. It is diffcult or unnecessary to articulate clearly what this kind of connection is, and despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, it might be seen as somehow special, moving or poignant. The connection between these two friends is based on a relationship of regard. Miyazawa san need not hide the challenging details of her daily life from Yanagi san, for fear of causing trouble. Their connection is a relationship of care and regard, simultaneously felt as extraordinary and entirely mundane. I have seen numerous examples of gentle, ordinary and yet special and moving care among older people in the course of my 14 months of feldwork, in 2008–9, in a neighbourhood in the south of Osaka. Some of the oldest residents of this neighbourhood, in their late 80s and 90s, enacted concern and care for those around them who were not their kin. Many challenged the ideal of the three generational family as the benchmark of care and decided to remain in their own homes rather than moving in with their children. While this is no doubt a form of chi-en (community connection), the form it took was novel, as they did not wish to return to the ‘sticky’ relationships of older, village-style communities, with their complex gift exchanges and lack of privacy. Instead, with the help of a local NGO, they sought to cultivate networks of support and mutual aid in which the reciprocity was less direct and more diffuse.51 Challenging the outline of both the ketsu-en and chi-en, they crafted connections of care.52

More than Human Sociality In a village deep in the mountains lived an old man. Since his wife passed away three years ago he has been all by himself (hitoribocchi). He had a son, now 22 years old, but he moved to the city for work. The old man occasionally received a message in the post, but did not get to see him. He passed one day after another, wretched and lonesome (wabishii). As the days passed, the old man grew dissatisfed living in the mountains. One day, he decided he would go to the city to live with his son. Happy to have made the decision, he suddenly noticed a small violet growing in the corner of the garden. ‘In all these years, I have never seen a violet so beautiful!’ He admired it. He decided to stay a while longer, to water it and see it grow. He watered it every day and soon he was no longer thinking about leaving.53

How could he leave, when the violet, which blossomed in a place that no one could see, needed him? If loneliness points to failures of care and sociality, this story directs our attention to a range of other forms of connection that people can cultivate. Feeling needed, connecting with other-than-human beings, with nature, can be very important for many who struggle with loneliness. More-than-human relationships, including connections with non-human animals and even with plants, may be associated with reduced feelings of loneliness and highlight the importance of care in fostering a sense of connection.54 Caring for someone—or something—may in this sense be at least as important as receiving care oneself. Among the residents of the neighbourhood I call Shimoichi, many people cultivated plants in pots on the road in front of their houses. A narrow street with virtually no pavement, merely a kerb demarcated by paint, and no front garden, did not prevent them from cultivating their plants and their relationship with the natural world. An assortment of pots seemed to spill out of virtually every entryway in some of the narrow streets. Not only fowers grew in these narrow, improvized, staggered gardens—vegetables thrived, too. Some kerbside gardeners told me they rushed out of the house to check and water the plants before they did anything else in the morning. They looked after the plants, and the plants nourished them in turn, they told me. The 319

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plants also, of course, needed them to survive. This sense of feeling needed was articulated quite clearly by young Japanese college students as a counterpoint to loneliness in a recent study by Chikako Ozawa De Silwa.55 One can also rely upon a pet to feel needed, and dogs are increasingly popular as pets in Japan. Paul Hansen’s work on canine family members is also clearly linked to companionship and loneliness. He recalls an event in front of a pet store where a young girl, disappointed, demanded to know why she could not get the dog she wanted. She had moved to Tsukuba City for her father’s work, and now, without her friends, she was feeling lonely, and so she pleaded with her parents, hoping for a new canine friend.56 Pet dogs are typically treated and considered to be a part of the family, in a new form of kinship. What becomes apparent when we consider non-human forms of connection is that, as some forms of sociality and support disappear, possibilities open up for other kinds of relationships and connections.57

Splendid Solitude ‘Regardless of time and society, when someone indulges in satisfying their hunger he will become . . . liberated for the moment’. A tall man in a dark grey suit and crisp white shirt moves down the street with determination. After some deliberation, he enters an eatery. Dark tiles and unstylish décor do not deter him. He chooses from the menu with glee and eyes some steamed eggs while waiting for his meal. At last his meal arrives, and with visible appreciation he buries his chopsticks in the steaming bowl of rice. Alone, he does not stand out from the other salarymen around him. His enthusiasm for food, attention and precision seem contagious. The man is the protagonist of a popular TV show, Solitary Gourmet (Kodoku no gurume), inspired by a popular comic book.

Is loneliness a disease? Asahi newspaper, one of Japan’s major newspapers, dedicated considerable space to this question in an op-ed in 2018 that received considerable attention. Okamoto, a psychologist, speaks of the pathologies of social isolation and ensuing loneliness that particularly affect middle-aged men. Shimoju, the author of a bestselling book on solitude, praises solitude as affording a space to know oneself.58 For a growing number of people, solitude is part of life. Many Japanese scholars suggest that as we age, we may lose friends and family members, and many will live to become alone, single or solitary. But being alone is not the same as being lonely. Even perceived loneliness need not be all bad: it could be a challenge that one learns from; a situation that invites self-development, as Shimoju would have it; or a space to rethink connections and the forms they can take. It can even be seen as glorious, as something to be relished, like the solitary steaming bowl of rice in Solitary Gourmet. Some of my single (and widowed) elderly friends in Shimoichi described their lives as raku de ii, good and easy. Released from the social expectations of marriage and parenthood as they reached the ends of their lives, they also managed to fnd a sense of freedom and opportunities for refection. At the same time, they managed to foster a range of social connections in their area and were largely unaffected by the more acute forms of isolation and abandonment. Clearly, solitude, social isolation and loneliness are not to be confused. While solitude may be sought after and productive, social isolation is a structural condition, while loneliness is associated with a feeling of loss and lack of social connection.59 The most troubling forms of loneliness in Japan affict those who are not valued or even seen. Such loneliness is less a psychological condition than a symptom of disregard and a powerful form of social critique. By fagging the limits of the care enacted by particular kinds of en, loneliness can hopefully also open up spaces for new forms of connection and care. In this sense, loneliness can be 320

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understood as a moral sentiment—a concept that can be traced back to Hume’s arguments about the primacy of emotion over reason in the context of moral responses.60 According to Jason Throop, we should pay attention to the role sentiments and emotions play in the everyday moral life and in situations of heightened self-refection and ‘moral breakdown’.61 The example of loneliness as a moral sentiment in the context of contemporary Japanese society complicates this distinction further: what if ‘moral breakdown’ is no longer a brief moment in time or a temporary crisis but instead becomes a prolonged state of affairs, enduring to the point it becomes normalized? Loneliness as a moral sentiment that highlights the limits of care does, nonetheless, offer an opportunity for self-refection, for rethinking extant relations of care and the cruelty of disregard.

Notes 1 The word ‘muen shakai’ was later voted one of the new top ten buzzwords, new words that describe the world of today for 2010. See ‘Muen shakai’, accessed 14 June 2021, https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7% 84%A1%E7%B8%81%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A-188968. 2 NHK「無縁社会プロジェクト」取材班,「無縁社会」“無縁死”三万二千人の衝撃. 2010. 東 京.文藝春秋. [NHK Muenshakai Project News Report Team, ‘Society without Ties’: Shock of 32,000 Lonely Deaths (Tokyo: Bunkeishujuu, 2010)]. 3 Japan National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Household Projections by Family Type, Number and Size of Household (1980–2030) (2008); OECD International Futures Programme, The Future of Families to 2030: A Synthesis Report (2011), 12. 4 S. Horiguchi, ‘Hikikomori: How Private Isolation Caught the Public Eye’, in A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs, ed. Roger Goodman,Yuki Imoto and Tuukka Toivonen (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 122–38. 5 Jieun Kim, ‘Social Exclusion and Care in Underclass Japan: Attunement as Techniques of Belonging’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 45, no. 1 (2020): 1–22. 6 Jenny de Jong Gierveld, Theo Van Tilburg and Pearl A. Dykstra, ‘Loneliness and Social Isolation’, in Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, ed. Anita Vangelisti and Daniel Perlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 485–500 (486); Louise C. Hawkley and John T. Cacioppo, ‘Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms’, Annals of Behavioral Medicine 40, no. 2 (2010): 218–27 (218). 7 de Jong Gierveld, Van Tilburg and Dykstra,‘Loneliness and Social Isolation’, 492. 8 Ibid.; Lynn Abrams, Linda Fleming, Barry Hazley, Valerie Wright and Ade Kearns,‘Isolated and Dependent: Women and Children in High-Rise Social Housing in Post-War Glasgow’, Women’s History Review 28, no. 5 (2019): 794–813. 9 Michelle Anne Parsons,‘Being Unneeded in Post-Soviet Russia: Lessons for an Anthropology of Loneliness’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 635–48; C. Jason Throop, ‘Moral Sentiments’, in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 150–68. 10 NHK World Japan, Face to Face, Kojima Miyu, Estate Cleaner, last modifed 25 Oct. 2020, www3.nhk. or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/2043062/?cid=wohk-fb-org_vod_ftf_kojima-202011-001& fbclid=IwAR00PAxv5oKTdIr9fkCDpFwZaG9Oi1e6FeGYKAV66l7c_EAGun3DELeGvq4. 11 Junko Otani,‘Kodokushi (“Dying Alone”): Japanese Perspectives’, in New Perspectives on the End of Life: Essays on Care and the Intimacy of Dying, ed. Lloyd Steffen and Nate Hinerman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 77–96. 12 Ministry of Health and Welfare (Japan),‘Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions’ (2019), accessed 28 June 2021, www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/k-tyosa/k-tyosa19/dl/02.pdf. 13 Ministry of Health and Welfare (Japan),‘Annual Health, Labour and Welfare Report 2016 (Summary)’, accessed 28 June 2021, www.mhlw.go.jp/english/wp/wp-hw10/dl/summary.pdf, 6. 14 Nils Dahl, ‘Governing through Kodokushi: Japan’s Lonely Deaths and Their Impact on Community Self-Government’, Contemporary Japan 32, no. 1 (2020): 83–102. 15 Jieun Kim, ‘Necrosociality: Isolated Death and Unclaimed Cremains in Japan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 4 (2016): 843–63; Anne Allison, ‘Lonely Death: Possibilities for a NotYet Sociality’, in Living and Dying in the Contemporary World, ed. Veena Das and Clara Han (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 662–74.

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Iza Kavedžija 16 M. Ishida, Koritsu no Shakaigaku. Muenshakai no shohōsen [Sociology of Isolation: A Prescription against the Society without Social Relation] (Tokyo: Keisōshobō, 2011), 23. 17 Dahl,‘Governing through Kodokushi’, 8. 18 Iza Kavedž ija,‘The Age of Decline? Anxieties about Ageing in Japan’, Ethnos 81, no. 2 (2016): 214–37. 19 Carola Hommerich, ‘The Advent of Vulnerability: Japan’s Free Fall Through Its Porous Safety Net’, Japan Forum, 24, no. 2 (2012): 205–32. 20 NHK World Japan, Face to Face. 21 Katsuhiko Fujimori, Tanshinkyūzōshakai no shōgeki [The Shock of a Society with a Rapidly Growing Number of People Living Alone] (Tokyo: Nihonkeizaishinbun shuppansha, 2010); Dahl, ‘Governing through Kodokushi’. 22 Sébastien Penmellen Boret, Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death (London: Routledge, 2014), 13. 23 See Jason Danely,‘The Limits of Dwelling and the Unwitnessed Death’, Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (2019): 213–39. 24 John Nelson,‘Household Altars in Contemporary Japan: Rectifying Buddhist “Ancestor Worship” with Home Décor and Consumer Choice’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 35, no. 2 (2008): 305–30 (309). 25 Anne Allison, ‘Greeting the Dead: Managing Solitary Existence in Japan’, Social Text 35, no. 1 (2017): 17–35 (18). 26 Penmellen Boret, Japanese Tree Burial. 27 Allison,‘Greeting the Dead’, 20. 28 Andrew McKirdy,‘The Prison Inside: Japan’s Hikikomori Lack Relationships, Not Physical Spaces’,Japan Times, 1 June 2019, www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/06/01/lifestyle/prison-inside-japans-hikikomorilack-relationships-not-physical-spaces/. 29 ‘Survey Findings Suggest Japan Has More than 1 Million “Hikikomori”’, Nippon.com, 5 June 2019, www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00463/. 30 For example, screen time and time spent on the internet are seen as putting youth at risk of becoming hikikomori in an investigation of internet addiction. See M. Tateno, A.R. Teo, W. Ukai, J. Kanazawa, R. Katsuki, H. Kubo and T.A. Kato,‘Internet Addiction, Smartphone Addiction, and Hikikomori Trait in Japanese Young Adult: Social Isolation and Social Network Front’, Psychiatry 10, no. 455 (2019), doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00455. 31 Andy Furlong,‘The Japanese Hikikomori Phenomenon: Acute Social Withdrawal among Young People’, The Sociological Review 56, no. 2 (2008): 309–25 (322). 32 Ramsey Ismail,‘New Starts at New Start: Recovery and the Work of Hikikomori’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 698–709. 33 Horiguchi, ‘Hikikomori’; T. Toivonen and Y. Imoto, ‘Transcending Labels and Panics: The Logic of Japanese Youth Problems’, Contemporary Japan 25, no. 1 (2013): 61–86. 34 NHK Muenshakai Project News Report Team, Society without Ties’. 35 João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 36 Kim,‘Social Exclusion and Care’. 37 Kathryn E. Goldfarb, ‘Family at the Margins: State, Welfare and Well-Being in Japan’, Japanese Studies 36, no. 2 (2016): 151–4. 38 Kim,‘Social Exclusion and Care’. 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Ibid., 16. 41 Ibid., 3. 42 João Biehl,‘Care and Disregard’, in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Fassin, 242–63. 43 Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 44 Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 65. 45 Shunsuke Nozawa,‘Phatic Traces: Sociality in Contemporary Japan’, Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2015): 373–400 (377). 46 Nozawa,‘Phatic Traces’, 388. 47 Ibid., 389. 48 An excerpt based on my feldnotes, from research conducted in Japan in summer 2019. 49 This is an expression used to describe a sense of fateful interconnection, rooted in Sino-Japanese folklore. 50 Nozawa,‘Phatic Traces’, 391.

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Loneliness as Social Critique 51 Iza Kavedž ija,‘The Age of Decline? Anxieties about Ageing in Japan’, Ethnos 81, no. 2 (2016): 214–37; Iza Kavedž ija,‘An Attitude of Gratitude: Older Japanese in the Hopeful Present’, Anthropology & Aging 41, no. 2 (2020): 59–71. 52 This kind of care, in contrast to disregards, one that sees and acknowledges, one that is open and somewhat undefned, is not unlike attuned care described by Jarret Zigon. See Jarrett Zigon, A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 132–57. 53 A summary of the short story ‘Sumire’, by Tanio Hojo. 54 Adrian S. Franklin, ‘On Loneliness’, Geografska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 91, no. 4 (2009): 343–54. 55 Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, ‘In the Eyes of Others: Loneliness and Relational Meaning in Life among Japanese College Students’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 623–34. 56 Paul Hansen,‘Fuzzy Bounds: Doing Ethnography at the Limits of the Network and Animal Metaphor’, Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 183–212. 57 In a different paper, Hansen argues that opportunities for cosmopolitan and multi-species contact have increased. 58 Michael Hoffman,‘Solitude Appears to Have an Image Problem in Japan’,Japan Times,11 Aug. 2018,www. japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/08/11/national/media-national/solitude-appears-image-problem-japan/. 59 For a discussion of differences between the terms and the defnitions of loneliness, see Chikako Ozawa de Silva and Michelle Parsons,‘Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 613–22. 60 Throop,‘Moral Sentiments’, 152. 61 Ibid., 159.

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PART 3

Distance, Place and Displacement

22 LONELINESS AND SOCIABILITY IN MARITIME AND COLONIAL SPACE A Comparative Intersectional Analysis of the Journals of Lt Ralph Clark and Dr Joseph Arnold Rosalind Carr

Two years ago I spent Xmas day at Vigo in Spain, last year off the coast at New Holland. This year at home alone.1

This lonely refection on Christmas day 1810 stands out in the journals of Dr Joseph Arnold, which take us from 1810 to 1815 and from London and Gosport in England to the Napoleonic Adriatic, Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good Hope, the Port Jackson colony and Batavia. In this era solitude was often associated with far-off spaces, but it was in London on Christmas Day that Arnold was lonely. Unmarried, his contentment was rarely reduced by his lack of familial domesticity, and Arnold typically and contentedly flled his days with sociability, which was predominantly homosocial. It was the removal of the possibility of sociability that triggered loneliness rather than locale. Although not as varied as in the London metropole, or even Gosport, Arnold’s sociable life continued onboard ships and in colonial port towns. This world formed his emotional community. For others it was different; a Christian naval offcer who rarely drank alcohol, Lieutenant Ralph Clark’s journal of his voyage on the First Fleet to Gadigal country (named Sydney Cove) in 1787 is illustrative of the intense feelings of loneliness that seamen could face. Unlike Arnold, who gained emotional satisfaction from sociability, Clark’s longing for his wife and son was only minimally assuaged by dining and attendance at fellow offcers’ drinking sessions. However, Clark’s loneliness also declined once he was busy in the colony, supervising convicts on Norfolk Island, and the focus of his emotional community shifted. This chapter approaches loneliness as an effect of the loss of an affective emotional community in an era that emphasized the importance of both domesticity and sociability for men and women, with a notable blurring between the two.2 Despite this blurring of sociability and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-26

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domesticity, comparing Clark and Arnold, the chapter shows that their primary identifcation with domestic or sociable models of eighteenth-century manhood impacted upon their feelings of loss. Naval offcers varying experiences of loneliness, understood as an absence of affective community, shows that, as with sexuality, men’s performances of masculinity were fuid and site-specifc and differed among men of a similar social class.3 They were also infused with late-eighteenth-century hierarchies of class and race. Colonial spaces were not the same as those in the European metropole, but they sought to recreate polite spaces and sociability on a smaller scale. As Onni Gust explores in their study of empire and exile:‘White and male-only clubs, and hill-station retreats, provided imperialists with sanctuary from the otherwise incomprehensible and overwhelming spectres of difference over which they were expected to rule.’4 In the settler colonial context, the recreation of ‘home’ via the imposition of a British landscape and the reproduction of European domesticity was and remains crucial to the colonizers’ ongoing attempts to overwrite First Nations sovereignty while simultaneously creating spaces of entanglement between colonizer and colonized.5 In this context, the formation of emotional communities of naval offcers illuminates the intersectional connections between belonging and colonial power. Signifying a primary alignment with maritime sociability in an age of global imperial mobility, Arnold’s recreation of metropolitan culture in colonial space and onboard ships confrmed an identity founded upon a community of professional colleagues and friends, with signifcant overlap between these two groups. Unlike Arnold, for Clark maritime sociability was not emotionally satisfactory, but once he was in the colony, Clark’s focus shifted to connections and conficts with fellow offcers and the material tasks of colonial occupation, and his loneliness abated. Both Clark and Arnold made their living as offcers in the British navy, and their lives covered a globalized European world of enslavement and invasion.6 Born in 1782, Arnold died in Sumatra in 1818, having served in the Napoleonic Wars, while Clark, born in 1762, fought in their revolutionary precursor and died off the coast of Haiti in 1794.7 As offcers in an expanding imperial navy, both were simultaneously products and agents of colonial white supremacy and their experiences of loneliness provide insight into the intersectional formation of emotional communities. Exploring this, the chapter reveals how an examination of masculinities and loneliness offers an insight into the classed and racialized formation of emotional communities in maritime and colonial space. This is demonstrated by the boundaries of communities which had emotional importance to Arnold and Clark as a form of belonging that negated loneliness and feelings of isolation.

Loneliness and the Multiplicity of Masculinities Travel in Europe and in the colonial and maritime worlds was an opportunity for the production of life writing in the absence of home and, often, family.8 Unlike the accounts produced by higher-ranked offcers involved in the frst occupation of the continent now called Australia, such as Lieutenant Governor David Collins and Captain John Hunter, Clark’s journal was not written with the intention of publication in London.9 Perhaps for this reason, it was less self-consciously polite. Addressed to his wife, the emotional language is particularly explicit and raw comparative to other manuscript journals—for instance, that of First Fleet surgeon George Worgan which is addressed to his brother.10 Clark’s expression of emotion also differed signifcantly from Arnold, who wrote two decades later. Rather than a signifcant shift in codes of masculinity over this era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, I contend that this difference illustrates their adoption of different forms of manliness on the spectrum of upper and middling masculine norms. Focusing on loneliness, the history of emotions enables an insight into men’s adoption 328

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and reiterative performance of masculinities by revealing the emotional communities that made them feel happy and fulflled.11 In the frst volume of Clark’s journal, his longing to be with his wife and son points to the importance of family and domestic manhood in his construction of self, whereas for unmarried Arnold, there is less distinction between his life in England, onboard and in colonial space. Throughout Arnold’s journals, homosocial friendships provide happiness and reinforce his identity as a man of polite medical learning. As the 2015 collection, Spaces for Feeling, edited by Susan Broomhall, explores,‘socialities of this era [1650–1850] had affective content and structures that were specifc to contemporary understandings of emotions’, and these emotional practices were site-specifc and impacted by ‘gender, age, faith, and class’.12 These factors are borne out by Arnold and Clark in their differing experiences of affective community—professional sociability in Arnold’s case and domestic family in Clark’s. For these men, the spaces of ship and colony elicited different emotions as affective community was enabled, lost and changed. While the explicit language of loneliness may not have existed prior to the nineteenth century, as Fay Bound Alberti has shown, there is scepticism concerning her argument that it did not exist as an emotional state.13 In their study of anxiety among younger sons of the English gentry, Henry French and Mark Rothery reject essentialist and ahistorical approaches to the emotions but call attention to emotional language in the correspondence between these young men and their families. Illustrating how anxiety was expressed in the language of a gentry emotional community, their archive of young men’s correspondence becomes an ‘archive of feeling replete with rich seams of evidence relating to emotions and masculinity.’14 The same applies to the travel journals of naval offcers. Though very different men, writing at opposite ends of a transformative historical epoch, Clark and Arnold express a shared emotional language of masculine honour and civility. Consider, for instance, Clark’s description of Captain Hall of the News South Wales Corp as ‘a genteel well behavd man’ and Arnold’s critical depiction of Lieutenant Bower as ‘one of those characters who never would be an honour to any profession’. In Arnold’s opinion, Bower’s only qualifcation was being a ‘bon vivant’.15 Here and throughout their respective journals, Clark and Arnold deploy a common language of core manly values necessary to maintain the emotional community of offcers onboard ships and in remote colonies and thus ensure the hierarchy that separated them from convicts, sailors and First Nations people.16 Illustrating the intersecting hierarchies of class and race in the context of colonial occupation at the edge of the British Empire, on their way to invade Gadigal country, Clark wrote that they were reliant on healthy marines ‘to defend us from the convicts and natives’.17 Both Clark and Arnold’s emotional community in colonial space were their ‘brother offcers’, a group boundaried not only by professional status but also by class and race. Yet despite their shared belonging in this racialized masculine community, Clark and Arnold experienced maritime and colonial emotional communities differently. The language and context in which feelings of loneliness or their absence are expressed in their respective journals reveal the divergence of masculinities among men of a similar rank and illuminate how domesticity and sociability provided varying levels of emotional satisfaction in differing contexts.

Domesticity Writing 20 years apart, the difference in chronology between Clark and Arnold is less signifcant than the way their experiences of loneliness indicate their adoption of different models of manliness and a fuidity inspired by circumstance. In Clark’s case, a sense of longing and loneliness pervades the frst volume of his diary written during the voyage from Portsmouth to Warrane 329

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(named Sydney Cove); his primary emotional community remained in England, and his domestic world of wife and son, his best friend (Kempster) and his aunt were not easily replaced by shipboard sociability. Surrounded by sociable men, Clark often felt alone, and his loneliness reveals a masculine identity founded upon domestic fatherhood, as he constantly records an intense longing to be with his wife and son.18 Missing one’s family is not in itself loneliness; in Clark’s case, it became so because of his inability to recreate a satisfying emotional community in the context of maritime sociability. This is indicated via the language of sadness: went by the Log last 24 hours 164 miles—thirty Such runs as this I think that we shall not be a great Way from Botany—I wish it was to Plymouth dear Sweet place wher all my happiness my Soul and tendrest Love is centerd—19 Attempting to combine his new naval emotional community with his primary domestic one, on his third wedding anniversary, 23 June 1787, Clark endeavoured to ‘spend the day as happy as the Ship will per mitt’, by organising a gathering including Captain Walton and two shipmates. Yet the night prior to the occasion, he refected that this would not fully assuage his loneliness: if I thought that I Should have been So unhappy at leaving my family behind I should never have come away from them—I did not know half how much I love them or all the gains on earth Should never have made me leave them O dear sweet Alicia my Beloved Alicia and Sweet Boy—Modrat Breeze from the N—Course South Lof 77 Miles Lat 10.47 N20 Clark’s recording of the ship’s location in many of his entries recalls the common association of the far away and the alone, established in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Clark was not alone on his ship, but unlike Arnold, shipboard sociability was not emotionally fulflling. Signifcantly, Clark rarely drank alcohol, which, historians such as Karen Harvey have noted, was central to male sociability across the century.21 As Elaine Chalus’ chapter in this volume points out, these moments of peer sociability fulflled an important emotional function among naval offcers separated from the familial and social networks of home. His teetotalism did not mean Clark was excluded from this culture entirely. Although constantly longing for home, he participated in naval sociability. For instance, on 16 September 1787, he recorded being awake with fellow offcers until 2 a.m. although he drank ‘nothing but Lemonnade [sic]’.22 Even in his account of his wedding anniversary aboard the Friendship there is a sense of some joy: Made my friends as happy as I in the Ship could and the[y] wair happy as the[y] Saw that it maid me happy on Account of it being Yesterday may Weding day—I gave them a cold dinner wine Beer and Cyder which was all that I had—the doctor Faddy and Self Sagn untill 10 oClock at Night23 However, this did not negate his longing for Alicia, and he continued with an expression of love for her: dear happy day I hope my dear Alicia keep it when My God Shall She and I may be together to keep it—god only knows how Much I love her never did man love Woman So as I doe her dear Tender Soul the best of her Sex, if God keeps me in life I will always 330

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have Some friends to dine with me that day for it was the best and happiest day that ever I Saw and will also keep that of our dear Sons dear Sweet Boy24 The sadness caused by Clark’s lonely longing for his wife and son was particularly extreme when the Friendship docked in Cape Town and there was no letter waiting from his wife. When they had previously stopped at Rio de Janeiro (the frst major port on the voyage), Clark’s emotional focus had been on his wife and son, but the opportunity to post a letter gave his melancholy a positive hue: thank god that I fnd there is a Ship here bound to London and will Sail much a bout the Same time for ther that we will for the Cape of good hope—I shall write a long letter to my Adorabl Sweet and Sinceer Alicia—god out of his great goodness bless her and I wish her a good night for I suppose She is in bed long before this for it is now 11 although it is not 8 oClock now with use So god protect her and my Ralphie25 Clark was also occupied with dining with fellow offcers and visiting the town. On one occasion, indicating a positive moment of solitude, Clark notes happily that he ‘went on Shore by my Self one the other side of the harbour to collect Butterfys wher I caught a great number of beautiful one for my dear Belovd woman’.26 When the First Fleet fotilla reached Cape Town, these acts of connection felt unanswered because there were no letters from Alicia waiting for him. This robbed him of the emotional connection that, as Chalus’ research of naval captains shows, was integral to mitigating the extreme loneliness that the distance of naval service inspired. Lacking the tangibility of emotional connection that letters represented, at frst Clark felt disappointed but not distressed and explained their absence as resulting from a ship not arriving from England to deliver one.27 Relying on this scenario for emotional stability, he distracted himself with the sociability of Cape Town. Yet his wife and son still dominated his dreams, and he grew anxious to hear from them: dreamt last night I was at my Beloved womans Burial—oh my God what a dream—oh that I could but have a letter from my Alicia before that I leave this place to no how She and my Son are—why doe I wish for a thing that is almost impossible it is love dear Sweet passion28 When a ship did arrive, Clark felt anxious excitement followed by crushing disappointment: —hope it is a Ship from England and that I may have a letter by her . . . oh my God how my hart goes pitte patty—about 1/2 after one Capt. M: Mr. F and the doctor came on board and inform me that She was from Falmouth in 12 weeks—almost half mad—then a few moment after they come a Gentleman came on board with a letter for Arundell and Says that was the only letter except one for Mr. Bradly on board of the Sirius that She had brought out—oh my God how I am disapointed has my Alicia entirly forgott her fond Clark—people in the Ship to Receive letters and not I . . . I am Quit down to think that all my hopes are over in not been abl to get a letter for this Year and a half—on my Returnd found Lieut Davey and Mr. Consident who Staid a half hour with use—Shall goe to Bed and See if I can get any ease on My Pillow and endeavour to think that my beloved has not Quite forgott her Clark her most Sinceer Clark So God Bless her and my Boy again Bless them29 331

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Suggesting a similarity with modern loneliness, Clark’s longing for his wife and son created a challenging psychological state marked by extreme sadness. On 5 December 1787, Clark recorded that he ‘lay a Weak the greatest part of the night and did nothing but think a bout home, god bless them both’.30 Two days later, he wrote that he wished to christ that I was but once got back to her again—not all the promotions Should make me part from her again—Latt 41–21 South—I cannot rest I wish that it was bed time that I might have a hearty cry that would ease the hevy [sic] load that at present is round my heart.31 Signifying eighteenth-century understandings of sadness as a possible precursor to melancholy, Clark’s longing was sometimes so intense that he feared it might lead to madness.32 On 11 July 1787, he dreamt of having been with my dear Alicia and Miss Turner in dock and that my Tender love was sitting at the fre with her night cap on and Seemd very low—I hope in gods goodness that ther is nothing the matter with her for if I know ther was I should certainly goe mad.33 It also, Clark was keenly aware, risked making him physically ill. In Cape Town on 26 October 1787 in his dream: I bought a drum for my Beloved Alicia and my Son but I thought She told me that he was dead—I awakend Capt. Meridith with crying in my Sleep—oh my god that I could but only heer from her—what would I give dear woman She dose not know how much Sinceerly love her—I am affraid that I Love her too much for my own health but who can help not loving her—She is all goodness and wher is her fellow on earth I would loose my left hand for only a pepe at her and my boy—God Preserve and Bless them both is my ardent wish that it is34 These references to a risk of madness as a result of his loss of emotional community of close family and friends can be read as akin to the depression that mental health professionals today recognize can be precipitated by loneliness, though the causal link is complex.35 In the context of late eighteenth-century society, Clark’s feelings were exacerbated by a perceived failing to protect as a father, and thus, his longing produced an anxious masculinity expressed through a language of Georgian manly sensibility. This conglomerate of feeling means we can read his longing and homesickness both as akin to modern loneliness and historically specifc. His contemporary, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher James Beattie recommended sober sociability as a cure for the ‘distemper’ of melancholy, and it appears that this is the direction Clark took.36 Once he was on shore in the colony, the tone of Clark’s journal changed. He formed a new affective community necessitated by colonial conditions. The third volume of Clark’s journals indicate a shift in focus from home and family to naval sociability. No longer constantly longing to be with his wife and son, Clark was focused on the establishment of colonial rule. In a one-line entry on 5 February 1788, he noted: ‘Nothing Exstrordinary my dr. wife—the[y] are clearing the ground as fast as they can’.37 Through this process, Clark’s emotional community became centred on his fellow offcers. The exact circumstances of this change are unclear. Unfortunately, the second volume of Clark’s journals—which may have given an indication of this emotional shift—are missing. Beginning again in 1790, in 332

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the third volume Alicia is not entirely absent, but she is rarely mentioned. Clark might still have kissed her picture on Sundays, but if he was, he no longer recorded it in his journal as a declaration of love. In the frst volume he noted this act almost every Sunday.38 In August 1790, on a ship departing the colony, Clark sent letters and ‘also a Box for my beloved woman Containing a [*] Skin, a pair of Pidgions of this Island, a Mount Pit Bird, a Mutten Bird, a Cock and Hen Robin, a quail, a white Breasted Bird all of this Island’.39 This gift suggests that Clark still loved and missed Alicia and his son. However, signifcantly, this no longer created a loneliness that threatened melancholic madness. There were more opportunities to correspond with his wife and Clark was distracted, gaining emotional fulflment, and frustration, from his fellow offcers. By 1790, Clark was on Norfolk Island overseeing the attempt to establish an agricultural settlement centred upon fax production. A site of hard labour and harsh discipline of convicts, Clark’s life was one of work and naval sociability, including friendships with some offcers. During this time, his entries are often brief and are far less emotive than in the frst volume. Tellingly, when Clark awaits the Gorgon to take him from the island in September 1790, it is not a longing for home, for his ‘dear sweet Alicia’, but a loss of comfortable naval sociability that makes him desperate to leave: Clear weather & no Surf but no Gorgon—I wish to be away from this place for the place begins to be disagreable for a great manny of my Brother offcers if not all are jealous of me because I am greatly in favour with Majr. Ross—if it is So the[y] have no Occation for if I could I would not doe them an injury although manny of them would me if the[y] had it in there power but I am Concious of having al along acted like ane honest man and a man of honour to my friend and them and all this is because Majr. Ross pays more attention to me than he dose to any of the Rest40 In making this shift in emotional community, and occupying himself with work, Clark no longer appears to be intensely lonely. This feeling had not disappeared, but his homesickness was not translating into a distressed emotional state. Though his longing for family was not at the forefront of his mind it was not entirely absent. On 31 December 1790, Clark refected sadly on the previous two years. Noting the loss of his possessions in shipwrecks both years, he returned to the theme of family in his hope for a better 1791:‘I Should forget it all if the Gorgon would come and take me home to my beloved family for I realy wish to be with them I have been too long a way from them.’41 This sad refection on time away from home is a rare entry in the third volume of Clark’s journal. When included, entries on home and Alicia are affectionate but more sedate than in the frst volume and typically occur when this previous world is brought to the forefront of Clark’s mind by the sighting and arrivals of ships. On 4 August 1790, he recorded that ‘the whole Town was in an uproar with the News of a Ship in Sight’, then noted their collective dismay when it did not return signal: this is the most cruelest thing that ever happend to any Set of people under heaven her appearing in Sight this Morning was to every body the Same as a reprive from death and then to leave us I don’t know what to make of it.42 Out on Norfolk Island, food supply was a constant concern, and when expected supplies did not arrive, they were, in Clark’s words,‘doom to starve’. Yet it was not only food Clark desired, he also wished for ‘Some letters from My belovd wife but no Such good fortune comes Yet to 333

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my lot I must wait with patience a little longer’.43 In this case Clark only had to wait a few more days before the Justinian arrived with food and letters,‘amongst them four from my belovd wife and that She and my dear little fellow are well’.44 This contact was absent during the voyage from Portsmouth to Gadigal country, and, along with increased emotional attachment to the colonial offcer community, the receipt of letters from home probably contributed to his calmer emotional state.

Sociability Arnold does not appear lonely except when the onset of Christmas removed sociable opportunities. Yet in the lead-up to his lonely Christmas Day, Arnold’s response to his aloneness appeared to adopt the more positive emotional state of solitude. On 22 December 1810, he refected, ‘My time pass very differently to what it has done for some time, quiet, ease, idleness, reading, walking, coursing, [unclear] &c. &c.’45 Embracing solitude through solitary walks, reading and other idle activities, Arnold adopted similar techniques to those employed by radical philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft. Yet Arnold did not welcome his aloneness. He embodied the sociability celebrated by philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume as emblematic of civility and civilisation, and as Barbara Taylor writes,‘[s]olitariness in this sociable self could only ever appear as lack or loss.’46 Professional sociability provided a primary emotional community for Arnold and is a core reason for his relative lack of loneliness in maritime and colonial, as well as metropolitan, space. In England, this sociability included attendance at St Guy’s Hospital Medical Society debates, the theatre and visits to friends, including Mr MCleary, whose insect and shell collection Arnold declared ‘probably the fnest in the world’.47 Arnold’s life onboard was also not lacking in opportunities for sociability. Though opportunities were more restricted, his naval sociability included dining with other offcers and passengers, and when docked at established port cities, attending pantomimes and other events, such as carnival at Valletta, Malta. Travelling on crowded naval vessels and visiting various ports, Arnold’s maritime world was far from the imagined lonely space of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe almost a century earlier and indicative of the interconnected, multi-ethnic British imperial world of the revolutionary era.48 Whereas Crusoe may have learned to accept the lack of companionship he initially railed against while marooned on a desert island, Arnold participated in an established global British Empire populated by people to dine and converse with. For Arnold, sociability provided emotional succour, and alongside preventing loneliness, it helped assuage regular feelings of frustration at his subordinate status when impeded by superiors he felt were lesser in knowledge and honour. Indicating a masculine anxiety concerning patriarchal status, Arnold was particularly aggravated by those who held superior rank but, in his estimation, lacked civility and intelligence, and he emphasized the negative constraints imposed on naval surgeons by ‘the perversity, ill will or want of gentlemanlike behaviour of the frst lieut’.49 On 24 February 1812, Arnold wrote in exasperation, ‘Another circumstance very annoying to a surgeon is that he can do nothing without the concern of the captain, even with respect to treatment of the sick.’50 In Arnold’s frustration the confict between naval hierarchy and Enlightenment emphasis on the authority of knowledge is clearly apparent. However, Arnold’s condemnation of superiors lacking in intelligence and manners also drew upon the emotional regime of naval offcers that emphasized martial rather than Enlightenment notions of masculine honour. On 25 April 1812, he recorded the shared dissatisfaction among his fellow offcers after they failed to identify probable enemy ships. This was due to ‘our not acting more like Englishmen when the strange ships were reported’, and he noted that they ‘all went to bed’ early. This frustration—expressed as a 334

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shared emotion of manly patriotic failure—is connected to the failure of the captain to maintain the character upon which his power should rest. As Arnold angrily noted, I really hardly know to what principle to attribute this inactivity; Mr—says it arises evidently from fear, which is an unpardonable passion in a person holding a situation of xxx, who ought to be brave, intrepid & active. Indeed I know of nothing more distressing than the situation of brave offcers under a pusillanimous leader51 Although Arnold primarily identifed with Enlightenment values of intellectual authority and professional sociability, his emotional communities intersected. As a naval offcer, he also celebrated bravery and other martial traits. This intersection in the form of critique of the captain’s manly virtues may have drawn on the increasingly mythological status of Lord Nelson, who, Kathleen Wilson explains, ‘mobilised and concentrated a version of stoic, affective, masculinist patriotism’ that, as much as it served the interests of the imperialist nation-state, also served a radical politics due to his well-known respect for his subordinates.52 Where Nelson combined ‘compassion and empathy’ with martial heroism, Arnold’s captain appears to have displayed neither.53 In the face of frustration at cowardly, authoritarian and illiberal captains, Arnold’s sociable networks reinforced his sense of self and enabled him to contribute to late-Enlightenment medicine. On the 24 January 1811, he ‘[d]ined with Dr Grey and Dr McArthur & spent a very pleasant afternoon in conversation on medical subjects’. On the subject of bleeding, he ‘was glad to fnd that our own opinions generally agreed’.54 Buoyed by the support of his professional friends, Arnold wrote a detailed letter to infuential friends criticising the practice of bleeding sailors suffering from fever. This was then read at a private committee of the London College of Physicians.55 Perhaps typical of many middling medical professionals, sociability and professional standing went hand-in-hand for Arnold, and his relationships with fellow surgeons in London, extending to fellow offcers’ onboard ships and in colonial space, formed his primary, intersecting, emotional communities. For this reason, the emotion of loneliness is largely absent from his journals. These emotional communities provided the foundation for the intimate connection of friendship, which facilitated patronage, protection and emotional community.56 In a material and emotional sense, these connections were essential in colonial space. As Clark readied himself to travel from Port Jackson to Norfolk Island, material provisions blurred the line of friendship and kinship, emphasising its importance: Captain Campble has been very kind he askd me if I wanted anything that he had he would let me have it—I told him I was much obliged to him—he Said I no that You have not much Tea I have put up a caddy for you with Majr. Ross’s—he also gave me half a dozen pair of Stocking which I want very much—the Sivility and friendship that Captain Campble has Shown to me I am affraid I never will have it in my power to make him a Suffcient Acknowlegement for his attention has been more like a father than a friend—his and Majr. Rosses friendship to me is what I call real and Sinceer57 Friendships located in naval sociability were also a signifcant source of emotional and material support for Arnold. When arriving in Sydney in 1815 on the convict transport vessel Northampton, he initially considered himself ‘adrift’ because of Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s lack of friendship. Yet through the hospitality of fellow offcers, he was able to secure lodging and by 4 July was ‘passing the time very pleasantly, having continually invitations to spend the day with some person or other’.58 In Sydney, the importance of hospitality to happiness, avoiding 335

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the loneliness of being cast adrift, is clearly apparent. ‘My reception from the Governor was cold and disgusting, and equally frigid from Mrs Macquarie, both of whom I knew well when they arrived at this place. My reception however from other persons was fattering and agreeable’, noted Arnold from the Indefatigable, on which departed for England.59

Intersectional Belonging in Colonial Space The sociable worlds of Clark and Arnold were primarily composed of other offcers who shared a similar aspirational upper middling-class identity. As with polite culture in metropolitan space, their world of honourable masculinity was never intended to include everyone. The emotional communities these offcers formed were boundaried by class and race. This is particularly apparent in Clark’s journals where lower-class convicts supposedly disorderly nature placed them outside his world of fellow-feeling, despite his sexual and possibly pseudo-domestic relationship with one of them, Mary Branham, a servant sentenced to transportation for stealing linen, with whom he had a daughter.60 Material objects,such as the love tokens given by convicts to family members or other beloveds prior to transportation, display a similar emotional connection to the domestic world left behind as the picture of his wife that Clark carried with him.61 Indeed, like Clark, for many convicts the emotional pain caused by exile from family was lessened when they integrated into colonial networks composed of people speaking the same language and sharing similar backgrounds to themselves, as Carol Liston explores,‘Convict letters home reveal people caught between interest in the new opportunities and sorrow at the loss of family and friends.’62 Denying this similarity of feeling, Clark’s diaries express no empathy with convict women. His representation of convict women as ‘damed whores’, and his delight in their brutal punishment stands in stark contrast to his constant concern for the health of his wife and young son, leading him to put his ‘trust in God that when I Return to her my happiness which I then Shall enjoy in her company will Repay me for the pain that I now Suffer in being absent from her’.63 Indicating the applicability of polite femininity to a specifc race and class of woman in the eighteenth century, in one particularly illustrative passage, among many references to extreme violence against convicts in the journals, Clark recounted, Capt. Walton has given me a puppy have cald it Efford after the dear Sweet place where frst I came acquainted with my Alicia my Vertious Wife—Capt Merideth order one of the Corporals to fog with a rope Elizh. Dudgeon for being impertinent to Capt. Meridith—the Corporal did not play with her but laid it home which I was very glad to see—then order her to tied to the pump She has been long fshing for it which She has at last got untill her hearts containt—Latte.64 Clark’s relationship with Branham occurred in this violent hierarchical context (though in the colony rather than onboard), which denied convict women the protections of the ideal of virtuous femininity—a process evident in its most extreme and long-lasting form in the brutal treatment of enslaved women of African descent in the Americas.65 Branham and Clark’s daughter, Alicia, was born on 23 July 1791. Clark’s diary entry for that day reads, ‘Rainy dirty weather—Majr. Ross no better’.66 This lack of recording of his natural daughter’s birth suggests that Clark’s emphasis on the domestic and the celebration of the feminine, expressed via loneliness during the voyage, was limited to England and his wife. Addressed to her, if he was intending for his wife to read the journal on his return, he would have reason to keep this event and emotional connections with Branham secret. That Clark named his and 336

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Branham’s daughter Alicia, after his wife, does suggest some transference of emotional attachment from his wife to his natural daughter. We do not know if this was a consensual encounter, and power relations in the penal colony made true consent between an offcer and a convict almost impossible.67 Yet Clark did bring Branham, her frst child, William Curtis (b. 1788), and their daughter back to England with him. There is a greyness here, indicating both the boundaries and fuidity in class-based domestic emotional belonging. This fuidity is particularly apparent in Arnold’s journals. Indicating his investment in an Enlightenment-informed manly sensibility, probably stemming from his professional role in caring for the health of convicts and sailors, Arnold is more sympathetic towards lower-class sailors and convicts. For instance, he discusses in detail the medical problems leading to the deaths of some convict women and, in so doing, gives them a humanity denied by Clark’s representations. This included women such as Anne Frost,‘aged about 30’ and ‘of a good appearance and strong habit of body’, who presented with a fever,‘symptoms of cholera, & a great pain about the belly, which was swelled’, and, despite Arnold’s efforts,‘[d]eparted this life’.68 That Arnold’s sympathy was connected to his identity as a medical professional is supported by Clark’s journal, in which he refers with frustration to doctors’ onboard requests that certain convict women are released from irons due to ill health.69 The participation of ship surgeons in the transatlantic slave trade refuses a simple correlation, but Arnold’s sympathy connects him culturally to those ship surgeons whose experiences of the trade encouraged abolitionist politics.70 Like them, Arnold abhorred extreme and unjust violence. Retelling a horrendous story of a Black sailor who was brutally fogged and tortured, Arnold reversed racist discourse by calling the captain a ‘beast’.71 Flogging increased in frequency and severity during the revolutionary era, a development that can be considered part of the counter-revolutionary impetus of the British Empire.72 Arnold’s criticism places him among those seeking reform of this brutal naval discipline and unchecked authority of ship captains and highlights a sympathetic humanitarian impulse that, as Jane Lydon discusses, ‘was an essential means of uniting dispersed communities and linking the metropolis and her colonies—but also served to exclude, especially on racial grounds’.73 On 21 May 1811, Arnold expressed sadness at the circumstances of a young man, pressed into the navy, who was ‘dressed in a black coat, small cloaths, and topped boots’, and, unlike other pressed men appearing on ship that day,‘was of a very good appearance, about 18 years old, of an abashed demeanour, and accomplished address’.74 A month later, he recorded the horror of this ‘unfortunate youth’ being fogged, describing the youth’s terror at the idea of the severity of the punishment, his cries & tears before feeling the lash, [the] inexpressible writhing of the body under severe pain . . . his unprevailing expression of misfortunes; & his forlorn & unpitied situation. Summing up the young man’s situation, Arnold refected, ‘Thus a man without friends is abused by all; so little benefcent is human nature in prosperity.’75 This reference to the importance of friendship underscores the benefts of a close emotional community at home and in maritime and colonial space. It also sympathetically portrays the young sailor as a victim by emphasising not only his torture but also his difference from other subalterns. Arnold’s sympathy for convicts and sailors did not mean that he typically considered them equals. Committed to the class hierarchy of the age, especially as it pertained to criminals, during his visit in 1815, Arnold was critical of Governor Macquarie’s inclusion of emancipated convicts at his table in Sydney. He was also ‘rather ashamed of being a guest’ of Mr Redfern, the principal surgeon in the colony and ex-convict, transported for his participation in the 1797 Nore mutiny. 337

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Professional status positioned Arnold and Redfern as colleagues and equal participants in colonial naval sociability, and they dined together, but Redfern’s past sedition and emancipated status excluded him from full membership of Arnold’s emotional community,‘although he is rich and a great friend of the Governor’s’.76 Indicating the shared emotional regime of naval offcers, as in the case of Clark, Arnold’s sympathy was infused by class and race. The fogged youth elicited full sympathy because his demeanour suggested a higher status than the other pressed men. In a similar manner, on 20 May 1811, Arnold recounted disorder on the ship caused by the ‘wailings’ of a ‘poor prostitute’. Expressing sympathy for this woman, Arnold noted that she appeared well educated, and he retold her story of being forced to fee a convent because of the French Revolution.77 As with the sailor, Arnold’s sympathy involved emphasising characteristics that positioned her above the lower classes. Operating intersectionally with social status, sympathy was, as Gust has shown, also connected to whiteness in the Enlightenment epistemology that underpinned the eighteenth-century imperial project.78 On 10 May 1811 Arnold discussed being introduced to two passengers on his ship, the consul general of the Balearic Islands and ‘a jew called Samuel Moses, a man sent from Jerusalem to collect tribute from England, a dirty offensive fellow who spoke eight languages & who was dressed in the Eastern garb’.79 Here, racialized difference, in this case an anti-Semitic and anti-Eastern sentiment, places Moses outside of Arnold’s emotional community though part of his shipboard sociable life. This differs from his discussion of people closer to him in social class and race, such as Mrs Germain, a recent war widow, with whom he and the ship’s captain dined on 8 July 1811 and towards whom Arnold felt sympathetic.80 As with young widows of fallen offcers, press-ganged sailors displaying polite accomplishments and French nuns driven mad by the circumstances of revolution, First Nations people became a device for Arnold to demonstrate his civility and sympathy and, by extension, his place within the emotional community of ‘enlightened’ naval offcers. Illustrating the racial prejudice of his sympathy, in 1815 Arnold noted that, compared to his frst visit, First Nations people in Sydney were as ‘rude and savage as ever’. Continuing this racist trope, he observed that they seemed more ‘cunning and artful’ than on his previous visit, commented on their fondness for drink and wrote disdainfully of their failure to embrace farming. He then employed a hierarchical humanitarian discourse in declaring that ‘something must be done for them’.81 Placing First Nations people as victims in need of assistance from the colonizers, Arnold represented the settler colonial process as inevitable and refused to acknowledge Indigenous survival, negotiation and resistance.82 As Nicola Starbuck has explored, racialized perceptions of emotion framed EuropeanIndigenous encounters in Oceania.83 Written 20 years earlier, at the beginning of the occupation, Clark’s journals depict a similarly sympathetic but deeply colonial perspective. He initially expressed distrust towards Eora and surrounding First Nations people, commenting as they sailed into Warrane (called Sydney Cove) that ‘the Supply Boat has been on Shore often had intercourse with the Natives who the[y] Say are very friendly but I will not trust them’.84 Later, Clark formed a friendly relationship with two Eora men, Dourrawan and Tirriwan, and after exchanging a hatchet for two spears with them, Governor Arthur Phillip requested that he take advantage of this relationship and ‘take one of them and bring them in [to the camp]’.85 Clark declined this, refecting that it would ‘be very Ungenerous to take them for after the[y] had place Such confdence in use that I could not think of doing it for if I had taken them both what would have become of there young children the[y] must have starved.’86 As with his expressions of loneliness during the voyage, his concern for the fate of the Eora children indicates Clark’s investment in fatherhood and domesticity as core masculine traits. Calling on these traits enables him to present himself as protector of the people whose land he is 338

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occupying and whose lives he is fundamentally, though not irrevocably, disrupting. This paternalistic, hierarchical application of this concern is also apparent in his journal when he writes of the death of a convict woman’s child; recording on 29 September 1787 that the doctor was cald up to see one of the Convict womens children which was very ill and has been almost ever Since it has been on board—it depart this life at 2 oClock this morning poor thing it is much better out of this World than in it.87 Clark’s lonely longing for his wife did not encourage any empathy with convict women, but his self-identifcation as a loving father allowed him a sentimental domestic masculinity that ultimately upheld race and class hierarchies.

Conclusion: Whiteness and Emotional Communities in Colonial Spaces Though Clark’s and Arnold’s expressions of manliness differed they coalesced around a shared emotional regime and community of British naval offcers separate from First Nations people and lower-class white Britons. Examining feelings of loneliness and their absence in Clark’s and Arnold’s journals reveals the importance of sociability and the formation of emotional communities of fellow offcers. Always embedded in professional sociability, Arnold rarely expressed loneliness, while Clark’s emphasis on domestic manhood as the core of his identity meant that his initial maritime experience was an intensely lonely one, almost leading to madness. Aligning with his community of fellow offcers once in the Sydney colony signifcantly lessened the loneliness caused by his separation from his wife, child, and broader kinship networks. Emotions in maritime and colonial space cannot be separated from motivations of imperialism and colonial rule, and both Clark and Arnold are indicative of the pivotal role that white middling men played in the expansion of the British Empire at the end of the long eighteenth century. It would be easy to assume that feelings of aloneness were enhanced in remote colonial space, yet in Clark’s case the work of establishing a penal colony on the unceded land of the Eora and surrounding nations distracted from his loneliness and encouraged him to form new, homosocial communities. For Arnold, this homosocial maritime and colonial world was initially and remained a core emotional community, and it was on Christmas Day at home alone in England that he felt lonely.

Notes 1 ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals, 1810–1815’, Microflm: CY 1391, State Library of NSW, Sydney, 25 Dec. 1810. 2 Susan Broomhall, ed., Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 2015); Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2009). 3 Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Karen Harvey,‘Ritual Encounters: Punch Parties and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 214 (2012): 165–203; Kate Davison, ‘Occasional Politeness and Gentlemen’s Laughter in 18thC England’, The Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014): 921–45; Rosalind Carr,‘The Importance and Impossibility of Eighteenth-Century Manhood: Polite and Libertine Masculinities in the Urban Eighteenth Century’, in Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinities in Scottish History, ed. L. Abrams and E. Ewan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 58–79. 4 Onni Gust, ‘ “The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging”: Exile and Empire in Sir James Mackintosh’s Letters from Early Nineteenth-Century Bombay’, History Workshop Journal 86, no. 1 (2018): 22–43 (23). 5 Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish, ‘The Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness, ed. Lee Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus

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6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Tracey Banivanua Mar and P. Edmonds, eds, Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2010); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Zoe Laidlaw and Alan Lester, eds, Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Landholding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2015). Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (New York: Harper Collins, 2020). Charles Bateson,‘Arnold, Joseph (1782–1818)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed online 11 Mar. 2022, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/arnold-joseph-1717/text1875; Janet D. Hine,‘Clark, Ralph (1762–1794)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed online 11 Mar. 2022, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clark-ralph-1898/text2239. Onni Gust, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Mark R.F. Williams, ‘The Inner Lives of Early Modern Travel’, The Historical Journal 62, no. 2 (2019): 349–73. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1 . . . (London: T. Caddell and W. Davies, 1798); John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island . . . (London: John Stockdale, 1793). George Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon (Sydney, 1978). Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context I. International Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions 1 (2010): 1–32. Susan Broomhall,‘Introduction’, in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2015), 3–7. Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton,‘Is Loneliness a “Modern” Phenomenon?’, 2020, www.birmingham. ac.uk/research/perspective/is-loneliness-an-exclusively-modern-epidemic.aspx. Henry French and Mark Rothery, ‘Male Anxiety among Younger Sons of the English Landed Gentry, 1700–1900’, The Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 967–95 (969). Ralph Clark, Paul G. Fidlon, and R.J. Ryan, The Journal and Letters of Lt. Ralph Clark, 1787–1792 (Sydney, 1981), 15 Apr. 1791;‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 15 Mar. 1811. Clark, Journal and Letters, 15 Apr. 1791; Margrit Pernau,‘Civility and Barbarism: Emotions as a Criteria of Difference’, in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 230–59. Clark, Journal and Letters, 8 Oct. 1787, 70. Joanne Bailey (Begiato), ‘ “A Very Sensible Man”: Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750–1830’, History 95, no. 3 (2010): 267–92. Clark, Journal and Letters, 3 Dec. 1787, 93. Ibid., 22 June 1787, 30–1. Karen Harvey, ‘Ritual Encounters: Punch Parties and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 214 (2012): 165–203. Clark, Journal and Letters, 61. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 31–2. Ibid., 9 Aug. 1787, 49. Ibid., 20 Aug. 1787, 53. Elaine Chalus, ‘ “My Dearest Tussy”: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle papers, 1800–14)’, in A New Naval History, ed. James Davey and Quintin Colville (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); and ‘The Loneliness of Leadership’ in this volume. Clark, Journal and Letters, 24 Oct. 1787, 77. Ibid., 1 Nov. 1787, 81. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 7 Dec. 1787, 95. A. Ingram, S. Sim, C. Lawlor, R. Terry, J. Baker and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, eds, Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century: Before Depression, 1660–1800 (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2011). Ibid., 12 July 1787, 37. Ibid., 27 Oct. 1787, 78. National Institute for Health Research,‘Loneliness Is Strongly Linked to Depression among Older Adults, a Long-Term Study Suggests’, 29 June 2021, accessed 15 Feb. 2022, https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/ loneliness-strongly-linked-depression-older-adults/.

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Loneliness and Sociability in Maritime and Colonial Space 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Richard Terry,‘Philosophical Melancholy’, in Melancholy Experience, ed. Ingram et al., 68. Clark, Journal and Letters, 119. Ibid., vol. 1. Ibid., 28 Aug. 1790, 202. Ibid., 16 Sept. 1790, 206. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 4 Aug. 1790, 196. Ibid., 8 Aug. 1790, 198. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 22 Dec. 1810. Barbara Taylor,‘Rousseau and Wollstonecraft: Solitary Walkers’, in Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt, ed. Helena Rosenblatt and P. Schweigert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 211–34 (221). ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 10 Dec. 1810. Sivasundaram, Waves across the South; Barbara Taylor,‘Robinson Crusoe and the Morality of Solitude’, The Loneliness Epidemic, Wellcome Collection, 2018, accessed 15 Feb. 2022, wellcomecollection.org/articles/ XA44NhEAALf5xtU2. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 19 July 1811. Ibid., 24 Feb. 1812. Ibid., 25 Apr. 1812. Kathleen Wilson, ‘Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and Body Politics’, in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 49–66 (49–50). Ibid., 59. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 24 Jan. 1811. Ibid., 3 June 1811. He was also a member of the Linnaean Society. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Clark, Journals and Letters. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 4 July 1815. Ibid., 13 July 1815. Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Early Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40–1. National Museum of Australia, ‘Convict Love Tokens’, accessed 12 Apr. 2022, www.nma.gov.au/ explore/collection/highlights/convict-love-tokens. Carol Liston,‘An Exile’s Lamentations? The Convict Experience in New South Wales, Australia, 1788– 1840’, in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, ed. Ronit Ricci (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 193–219 (209). Clark, Journal and Letters, 6 Oct. 1787, 20, 69. Ibid., 5 July 1787, 36. Kirsten E. Wood,‘Gender and Slavery’, in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Mark M. Smith and Robert L. Paquette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Clark, Journal and Letters, 272. Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 22 Mar. 1815. For example, Clark, Letters and Journals, 23, 25 July 1787, 42–3. Suzanne Schwarz, ‘Scottish Surgeons in the Liverpool Slave Trade in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, ed. Tom Devine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 145–65. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 29 Apr. 1812. Patrick Underwood, Steven Pfaff and Michael Hechter, ‘Threat, Deterrence, and Penal Severity: An Analysis of Flogging in the Royal Navy, 1740–1820’, Social Science History 42, no. 3 (2018): 411–39; Sivasundaram, Waves across the South. Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 21 May 1811. Ibid., 28 June 1811. Ibid., 13 July 1815. Ibid., 20 May 1811.

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83 84 85 86 87

Gust, Unhomely Empire. ‘Joseph Arnold-Journals’, 10 May 1811. Ibid., 8 July 1811. Ibid., 7 July 1815; Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For an introduction to the history of multifaceted Indigenous Australian responses to colonisation, see Lynette Russell, ed, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow, eds., Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016); Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017). Nicole Starbuck, ‘ “Naturally Fearful”: Emotion, Race and French: Papuan Encounters, 1818–30’, The Journal of Pacifc History 51, no. 4 (2016): 357–74. Clark, Journal and Letters, 19 Jan. 1788, 112. Ibid., 15 Feb. 1790, 133. Ibid., 15 Feb. 1790, 134. Ibid., 65.

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23 THE LONELINESS OF LEADERSHIP Royal Naval Offcers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Elaine Chalus

On the quarter-deck I am the captain; in my cabin I am the husband and the father, with a full sense of the blessing of being so.1

So wrote Captain Edward Codrington to his wife Jane from his ship Orion in August 1805, pinpointing that division between the professional and the personal man that he and other naval offcers like him negotiated emotionally and psychologically while at sea. He had started his letter two days earlier and was adding to it as he had time, in order to ensure that he had a letter ready to send at a moment’s notice should the opportunity suddenly arise. This practice was also useful for him in creating the fction of an ongoing conversation with his wife. It helped to bridge the distance separating them, gave him an opportunity to record the triumphs and frustrations of the day, and provided him with a safe, private space for confdences and for expressing, however guardedly, his feelings. He was missing her and their young family deeply but was loath to ‘indulge’ his emotions,‘for fear of the weakness it might leave behind’: Even now that we are decisively separated, I cannot detach myself from the desire of being with you in spite even of the impossibility; and so much faster do my thoughts fy than my pen moves, that I must confne myself to a bare journal, and not unman, or, rather, uncaptain, myself by attempting to detail them2 (Italics in original) Codrington’s use of the words ‘unman’ and ‘uncaptain’ is telling. Allowing himself fully to acknowledge what he was feeling—to put into words his loneliness as expressed through longing—was dangerous; it threatened to overwhelm him, to unravel the martial masculinity upon which he depended and thus undermine his ability to fulfl his leadership role as an effective naval offcer in a time of war.3 As the captain of a 74-gun, third-rate ship of the line, in charge of a crew of about 650 men, he not only had to be alert to the ever-present dangers of storm and shipwreck but also had to maintain a taut battle-ready effciency. Self-mastery mattered. He believed that he could not afford to have a divided emotional focus. Loneliness and longing had

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-27

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to be compartmentalised and contained, channelled into rational decision-making, administrative oversight, strategic alertness and calculated professional bellicosity. Softer sentiments had to be relegated to times of solitude and the more private space of his cabin; they posed a danger on the quarterdeck. This chapter builds upon my earlier research into the ways that one naval family, the Fremantles, coped with separation during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1802; 1803–1815).4 It concentrates on the loneliness of leadership experienced by active Royal Navy offcers, specifcally captains and admirals, who not only were often away from their loved ones for years at a time during the wars but were also, as a result of the increasingly rigid, hierarchical structure of the Royal Navy, set apart professionally, socially and psychologically from their subordinates.5 It suggests that, on the whole, these men suffered from two kinds of loneliness: personal and professional. While the two frequently overlapped, both were vocational. Personal loneliness was social and emotional, an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of separation from home and family due to active service.6 It was also an acknowledged concomitant of leadership, the result of an invisible barrier of status that precluded the easy intimacy of the midshipmans’ and lower offcers’ messes from being readily replicated at a captain’s or admiral’s table. Professional loneliness, by comparison, was circumstantial. It tended to result from a breakdown or lapse in communication with superiors, be that an admiral or the Admiralty itself, which left the offcer at sea feeling frustrated, isolated, under- or unappreciated—sometimes even abandoned. What follows draws upon the wartime correspondences and memoirs of several commanding offcers who were active at sea throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, including primarily Captain Sir William Hoste and Captains (subsequently Admirals) Sir Edward Codrington and Cuthbert Lord Collingwood.7 It maintains that loneliness, as expressed by these men, was primarily articulated through expressions of longing and frustration—be it for home and loved ones, for peer sociability, and/or for offcial direction and recognition. It considers the role of correspondence, the importance of family ties and the weight attached to sociability as ways of mitigating loneliness.8 It contends that while loneliness could be acute, it was endured and contained not only because the men involved expected it to be time-limited but also because they believed in the cause for which they were fghting and felt that their service at sea would lead to the fulflment of a variety of goals—personal or familial, professional and/or national.

Historicizing Loneliness Groundbreaking work by sociologist Robert S. Weiss, published in the early 1970s, identifed loneliness as a subjective and multidimensional experience, rooted in the human need for relationships and proves valuable when considering the loneliness suffered by naval offcers at the end of the 18th century. Weiss identifed six ‘provisons’ of social relationships and argued that all were necessary for people to feel supported and avoid loneliness: • • • •

Attachment: relationships that provide a sense of security and place, such as marriage and close friendships Social integration: relationships where participants share common concerns, information, ideas and experiences Opportunity for nurturance: relationships which provide a sense of being needed, such as taking care of a child Reassurance of worth: relationships which attest to individual competence in a particular role, such as work relationships 344

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• •

Reliable alliance: kin relationships or other relationships who could be counted upon to provide extended assistance if needed Obtaining of guidance: a relationship with a trusted authority fgure who can provide advice, direction and emotional support if/when required9

While some relationships might fll numerous provisions, no one relationship would supply all. Weiss posited two forms of loneliness resulting from unmet provisions—social and emotional— and differentiated between them: social loneliness was caused by the loss of or the absence of involvement in positive social networks, whereas emotional loneliness occurred as a result of the loss of, or absence of, a close personal relationship or attachment.10 His theory of loneliness has proved extremely infuential and has been refned and developed in subsequent decades by various scholars. It forms the basis of DiTommaso’s Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA), the UCLA Loneliness Scale and the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale.11 While the naval offcers under consideration in this chapter did not use the word ‘loneliness’ in the modern sense—as Fay Bound Alberti has pointed out, this usage did not become common until after 1800—and we cannot assume that their expectations and, consequently, their emotional responses would have been calibrated in the same way as those of modern respondents, their correspondences suggest that they would have identifed with many of the statements used to assess loneliness on the modern DJG Loneliness Scale.12 Their hunger for correspondence, need for confdantes, longing for home and loved ones, efforts to remain involved with their children and estates, and desire for peer sociability, offcial guidance and recognition all speak to their experience of loneliness, if not to the label. As this suggests, and as Bound Alberti has argued, loneliness is not a single emotional state but a cluster of emotions that are mutable and temporal; they vary according to individual perception, expectation, and circumstances, and can change over time.13

The Naval Context Except for a brief interlude during the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803), the Royal Navy was constantly at war between 1793 and 1815. Offcers were expected to run taut, wellordered, battle-ready ships and squadrons, and maintain disciplined yet harmonious crews. Appointments were usually for three years but could be extended for various reasons: for example, Vice Admiral Thomas Francis Fremantle extended his appointment to the Mediterranean by a year, from 1810 to 1814, and Admiral Lord Collingwood served without a break or opportunity to return home from 1803 until his death in March 1810. The development of effective provisioning, combined with the copper-bottoming of hulls against shipworm in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, made it possible for ships to stay at sea for years at a time; in addition, pressure was increasingly being placed on offcers to stay onboard and keep their crews onboard in order to effect speedy refts when at port. Administrative controls were tightening as well, as the Admiralty placed growing bureaucratic demands upon captains and admirals and subjected them to increasing scrutiny.14 In addition, the ‘rough intimacy’ that N.A.M. Rodger indicates had existed between offcers and men earlier in the century had been replaced by gradations of status and expectations of unquestioned obedience to commands that set senior offcers apart from others onboard.15 Senior offcers were treated with (and expected to be treated with) ceremony, deference and respect by their subordinates. Their living quarters onboard were the largest and the most elaborately decorated and furnished. They had their own servants, their own food and drink and often their own cooks; unless they chose to invite other offcers or members of the crew to join them, they ate alone. Consequently, while the gap in status and intimacy between an admiral or captain and his 345

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offcers might vary, as some were more informal and welcoming than others, it was ever-present. Thus, while young Capt. William Hoste could enthuse to his mother on taking command of the frigate Greyhound in 1802 that it was ‘the greatest comfort to have a set of gentlemen about you, whom you can associate with’, he was much more aware of the extent of a captain’s power by 1805:‘No absolute monarch can be more despotic than a captain of a man-of-war, if he pleases. No character, and, indeed, no creature existing, has it so much in his power to render the lives of those under his command either miserable or happy’.16 He recognised that this system placed too much authority in the hands of a single man but was convinced that it was necessary:‘if you were to abridge their power the smallest in the world, you would ruin the service; or at least you might as well take our commissions away altogether’.17 This model of leadership bestowed authority and status on senior offcers and entangled offcers’ personal reputations and honour with the decisions made at sea; however, it also came at a price of heavy responsibility and isolation that could result in bouts of loneliness. The navy’s primary objective in this period was the defeat of France and its allies, but shifting alliances and the emergence of multiple theatres of war saw British ships operating in the waters of Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the East and West Indies. Large-scale feet actions and spectacular victories, such as the Glorious frst of June (1794), Cape St Vincent (1797), the Battle of the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801) and Trafalgar (1805), captured the public imagination and did much to turn British sailors into popular heroes and naval offcers into models of martial masculinity.18 These, however, were rare and most of the navy’s efforts during the wars were smaller and more quotidien, if also diverse and often demanding. Smallscale actions could be dangerous, and the administrative, organizational and strategic demands of successfully managing hundreds of men and an often-cranky man of war was only one aspect of the wide range of responsibilities placed upon fag offcers and the captains who served under them. These included: maintaining blockades; pursuing enemy feets at sea with a view to bringing them to battle; assisting the army in support of amphibious expeditions against enemy positions; protecting convoys; harassing and destroying the maritime trade of the enemy; policing ostensibly neutral shipping; and, in many cases, performing front-line roles in Great Britain’s diplomatic representation.19 Blockading, which was a primary British tactic throughout the wars, as the navy sought to prevent enemy ships from leaving ports, was the naval activity most likely to see offcers longing for home and family. It involved a signifcant proportion of the navy and could keep ships on patrol for months at a time.20 It combined perpetual alertness to enemy movement with repetitive cruising in potentially dangerous situations. Depending upon where a ship was stationed, blockading could be intensely boring or highly demanding. The latter was particularly true after 1798 when ships assigned to the inshore squadron were stationed as close as possible to the shore and just out of the reach of the guns of the opposing feet.21 Collingwood (Figure 23.1) was by no means alone in experiencing both sorts of blockade. In 1796, while still a captain, he took part in the long ‘open’ blockade of Toulon, cruising at a distance offshore in the hope of drawing the French feet out. ‘It is’, he wrote in May after a month of blockade,‘but dull work, lying off the enemy’s port’.22 The repetitive nature of the station gave offcers like him time to get thoroughly bored and lonely and to long for home and family. ‘The accounts I receive of my dear girls give me infnite pleasure’, he wrote to his father-in-law:‘How happy I shall be to see them again! but God knows when the blessed day will come in which

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Figure 23.1 The Right Honourable Lord Collingwood. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

we shall be again restored to the comforts of domestic life.’23 He was still blockading Toulon in September, and he commented to his father-in-law that he was comforted by the kindness of relatives to his wife and children:‘In this long cruise, now twenty-four weeks before Toulon, we want something to comfort us.’.24 His experience was quite different seven years later when he was the admiral commanding the inshore squadron on ‘close’ blockade off Brest. Not only was his inshore squadron isolated from the rest of the feet and open to challenges from the French, but his ships were also in waters where maintaining position safely required continuous skilled seamanship. It was anxious and exhausting work: I am lying off the entrance of Brest Harbour, to watch the motions of the French feet. Our information respecting them is very vague, but we know they have four or fveand-twenty great ships, which makes it necessary to be alert, and keep our eyes open at all times. I therefore bid adieu to snug beds and comfortable naps at night, never lying

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down but in my clothes . . . but with a westerly wind, it is impossible with one squadron to prevent ships getting into Brest Harbour; for it has two entrances, very distant from each other,—one to the south of the Saints, but which, off Ushant, where we are, is entirely out of view. I take the utmost pains to prevent all access, and an anxious time I have of it, what with tides and rocks, which have more of danger in them than a battle once a week.25 When he was fnally relieved, more than two months later, and was cruising in the less demanding station off Ushant, he refected on the stress and exhaustion of his inshore experience: It was a station of great anxiety, and required so constant a care and look-out, that I have been often a week without having my clothes off, and was sometimes upon deck the whole night. I was there longer than was intended, for want of a proper successor, and saw all my squadron relieved more than once.26

Personal Loneliness Given the length of time that commanding offcers were away from home and loved ones, and the isolating nature of naval leadership, it is no surprise that their correspondences regularly contained signs of underlying or even acute emotional loneliness. Personal letters were precious to wives and families at home and to the men at sea. They served a variety of purposes, including the creation of virtual family circles that strove to involve each partner in the life of the other, as argued in my study of the Fremantles’ experience of separation.27 The letters sent and received were often journalistic, a jumble of daily activities, family news, children’s deeds and accomplishments, estate business, local and national gossip, and discussions of shared plans and projects. They were also, crucially, physical objects with deep emotional resonance: they made relationships tangible. Having been touched and created by loved ones, they were testaments to commitment and connexion that helped to stave off loneliness.28 As Codrington (Figure 23.2) wrote to his wife, two days after going back to sea in 1805: I shall be very comfortable, I doubt not, by-and-by . . . I want a letter, a little short line, to say those are well who are so dear to me; and I fancy that with that comfort, now and then, I should be satisfed.29 Communication in the age of sail was always subject to delays imposed by distance or misdirection or loss by misadventure; consequently, being without letters from home for weeks or months at a time is a leitmotif that runs throughout naval correspondences for this period. Hoste repeatedly commented in his letters home on ‘the old story, your long, long silence’.30 When letters fnally did arrive, he was ecstatic: it almost made me mad with joy . . . I had so often fattered my self with the hopes on getting letters on my arrival in port, and had so often been disappointed, that I almost began to despair.31 Since numerous letters might arrive at once, it was important that they were dated and numbered—for instance, on one day in April 1806, Codrington received a record 14 letters, plus additional enclosures, from his wife.32 Reading, answering and then often repeatedly rereading letters helped to alleviate loneliness and create the fction of an ongoing conversation. As Jane Codrington commented when signing off her day’s entry in a journal-letter in December 1805: ‘this has been my frst evening alone; though less alone than any, as I have fancied myself chatting with you, dearest, off Carthagena’ (italics in original text). She returned to the same theme the next

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Figure 23.2 Vice Admiral Sir Edward Codrington. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Mr J. Richardson Dilworth.

evening:‘I must to bed; and hope you are as much the better for my little chit-chat as I am. What blessings are pen and ink!’33 The navy discouraged young offcers from marrying early if they wished promotion, as it was assumed that a married man with a wife and family ashore would naturally have divided loyalties.34 Collingwood was a classic example of this, having only married at forty-three. Conversely, one of the reasons given for Commander James Gardner’s lack of career progression was his early marriage in 1798. Admiral Sir R. Vesey Hamilton, who edited Gardner’s Recollections, was blunt: ‘his future career does not contravene the frequently expressed opinion of our most distinguished admirals, from Lord St. Vincent downwards, that as far as the service is concerned a young lieutenant might as well cut his throat as marry’.35 Offcers’ correspondences indicate that this was a commonplace that had some validity, although it is equally clear that they were capable of compartmentalizing their emotions to carry out their administrative and military duties. That it was not always easy to do so, particularly when alone in their cabins and otherwise unoccupied, as refected in numerous correspondences. Codrington, writing in 1806, was well aware of both the expectation and the emotional pull:

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A sailor should have no connections out of his ship: his ship should be his wife, his friend, and his hobby-horse. It is so, nearly, betwixt the ages of twenty and thirty; but the mind of a poor devil like me, who cannot dispossess himself of certain hankerings after home, meets with as much tossing and tumbling as a ship does in a gale of wind.36 He had frst gone to sea, aged thirteen, in 1783 and had only married, aged thirty-two, in 1802. His ‘hankerings’, while on ‘dull blockading work’ with Nelson’s squadron off Cadiz in the summer of 1805, led him to seek reassurance from his wife that he was not being forgotten. Recalling their ‘little domestic enjoyments’ and their baby’s laugh moved him so deeply that he was once again ‘unmanned’ and so distressed that he abruptly ended the letter: Alas! I cannot look back to our little domestic enjoyments without feeling quite unmanned by the prospect of long, long absence from all hope of a renewal of them. Surely Edward misses me, even if fat little William has lost all remembrance of my dandling him. His sweet laugh has, however, left such traces in my memory as will not be easily forgotten! But I am now distressing myself to such a degree that I must quit the subject altogether; with only adding the frst and strongest wish of my heart for the united welfare of you and them. Good night.37 Unsurprisingly,his eagerness to get home increased as he neared the end of his three-year appointment. When, at the end of January 1813, he learned that his departure had been postponed (in the end only by two weeks), he complained to his brother that remaining in post was ‘a privation which, by comparison, makes life almost appear burdensome’.38 Others were at sea for far longer. Collingwood, who was a micromanager at sea and a frustrated patriarch, tried repeatedly to direct his daughters’ education from a distance. Fond as he was of his wife, he clearly did not think that she had the necessary force of character to direct their daughters’ education appropriately as they moved into adolescence. He recoiled at the thought that their education might turn them into fashionable fne ladies, skilled only in ‘the tiffany founce’ of accomplishments taught in boarding schools.39 He was obsessively concerned that the girls received a serious education—‘that they should be accomplished in mind, and respected for their manners’—and his letters over the years to his wife, to the girls’ teacher and later to the girls themselves contained advice and encouragement on the study of serious subjects, directions on what to read, exhortations against fashion, frivolity and cards and, fnally, frustration because their education remained ‘a patchwork’, not ‘under the direction of a parent, one who feels an interest in directing their studies, and whose example would make the path of excellence easy’ (i.e., himself ).40 Collingwood offers an extreme example of personal loneliness, however. He missed his wife and children intensely, and his longing to return to them and to an idealised life at home is a recurrent theme in his letters. He missed the views from his house, the trees he had planted and the vegetable garden he had tended. As he reminisced to his wife, now that he was away,‘even the rattling of that old waggon that used to pass our door at six o’clock in a winter’s morning had its charms’.41 Married men did not have a monopoly on loneliness, though. For Hoste (Figure 23.3), who had been appointed to the command of the brig Mutine in 1799 at the age of nineteen, a leadership position that separated him physically and psychologically from his crew, letters from home mattered more than ever. By this time, he had been at sea for approximately seven years and receipt of a letter from his parents after a long wait brought joy and reassurance, both that all was

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Figure 23.3 Captain Sir William Hoste, Bart. (undated, but c. 1800), in Memoirs and Letters of Capt. Sir William Hoste, Bart., ed. Harriet Walpole Hoste (London: Richard Bentley, 1832), vol. 1.

well at home and that they had not forgotten him. He was quick to reassure them that he had not forgotten them either: when once I saw my father’s hand-writing, my joy was almost beyond bearing, and for a while I forgot the service and Mutine also, in the pleasure I felt in hearing from you. I assure you, that we sailors, although far distant, feel and think of our absent friends, (I speak of myself,) as much as any people can possibly do.42 Being captain of the brig meant that he was alone far more than he had been previously and while he, like other offcers, distracted himself by reading (he seems not to have had pets onboard, which many other offcers did), he inevitably had more time to refect on how much he missed home and family: When in large ships, with so many companions, my thoughts were more employed, though, believe me, I never forgot you. At present, the case is altered; I am in a brig

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by myself, and having more time, and less hurry and bustle than formerly, my ideas consequently turn to that spot and to those objects which are so dear to every one when placed in similar situations. I picture to myself the happiness that awaits me on my return to England; I fancy I see my father, and you, and all the family round the freside in the parlour: indeed, I think when I see it in reality, the old house will hardly hold me.43 For another young captain, Hon. Charles Paget, it was the memory of mornings at home with his brother Arthur and the promise of renewing those pleasures that sprang to mind most forcibly in 1808: Of course you are now settled in your old rooms at Uxbridge House. It will not be bad fun when from the end of the passage we shall hear each giving the other a Hail of a Morning, and then going down, as we used to do, to breakfast with my father and Mother. You dear fellow, how I wish for such days again.44 The language of loneliness that offcers used when writing home bears noting for the insights that it provides to the depth of their feelings. Whereas Hoste’s longing for home varied between disappointment, despair and gentle nostalgia—‘I wish I was one of your snug Christmas freside party’45—Codrington, as this chapter has already indicated, spoke of loneliness in terms of privation and its impact on his masculinity and leadership. Writing to his wife in 1811, when he was leading the British squadron that was trying to fend off the French attack on Tarragona, he apologised for not enclosing letters to their sons: I literally cannot compose myself so as to write the boys a little letter each. This appears extraordinary even to myself; but I have nothing which can be called leisure for a moment, and the encouraging that state of mind which fts me for that little task, unhinges me for the business on which I am now perpetually employed.46 While loneliness and longing for home never appeared to have threatened to undermine Collingwood’s masculinity or impinge upon his ability to carry out his job, his letters feature a language of suffering and exile that is, if anything, more extreme than that used by other offcers: words and expressions such as ‘anxious’,‘painful’,‘anguish’,‘complete misery’,‘hard service’,‘sacrifce’ and ‘banished’ are all featured, and his fantasy of a domestic rural idyll, alone with his wife and daughters, became ever more poignant as his health began to fail. Examples such as these can be extracted and multiplied from almost any commanding offcer’s correspondences. Having an active, positive correspondence network went at least some way to meeting Weiss’s six ‘provisons’ for social relationships would have helped to assuage personal loneliness. Letters embedded men into the lives of their families and reassured them that they had a place in the wider world. Maintaining a correspondence was transactional, so while their correspondences provided the men at sea with confdantes, friends, allies and advisers and regularly offered them love, support and reassurance, they also demanded active participation and responses in kind. Moreover, letters gave commanding offcers a safe space for recording and sharing daily occurrences, naval triumphs and personal frustrations. While accounts of their experiences were ostensibly private and meant for the letters’ recipients, it was common practice for detailed explanations of naval actions and individual naval successes to be shared with friends, neighbours, patrons and others with naval infuence. This sort of sharing blurred the boundary between the personal and the professional. 352

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In an institution where self-promotion mattered and where ambitious offcers knew how easy it was for someone away at sea to be forgotten by both the public and those in power at the Admiralty, especially if serving under an admiral who was chary of praise or had perceived favourites, these personal accounts were often multipurpose. They gave family and friends on-the-spot reports and updates, which could then be copied and sent to a spiderweb of local and/or national allies and supporters, and they tended to testify (implicitly or explicitly) to the individual captain’s or admiral’s character, competence, bravery and patriotism. A chatty letter from Charles Paget to his brother Arthur in December 1806 serves as an example. It ranged from recounting how he had had to deal with a fre in the bread room near the Magazine—‘fellows behaved devilish well and in ten minutes it was extinguished’—to asking Arthur to speak to Thomas Grenville, then First Lord of the Admiralty, when he met him, and seek to have Charles’ ship recalled so that it could either be properly repaired or paid off and broken up.47 Charles’ frustration was obvious:‘I am, I fairly tell you, quite sick of this method of going to sea’; what he really wanted was for Arthur to make a case to Grenville for his transfer to a better frigate.48 This seems to have worked, for Charles was shortly afterwards moved to another ship. Jane Austen’s naval brother, Francis, similarly used his correspondence with his father and then, later, with his brother Henry to get them to approach men with naval infuence to seek additional patronage and forward his career.49

Professional Loneliness This overlap between the personal and the professional leads to a brief examination of commanding offcers’ professional loneliness. As with Weiss’s social loneliness, professional loneliness was linked to social isolation caused by the lack of a social network—in this case peer sociability.50 It could also, however, emerge from a sense of frustration or abandonment when captains or admirals lacked contact with or guidance or recognition from superior offcers or the Admiralty itself. With the navy’s increased ability to re-provision at sea and pressure from the Admiralty initiated under St Vincent to limit time in ports and keep crews onboard, the opportunities for commanding offcers to meet in person and socialize became ever more constricted. Peer socializing was important, as commanding offcers, by dint of their leadership positions, had been removed from the fraternity of the wardroom and had no direct peers onboard. Having the chance to meet in person and dine with other captains or to be part of a cheerful and convivial group hosted by a welcoming admiral, such as Admiral Lord Nelson, went a long way to addressing social and emotional isolation. The tedium of incessant cruising on blockade was made even more wearing if a commanding admiral decided, as some did, to prohibit captains from leaving their ships to socialize. Lord Howe was such an admiral, as was Collingwood. While Collingwood had himself complained at Admiral Lord Howe’s proscription when a young offcer and was individually pleasant and supportive of his captains when as an admiral he met them in person, he was a deeply reserved, driven man whose work ethic made him constitutionally ill-suited to dining culture. Codrington—himself a sociable man who prized the ability to meet with his fellow captains— grumbled to his wife about this when he joined the feet off Cadiz in September 1805, shortly before Nelson arrived from England: ‘We have got into the clutches of another stay-on board Admiral [Collingwood]’, he complained, ‘who never communicates with any body but upon service; and so, unless Bonaparte orders his feet out, we stand a very good chance of forgetting that anything like society is known amongst men’.51 A week later, he broke Collingwood’s injunction and went to dine onboard with Admiral Sir Robert Calder, at Calder’s invitation. Calder was at that point second-in-command and was wellknown in the feet for his hospitality. He had returned from an indecisive engagement with the 353

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Franco-Spanish feet off Cape Finisterre in July only to fnd that he was castigated by the British press for not securing an overwhelming victory and, instead of being supported by the Admiralty, was being ordered home to face a court martial. While historians have since debated both Calder’s personality and his decision-making during the battle, Codrington clearly sympathized with Calder’s situation and felt that he was being treated appallingly by the British press, politicians and the Admiralty.52 He felt that Calder’s problems were due to the way that he had written his report to the Admiralty:‘Had he written well they would have made it a great victory’.53 For Codrington, Calder’s situation highlighted both the isolation caused by prohibiting peer sociability and the precarity of offcers’ reputations—public and naval—if the press and politicians turned against an offcer and support from the Admiralty was not forthcoming: I am quite confdent the Admiral [Collingwood] does not like to see any of us associating together. Sir R. is not only much worn, but much out of spirits, in consequence of public opinion bearing so hard on him; and to a hospitable man fond of society and having many of his sea friends in the same feet, it is very cruel not to allow him any intercourse with them, when their society is of value to him. How few there are who even at the close of a long life of hard service have had during all that life an opportunity of distinguishing themselves; and how few of those who have been favoured with that opportunity and done their utmost, have escaped public reprehension! Even the unnoticed service that we are now performing, without the smallest prospect of amendment, deserves at least the thanks of those whose ease and enjoyment are thereby secured to them.54 Codrington was yet more upset at the end of the month when it appeared that Calder was not even going to be allowed to return to England in his fagship but had been ordered by the Admiralty to go home in the poor-sailing frigate Dreadnought. In the end, this did not happen, as Nelson refused to carry out this order out of sympathy for Calder’s reputation and honour and sent him home in his fagship:‘I trust that I shall be considered to have done right as a man and to a brother offcer in affiction; my heart could not stand it’.55 In the interval, while decisions about Calder’s return were still being determined, and prior to Nelson’s arrival with the feet, which saw the immediate restoration of inter-ship dining and mixing, Codrington and his fellow captains found a workaround that they would use again in the months after Trafalgar. A court martial provided them with the excuse they needed to gather and socialize: A court-martial on board his [Calder’s] ship yesterday, however, admitted us to as social a dinner as I was ever at; and the beautiful music his band gave us to make our wine relish, made us all regret the more the diffculty of repeating our visit. It was really to me (and I am sure it would have been to you) a most animating sight; an admiral surrounded by twenty of his captains in social intercourse, showing a strong desire to support each other cordially and manfully in the event of a battle taking place. While this sort of sociability was precious, it only went some way, Codrington maintained, to making up for everything else that they were missing while at sea: I could not help observing to King and one or two others near me, that the sort of meeting we were there enjoying was the only partial recompense I could have for the sacrifce I was making; in which sentiment they all fully agreed with me.56

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Conclusion Given that wartime naval service was dangerous, demanding and isolating, what motivated offcers such as these to continue to serve as they did, even when severely ill, as was the case with Collingwood, who, after years of longing to return home, tragically died at the beginning of his return trip to England? It is worth considering in context the loneliness that these men suffered. By the time that they reached the rank of captain or admiral, they were all vastly experienced naval offcers with decades of service behind them. Most had effectively been brought up in the navy, having entered as boys, generally between the ages of ten and thirteen. They were therefore thoroughly aware of the fact that commanding offcers had heavier responsibilities than junior offcers and that their leadership positions would separate them physically and hierarchically from the other offcers onboard; however, it may be that they only came to appreciate the extent of this separation and its potential for loneliness once they were in post. Loneliness was a vocational hazard that increased with rank. It was a shared experience and offcers needed to learn to compartmentalize their feelings in order to carry out their leadership tasks. They were most likely to be lonely when involved in routine or repetitive tasks and had time to refect on what they were missing. While Codrington is the only offcer I have thus far found who openly spoke of his feelings threatening to ‘unman’ and ‘uncaptain’ him, loneliness is a recurrent theme in offcers’ letters, and it is clear that there was a tension between loneliness and leadership. Set against this, however, was the assumption that their service would be fnite and that it would enable them to fulfl personal goals—be it to retire in comfort and improved fnancial circumstances and lead the remainder of their lives as gentlemen at home with their loved ones or to satisfy ambition for prizes, prize money or glory—or a combination of all of these. For Codrington, ‘it is for the love of glory I would fght, and not from any partiality for the act of fghting’, though he also acknowledged that he wanted to make his wife and children proud of him;57 for Hoste, patriotism was combined with personal ambition. In 1802, he explained his feelings to his mother: I am fond of the profession I have embraced; I think it one of the frst in the world; I would willingly give up all my time and pleasure to it; and, indeed, I think a man’s life is nothing, when lost in the service of his king and country.58 He was more explicit in 1810, when writing to his father: ‘God knows when I shall see England; the road is open here to riches, honour, &c. &c.; strike whilst the iron is hot, is a wise maxim’.59 For each of Codrington, Hoste and Collingwood, however, their willingness to endure the hardships of service, including chronic loneliness, appears to have been an overarching patriotic commitment to king and country, buoyed up by varying degrees of belief in English superiority and a ferce determination to defeat Napoleon. Hoste was explicit about his pride in being English when writing to his father in 1809: How I bless my stars I am of that dear little island, and under a government like ours. When I see other countries and other people, I am not only proud of being an Englishman, but feel a sort of conscious superiority, which is in no other manner to be accounted for than its being common to all Englishmen, and is inherent in them.60 Codrington, always more lyrical, sang the praises of England, having been shocked by what he had seen of the living conditions of the Spanish poor on a brief trip into Spain from Gibraltar: ‘Dear delightful England!—or rather, dear Liberty!—“which gives the fower of feeting life its

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lustre and perfume,” and makes England the Paradise of the world!’ As he explained to his wife a few days later, his ties to England were both patriotic and personal: Even in my earlier days, when cruising in this part of the world, I have incessantly blessed my stars that I was born in England; and now that I am bound to my little independent home by so many endearing ties which at that time were only anticipated as at a great distance, England is become my Paradise.61 It is Collingwood, fnally, whose explanation to his wife best captures the resolute determination that underpinned his service, as well as that of many other offcers, and made him willing to suffer years of loneliness while at sea: Our Country requires that great exertions should be made to maintain its independence and its glory. You know, when I am earnest on any subject, how truly I devote myself to it; and the frst object of my life, and what my heart is most bent on, (I hope you will excuse me,) is the glory of my Country. To stand a barrier between the ambition of France and the independence of England, is the frst wish of my life. . . .62

Notes 1 ‘Edward Codrington to His Wife Jane Codrington, 10 Aug. 1805’, in Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, ed. Jane, Lady Bourchier, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1873), 1: 44. For biographical information on Codrington, see J.K. Laughton and Roger Morriss, ‘Codrington, Sir Edward (1770–1851), Naval Offcer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed 23 Sept. 2004, www-oxforddnb-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-5796. 2 ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 10 Aug. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 43. 3 Thomas Dixon notes a similar dual existence—a man of feeling in private and a resolute stoic professionally—in a contemporary of Codrington’s, the physician and surgeon Sir Charles Bell, who treated the wounded in Brussels in 1815 after Waterloo. Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 130–1. 4 Elaine Chalus, ‘ “My Dearest Tussy”: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle Papers, 1800–14)’, in A New Naval History, ed. Quinton Colville and James Davey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 47–69. For further information, see E.J. Hounslow, Nelson’s Right Hand Man: The Life and Times of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Fremantle (Brimscombe: History Press, 2016). 5 With special thanks to Rory Muir, visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide, for sharing his expertise in naval and military matters so generously and for his kind and helpful feedback on this chapter prior to publication. 6 Robert S. Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973). 7 To avoid a confusion of ranks and titles, as these offcers were promoted, the endnotes will refer to them by name only. 8 Emma Carson’s exploration of romance and separation during wartime picks upon some of the same themes, especially the importance of correspondence. See her chapter in this volume. 9 Weiss, Loneliness; Robert S. Weiss,‘The Provisions of Social Relationships’, in Doing Unto Others: Joining, Molding, Conforming, Helping, Loving, ed. Zinck Rubin (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 23–5. 10 Weiss, Loneliness, Chs 4–5. 11 Enrico DiTommasso and Barry Spinner, ‘The Development and Initial Validation of the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA)’, Personality and Individual Differences 14, no. 1 (1993): 127–34; Daniel W. Russell, L. Anne Peplau and Carolyn E. Cutrona, ‘The Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: Concurrent and Discriminant Validity Evidence’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (1980): 472–80; Jenny de Jong Gierveld and Theo van Tilburg,‘A Six-Item Scale for Overall, Emotional and Social Loneliness’, Research on Aging 28, no. 5 (2006): 582–98.

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The Loneliness of Leadership 12 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 18. The original 11-item loneliness scale can be found in Jenny de Jong Gierveld and Theo van Tilburg,‘A Six-Item Scale for Overall, Emotional and Social Loneliness’, 586. It is as follows: (1) There is always someone I can talk to about my day-to-day problems. (2) I miss having a really close friend. (3) I experience a general sense of emptiness. (4) There are plenty of people I can rely on when I have problems. (5) I miss the pleasure of the company of others; (6) I fnd my circle of friends and acquaintances too limited. (7) There are many people I can trust completely. (8) There are enough people I feel close to. (9) I miss having people around. (10) I often feel rejected. (11) I can call on my friends whenever I need them. 13 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 6. 14 John Morrow, British Flag Offcers in the French Wars, 1793–1815: Admirals’ Lives (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), ch. 1. 15 N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Penguin, 2005), 491; see also John Morrow on ‘Authority and Command’, in British Flag Offcers, 33–52. 16 ‘William Hoste to his Mother, Greyhound, Naples Bay, 1 Aug. 1802’, in Memoirs and Letters of Capt. Sir William Hoste, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 1: 184;‘Hoste to his Father, Eurydice, 12 Feb. 1805’, idem., 216. For biographical information, see J.K. Laughton and Michael Duffy,‘Hoste, Sir William, First Baronet (1780–1828), Naval Offcer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed 23 Sept. 2004, www-oxforddnb-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-13844. 17 ‘Hoste to his Father, Eurydice, 12 Feb. 1805’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 217. 18 For details on these battles, see Sam Willis, In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson (London: Atlantic, 2013). For the wider impact of the navy on British society, see, for example, Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (London: Routledge, 2002); Adam Nicholson, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar (London: Harper Collins, 2005); Kathleen Wilson,‘Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and the Body Politic’, in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 49–66; Isaac Land, War, Nationalism and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Joanne Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c.1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 117–33. 19 John Morrow, British Flag Offcers, 9. 20 James Davey, In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2015), 68. 21 John J. Janora,‘Analysis Considering the Signifcance of the Use of Naval Blockades during the Napoleonic Wars’, The Exposition 5, no. 1 (2019), Article 1, 3, accessed 28 Oct. 2021, https://digitalcommons. buffalostate.edu/exposition/vol5/iss1/1. 22 ‘Cuthbert Collingwood to J.E. Blackett, Esq., Excellent, off Toulon, 11 May 1796’, in A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord Collingwood: Interspersed with Memoirs of His Life, ed. G.L. Newnham Collingwood, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: James Ridgway and Sons, 1838), 1: 38. 23 Ibid., 39. 24 ‘Collingwood to J.E. Blackett, Esq., Excellent, still off Toulon, 25 Sept. 1796’, in Collingwood, Selection, 1: 42. 25 ‘Collingwood to J.E. Blackett, Esq., Venerable, off Brest, 9 Aug. 1803’, in Collingwood, Selection, 1: 126–7. 26 ‘Collingwood to J.E. Blackett, Esq., Venerable, off Ushant, 10 Oct. 1803’, in Collingwood, Selection, 1: 128. James Davey notes that the inshore squadron was the most perilous and that the strain on offcers was such that ships seldom stayed out more than two months: James Davey, In Nelson’s Wake, 50. 27 Chalus,‘My dearest Tussy’. 28 Cf. Carson in this volume; Katie Barclay, ‘Doing the Paperwork: The Emotional World of Wedding Certifcates’, Cultural and Social History 16 (2019): 315–32. 29 ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, Orion, 10 Aug. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 44. 30 ‘Hoste to his Mother, La Mutine, at sea, 3 Nov. 1799’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 121. 31 ‘Hoste to his Mother, Mutine, 10 Apr. 1799’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 104. 32 ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 16 Apr. 1806’, in Memoir, 1: 106. 33 ‘Jane Codrington to Codrington, Brighton, 4–5 Dec. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 86. 34 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 526. 35 Recollections of James Anthony Gardner, ed. Admiral Sir R. Vesey Hamilton and John Knox Laughton, Navy Record Soc. vol. 31 (London: 1906), xv.

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Elaine Chalus 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 13 Oct. 1806’, in Memoir, 1: 123. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 29 Aug. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 46. ‘Codrington to Mr Bethell, Arèns de Mar, 30 Jan. 1813’, in Memoir, 1: 306. ‘Collingwood to Mrs Stead [his sister], Ville de Paris, off Toulon, 15 June 1809’, in Private Correspondence, Naval Record Soc. vol. 98: 281. Ibid. ‘Collingwood to His Sarah Collingwood, Ocean, 16 June 1806’, in Collingwood, Selection, 1: 328. ‘William Hoste to His Mother, Mutine, 10 Apr. 1799’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 104–5. ‘William Hoste to His Mother, Mutine, at Sea, 3 Nov. 1799’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 122. ‘Hon. Charles Paget to Hon. Arthur Paget, Cambrian, at Anchor off the Bayonne Islands, 26 Jan. 1808’, in The Paget Brothers, 1790–1840, ed. Lord Hylton (London: John Murray, 1918), 75–8. ‘Hoste to His Mother, Amphion, at Sea, Adriatic, 24 Dec. 1809’, Memoirs and Letters, 2: 8. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, Blake, off Villeneuva, 4 July 1811’, in Memoir, 1: 234. ‘Charles to Arthur Paget, Egyptienne off the Lizard, 22 Dec. 1806, 4 a.m.’, in Paget Brothers, 59. Ibid. Rory Muir, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen’s England (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2019), 222. Weiss, Loneliness, ch. 5. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 4 Sept. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 46–7. See, for instance, varying opinions in Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 536; Morrow, British Flag Offcers, 62–5, 68–9; Davey, In Nelson’s Wake, 84; J.K. Laughton and Andrew Lambert,‘Calder, Sir Robert, Baronet (1744/5–1818), Naval Offcer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last modifed 23 Sept. 2004, www-oxforddnb-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-4370. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 30 Sept. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 52. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 10 Sept. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 48. ‘Nelson to Lord Barham, Frist Lord of the Admiralty, 30 Sept. 1805’, in The Dispatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, ed. Sir Nicolas Harris Nicolas, 7 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1844–6), 7: 57. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 20 Sept. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 49. In April 1806, while still under Collingwood’s diktat he rather smugly informed his wife that they were using the same strategy to meet and dine after courts martial. He also greeted his appointment to Strachan’s Walcheren expedition with pleasure, as ‘Sir Richard is all kindness and wishes to live with his squadron on terms of friendship; and we go on dining about’. See idem., letters of 27 Apr. 1806 and 24 May 1809, 108, 134. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 25 May 1806, 9 July 1806’, in Memoir, 1: 110, 115. ‘Hoste to his Mother, Greyhound, Naples Bay, 1 Aug. 1802’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 185. ‘Hoste to his Father, Amphion, Malta, 21 Feb. 1810’, in Memoirs and Letters, 2: 18. ‘Hoste to his Father, Amphion, off Fiume, 24 Sept. 1809’, in Memoirs and Letters, 1: 348. ‘Codrington to Jane Codrington, 30 Sept. 1805’, in Memoir, 1: 52. ‘Collingwood to Sarah Collingwood, Ocean, 9 Mar. 1808’, in Collingwood, Selection, 2: 108.

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24 ‘SMALL UNEASINESSES AND PETTY FEARS’ Life Cycle, Masculinity and Loneliness1 Joanne Begiato At around the age of 22, though separated by two decades, two young Scotsmen, Henry Robert Oswald Sr (1790–1862) and John Dunlop (1823–1867), each spent several months writing a journal. Both were at a similar stage of life, having completed their education and training and were about to embark on the early stages of their careers. Oswald wrote between 1812 and 1813, describing his frst six months as government surgeon to John Murray (1755–1830), Fourth Duke of Atholl, Governor General of the Isle of Man, and Dunlop recorded his experiences from 21 October 1845 to 8 August 1846, frst as a medical student in Paris and then on his voyage to India after he secured the post of assistant surgeon to the 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment of Foot.2 During a time of transition, both men determined not only to record their experiences, but also, importantly, their inner states. Oswald began his diary in November 1812 on arriving in Edinburgh after an absence of nine months with his militia regiment in England, planning to note ‘such things and thoughts therein as may be useful and a lesson to me in future life’.3 Dunlop explained his intentions in the opening of his ‘Journal of my life’ by quoting D. Sherwin:‘The Great thing to be recorded is the state of your own mind; and you should write down everything that you remember, for you cannot judge at frst which is good or bad, and write Immediately when the impression is fresh for it will not be the same a week afterward’.4 Neither young man applied the word loneliness in their journals, nor did they refer to themselves as lonely; occasionally they use ‘alone’ to describe their state, although both were surrounded by people.5 Yet both reported feelings and states that various scholars and commentators would come to associate with loneliness, which Fay Bound Alberti identifes as an emotions cluster, including a lack of belonging, weak social connections, alienation, isolation, concerns about physical and mental health, and a range of emotions, including anxiety and fear, and ‘feeling states’, such as homesickness and nostalgia.6 It is not surprising that they did not discuss their condition through the language of loneliness, since this was yet to emerge and be applied as the label for a ‘recognizable experience’ that we associate today with its modern, pathologized form.7 As Bound Alberti and others argue, loneliness was a by-product of modernity.8 Keith Snell observes that modernity created phenomena that produce the experience of loneliness—namely,‘atomistic migrant[s], wage-dependent individuals, and “self-resilient” ideologies’.9 Certainly, as will be

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-28

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shown, both Oswald and Dunlop were subject to some of these forces. Following the application of psychoanalytic theory to loneliness, from the early 20th century, it took on a pathologized form, with psychology also offering a framework for experiencing and expressing it.10 Even so, Oswald and Dunlop recorded concerns about their mental well-being, which they related to their situation. Both men also used descriptions that align with Bound’s observations that loneliness is physical, evoked through metaphors, such as coldness, or through the loss of home. Finally, both men described their experiences at ‘pinch-points’ in their life course, which, Bound Alberti notes, are times when loneliness occurs, such as childhood and old age.11 Noting that some of the men’s experiences accord with current defnitions of loneliness is not, however, an argument that the two men were experiencing a state of loneliness that is universal, albeit without the use of the word to name their feelings. Rather, this chapter proposes that their circumstances produced a range of emotions and states that were akin to the modern concept of loneliness but were, nonetheless, historically specifc to the social, cultural and gender structures of the frst half of the 19th century. Both men were seeking to establish themselves as surgeons and, in order to do this, were obliged to travel and live away from their familial homes, residing, in Oswald’s case, as a surgeon with patrons’ families and, in Dunlop’s, with his regiment as an assistant military surgeon en route to a posting in India. Both experienced this phase of their lives as precarious and the changes they encountered left them disoriented. Oswald refected,‘my situation at present is so dependent & uncertain’, while Dunlop wrote, early in 1845, it seems a question whether anything can be more uncertain than the life of a military man. One day he is in England, living as at home, the next he is ordered to brace the deep, and embark upon a new life: to face a new and tropical climate, to take leave of friends, to go through new scenes, and perhaps to meet new enemies and an early grave.12 For both men, as Dunlop’s journal entry hints, it was distance—physical, conceptual and emotional—that was the frame through which they experienced and conceived of the states that speak to us of loneliness. This was made especially acute by their stage of life, in which they were moving from youth to maturity, seeking to attain independent professional status. Oswald and Dunlop, like many other young men seeking place, had to engage with distance in several forms. This included a spatial component since they were physically distanced from their familial homes and their parents and siblings. In turn, this provoked another form of emotional distance, sometimes evoked through the comfort of family or childhood homes contrasted with the discomfort of temporary homes. Such men might encounter both emotional and social distance in their temporary abodes, as they navigated new social networks in their fedgling attempts to meet the requirements of their professions.13 Finally, they were aware of a temporal distance between their current situation and their future aspirations of independence, status and recognition. Thus, their sense of distance meant that Oswald and Dunlop feared or experienced ‘subjective’ aloneness which, as Snell remarks, is felt among other people.14 This was not uncommon. Henry Parkes emigrated to Australia in 1839 at the age of 23 and wrote onboard ship, ‘more solitary and companionless than I ever was in all my life in this stagnant crowd of human beings’.15 Parkes had the beneft of travelling with his wife. Neither Oswald nor Dunlop had such support. For them, being ‘alone’ at this transitional point in life was diffcult, vulnerable and even dangerous to body and mind.16 A further aspect of the men’s experiences that can be historicized is the relationship between masculinity and their perceived states of uncertainty, disruption and distance, which were deeply

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entwined as Rosalind Carr’s study of late Georgian naval offcers demonstrates. In the frst place, these were feelings that had the potential to destabilise or cause them to fail to achieve standards of masculinity, which, by the mid-19th century, valorised confdence, risk-taking and, as Andrew Popp notes in this volume, individual and daring entrepreneurship. They were also perhaps less tolerant of introspection.17 Manliness was powerfully embodied too, conveyed through emotionalised bodies and objects that celebrated good health, ftness and, across the two generations represented by Oswald and Dunlop, physical and mental robustness.18 As such, both men had to square their vulnerable conditions with their notions of ideal manliness, where the experiences of what we understand as loneliness could be perceived as indicating subordinate or weak forms of manhood.19 Indeed, Elaine Chalus shows in this volume that in some situations loneliness could be feared to unman those exercising authority. There is evidence that in trying to navigate their complex feelings, both men used standards of masculinity to assess and manage their situations. John Tosh has demonstrated, for instance, that male emigrants to the colonies in the period 1815 to 1852 were presented as demonstrating ‘masculine virtues’ and testing themselves as men.20 Men encountered a further tension in doing so, however. Male youths were given some leeway in conforming to codes of mature masculinity because society recognised that this was a period of growth and learning. Youths could, therefore, make and recover from behavioural mistakes, usually around socializing, including alcohol consumption, gaming and other boisterous activities.21 Indeed, to varying extents, Oswald and Dunlop engaged in sociability, often, it seems, to distract them from their feelings of isolation. Yet at their age and stage of life, they were moving beyond the period of toleration so that they also used ideas of unmanliness to discipline their practices, thoughts and behaviours.22 The rest of this chapter analyses Oswald and Dunlop’s journals alongside the qualities ascribed to loneliness as an emotions cluster. It uses three themes. Firstly, that of ‘distant homes’, which explores the men’s responses to separation from family, and notions of discomfort. Secondly, ‘distanciation’, referring to the process wherein they scrutinized their physical and mental health and monitored the actions they took to distract from their negative feelings. The third theme is ‘distance and proximity’, which uncovers Oswald’s and Dunlop’s anxieties over their social and professional connections. Space limitations mean the men’s language or tropes are not situated in the wider literary forms of the period. It is important to note, nonetheless, that 19th-century print culture offered examples of loneliness to readers. Loneliness served a narrative function in Victorian novels, where it was used to explore the inequality of social and gender roles.23 Analyses of life-writing that include accounts of loneliness, alienation and social isolation indicate not only that the intersection of gender, class, wealth and race shaped writers’ experiences and presentation of self to readers but also, in turn, contributed to narratives of migration and imperial colonization by the later 19th century.24 Journals also offer a fruitful form of life-writing for exploring loneliness, given that, in Stephen Bending’s words, the ‘journal is both an attempt to create social contact and a reminder of its absence’.25

Distant Homes: Separation and Discomfort At the end of 1845, John Dunlop recorded that he was leaving Paris, where he was a medical student, and would be ‘gazetted to an assistant Surgery in her Majesty’s service’.26 While he ‘rejoiced’ about this, he was uneasy about its implications: I was also not ignorant that this summons to London would sever that delightful tie of domestic life, which I had so long enjoyed, that it would launch me forth into the

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world, and into the uncertain and adventurous life of a military surgeon, where separated from home and all its endearing connections I would require to form a home within my own circle, and in the narrow confnes of a small quarter in a barrack, where I must live, all independent and isolated amidst the vicissitudes of a foreign climate and perhaps a foreign war. When making haste for my departure such thoughts now and then forced themselves upon me; but I was so much occupied with a thousand things, that it is only now when quietly settled for a short space here that they came with their full force on my mind.27 Dunlop understood his professional future to be ‘uncertain’, a state which caused anxiety and was compounded by his separation from domestic family life. Indeed, his journal entries in Paris indicate that his mother was present since he noted his ‘domestic circle[’s]’ anxiety over her health and care for her.28 Such familial connectivity may well have exacerbated his worries over his ‘isolated’ future life. He went on to use the term ‘alone’ to describe his situation: ‘A father’s house must be left some time or other; and such being the case I shall try to console myself by anticipating the future alone.’29 In envisaging his potential loneliness through contrast with a loving domesticity, Dunlop deployed that pervasive cultural motif, which John Tosh has shown shaped many middle-class men’s sense of self.30 He certainly hoped this would not be a permanent ‘fight’, for he immediately consoled himself by recognising that after an absence he could ‘return and enjoy the society of my dear parents, and as a melancholy solace, shall look back as on a pleasant dream, on the happy days of childhood, and a youth spent under the tender care of a[n] affectionate mother and the careful guidance of a kind Father’.31 Like many other people in a similar situation, Dunlop found solace in nostalgia, both for his family home and its inhabitants.32 He also utilized nostalgia for his ‘native country’ since he was leaving for Calcutta:‘a new world, where new things and new people must be my companions’.33 Written aboard ‘the gallant barque British Sovereign, sailing along the coast of Portugal’, Dunlop was already conjuring the ‘green felds, the healthy hills, even the black clouds & the dull mists of my ‘ain countrie’ as a mitigation for the uncertainties of life ahead.34 As Claire Walker argues in this volume with regard to early modern nuns, this feeling state was not its medically dangerous counterpart.35 Here, the positive emotions of nostalgia served to combat the negative emotions of loneliness and promote confdence.36 In a society which demanded that people travelled widely and rewarded it, Dunlop did what was necessary to manage his apprehension and sense of dislocation through positive emotions: But think not that I leave old England with the melancholy feeling of an exile. Hope whispers to me that I shall see it again, and a cheerful somebody whispers that my new life may not be unpleasant; so I try to be cheerful, and some success has followed my exertions. I have not much to say as to our embarkation.37 Still, it is interesting that he elected not to write about the moment of departure, which hints that cheerfulness could only go some way to ameliorating the melancholy. Oswald did not record nostalgic yearnings for his childhood home, when refecting on his separation. When he mentioned visiting his family home in November 1812, just before leaving for the Isle of Man and taking leave ‘with fortitude on both sides’, his focus was on his father’s fnancial misfortune. ‘Our only consolation’, he commented, ‘together with good conscience, was that from my being countenanced by sensible patrons things might probably

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brighten’. For Oswald, leaving home for a profession was a matter of profound guilt for having been tempted to leave them in the Days of their prosperity. Had not my predilection for a profession induced me to do so I might instead of spending 5 years in expenditure having become a farmer early and saved some of the family substance. His education and training, he worried, ‘had incurred expenses that would have now gone far in giving my little Brothers a similar one’. The responsibility, obligations and ‘mortifcations and disappointments’ of trying to set himself up with ‘a too empty purse’ provided a constantly unsettling context to his frst months on the Isle of Man.38 This was not alleviated by his ongoing communications with his family. Elsewhere in this volume, Elaine Chalus and Andrew Popp show that correspondence narrowed the distance between separated couples, managing the loneliness they encountered through the intimate connections it enabled. Unfortunately, neither Oswald nor Dunlop gained such solace from their familial letters. Dunlop was separated from his family by considerable spatial and temporal distance. Thus, the arrival of letters for him simply caused apprehension about what he might discover in them. Anticipating his arrival in Calcutta, he wrote, ‘I live in the hope of being rich in letters and expect many kind things in them, but let me not look forward with too sanguine a mind. I may hear news not only pleasing but sad.’39 For Oswald, residing somewhat closer to his family home, receiving letters only heightened his worries because they brought further news about his father’s deteriorating fnancial position and compounded his guilt. In January 1813, he commented,‘I often feel uneasy when I think of the family at home’, that they ‘are in continual solitude as to destroy every necessary expense’ to support him.40 Here, solitude was not a positive opportunity for refection but a form of social denial, even suffering. Clearly, Oswald regretted that in order to enable him to be in the world, his family had to be in a solitary state, denied sociability. Yet sociability had its own challenges for young men setting out on their careers and could be linked to emotional troubles and feelings of loneliness. On Oswald arrival on the Isle of Man on 26 November 1812, for instance, he delivered a letter from Dr John Barclay to his patron’s factor, Mr Scott, requesting his services in Oswald’s favour. He noted about Scott, ‘Thought he received me coldly’.41 As scholars of loneliness have observed, loneliness is felt in the body, and thus, metaphors of heat are often invoked to capture or convey its impact.42 Oswald used coldness frequently to indicate his sense of isolation, or what he tended to term ‘distance’, from others. Coldness was associated with indifference, the opposite of the warmth of domestic comforts. In January 1813, on visiting the Archdeacon’s residence, he met ‘a relation of Mr Gawne’s, they were coolly polite but shewed me indifference or aversion.’43 The family of his master George Bell showed him a cold heart in 1810, while the Farmer family were ‘coldly polite’ in March 1813, which left him feeling ‘indifferent or rather displeased’. His own emotional reactions to this caused him unease:‘I wish I could subdue every such passion. But then I would do at the risk of having the character of a cold hearted humdrum. Nor would I wish to overcome the fne and honourable feelings and I am afraid that if the frst were overcome the last must also suffer’.44 Oswald feared returning coldness with coldness because that would affect his ‘self presentation’, a term he used frequently when thinking about his presence in society.45 Oswald also complained about those who grudged food to people who ‘messed’ with them: ‘[t]his is experienced by tutors, families, apprentices . . . etc.’ He observed,‘[t]hough satisfaction ought to be considered as a sensual pleasure but a necessary requirement yet there is a gratifcation in it which cannot be denied & which few people would consent to forgo.’46 His expressions

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evoke the imagery used in the 21st century of loneliness as a form of ‘bodily hunger’, an expression of disconnection and the need for human contact.47 Satisfactory food and warmth fed more than his body. Indeed, on the initially rare occasions that Oswald reported feeling happy with others, he used the term ‘warm’. When he penned some lines of verse in January 1813 about an idealised patron, they were kind and provided a decent, caring home for visitors: ‘No cold hospitality there.’48 When leaving friends at Ormiston, he commented that their hospitality ‘made me feel very warmly in return’.49 After settling into his lodgings and having fnally received the trunk that had gone missing on his journey to the Isle of Man, he used these tropes of comfort, perhaps signalling the waning of his acute feelings of loneliness: ‘27th January spent the day as usual, walking & got my trunk which has been long waiting safely the packet containing books & dined at Home on beef steaks & ale & spent the eve in reading & noting & arranging accounts & expenditures with much comfort & satisfaction’. Being reunited with his possessions soothed Oswald, since they acted as ‘emotional objects’ to convey the sense of home and comfort that he had hitherto lacked.50 In the mid-19th century, Dunlop also turned to an object that resonated with a sense of home. In June 1846, he was convalescing in his bunk from an illness, and even though he had recently suffered from the oppressive heat, he recorded gaining comfort from ‘my plaid (that faithful companion of my wanderings)’.51 Comfort could also be secured from habits, mixed with nostalgic national pride; he clearly found relief in all things Scottish. Thus, Dunlop also noted that he was gaining delight from rereading Walter Scott’s novels: ‘the more they are read, the more will their beauties be seen, and the more will a Scotsman have reason to be proud of his country as he sees old and young engaged in Scott’s heart stirring details’.52 Spatially distanced from home and family, these two young men suffered emotional distance as a consequence, or what we would call loneliness. Required to establish themselves in new social networks that were initially unfamiliar, both in the sense of not being familiar and being largely cut off from familial comfort, these men felt adrift.

Distanciation: Bodies and Minds Studies of loneliness in the past and present note that it causes lowered mood and physical and psychological discomfort and illness. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people ascribed the states of melancholy, or ‘dejection of spirits’, to being alone.53 Oswald regularly reported on both physical and mental health problems in his journal. The frst was a repeated stomach complaint that took the form of bowel problems. The second was a variety of states of mind, including melancholy, lowness of spirit, anxiety and, at times, something akin to paranoia. Perhaps of especial signifcance for the theme of loneliness, he linked the physical and psychological disorders to each other but also to his situation. Although he related his digestive problems to his diet, especially consuming bread and cream, he also linked them to his state of mind. For example, he noted on one occasion, ‘My stomach complaint greatly encreased together with . . . restless uneasiness.’54 He made the link between his health and his circumstances explicit when he declared that there ‘can be no doubt that certain affictions of the bilious system have great affect, when conjoined with extreme circumstances especially in producing a melancholic turn of mind’ (my italics).55 Twenty years later, Dunlop also worried that his low emotional disposition and ‘discontent’ was partly ‘down to the sense of an ill-conditioned mind where a grumbling spirit fnds a better welcome than a contented one’.56 Reading Oswald’s journal entries shows that the occasions when he reported most physical and mental distress was when he was disengaged from his immediate social network, separated from home and family, and living with distant social superiors on whom he depended for his 364

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future professional status. As such, it was alleviated by changes in his situation. Following a visit to his patron’s wife, the Duchess of Atholl, he commented, for instance, that the duke was absent: ‘I must say that I felt much easier in the absence of his distant behaviour’.57 When Oswald was reporting more easy familiarity with his peers in Douglas, he also recorded that his digestive ailment was improving. In February 1813, after an evening playing cards, he mentioned ‘stomach complaint trifing’ and ‘my spirits & bodily bulk & strength increasing’.58 At several points in Oswald’s journal, it is possible to suggest that the acuteness of his feelings pertaining to his situation led him to fear that his mental health was breaking down. Oswald recorded his feelings with honesty, although at times he worried about their implications for his state of mind. After reporting on his extreme unhappiness when dwelling with the Bell family, he returned later to the entry and added a half page that read:‘The page regarding my situation in Mr Bell’s family arose more from the Diseased state of my feelings than reality. It is true I was very dependant there and felt it much but Mr B has been a good friend to me notwithstanding’.59 Although he appears to have done little self-censoring, on 23 January 1813, he commented following a visit to an ‘insane woman’ he was treating: Did not reason tell me that the many wild imaginations and ridiculous notions that daily pass through my mind, were foolish, and prevent me from jotting them down here. I might justly consider myself a mad man; indeed at some futurity, if I live, when I look over this diary I believe I will consider myself a silly fellow.60 His mental distress was surely a result of his sense of friendlessness and social isolation. This was not uncommon. As Alison Duncan shows, unmarried women’s loneliness was closely linked to their inability to access the polite sociability that offered them belonging and secured social status. Through January Dunlop continued to refect on his ‘derangement of the imagination’ caused by his concerns about other people’s perceptions of him. Although he said, ‘I can give no reason’ for the feeling, he confessed fretting ‘that either me or my conduct have given and do give cause of great inquietude and vexation to some unknown persons’. He also observed that these feelings, which he described as an ‘Enigma’,‘originate merely from what I could call mental expressive motions of the body with meaning looks of and fnite sentences from many individuals’.61 Simultaneously open to public scrutiny, yet still to fnd a social network that enabled both personal and professional support, Oswald felt his emotional and mental state to be severely threatened. One way to deal with loneliness is to engage in activities that distract temporarily from its emotional and psychological toll. Bending has shown, for example, that Lady Mary Coke recorded in her journal that gardening ‘amused my thoughts’ when ‘Nobody came to see me’.62 Oswald attended festivities over Christmas and the New Year of 1813 and then recorded more regular socializing once he had removed from Castle Mona to lodgings in Douglas. He played billiards, dined with other families, and played cards in ‘company’. As this became more frequent, he began to miss regular diary entries. After missing six days, he observed,‘If talking to a number of persons & spending time whole evenings in company be a sign of progress in my profession I certainly will succeed.’63 When Oswald was obliged to mix with others, both professionally and socially, he had fewer opportunities for troubling self-refection. Dunlop likewise distracted himself from his low spirits. In June 1846, he described feeling disoriented. He ruminated, This voyage to me is peculiarly irksome and why I really cannot say. The ship is good; the voyage hitherto most rapid and we continue to be wafted on our course by gentle 365

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breezes over a comparatively smooth sea. All my companions are agreeable and our gallant Captain is most attentive . . . and why should I then develop under all these favourable circumstances hang this head down, look dolorous and wish the voyage would end.64 Dunlop could not fully explain why he found his situation so diffcult, though for the modern reader, it resonates with several of the states that fall within loneliness as an emotions cluster. His musings do indicate that in order to distract himself from his challenging state of mind, he socialized with his fellow companions, engaging in ‘gossip, light reading, and an occasional escapade up the rigging’.65 He was quite explicit about his rationale: such ‘occupation is sought for little else than to cover what is disagreeable and to prevent the thoughts from taking their colour from surrounding circumstances’.66 This ‘bonding’ with his fellows extended to xenophobic and racist mocking of the Portuguese and some African customs offcers that they encountered when they anchored at Porto da Praia, Santiago, the latter of which, he jeered,‘gave rise to not a little merriment among our fellows’.67 This resonates with Carr’s argument elsewhere in this volume that men’s attempts to combat loneliness through forging homosocial emotional communities in maritime and colonial spaces also articulated the category of ‘whiteness’ and enabled them to assert racialized and classed selfhoods. Although keeping busy and forming new social connections distracted both men from their feelings of isolation and discomfort, their leisure activities had ambivalent consequences for them. On the one hand, they helped the men to move beyond feeling alone to being embedded in new social and professional networks. Furthermore, they were activities that had some appeal as subversive forms of masculinity.68 But on the other hand, both men simultaneously worried that these distracted them from professional success. Oswald, for example, noted that social visits were opportunities to make ‘myself known’ to potential clients.69 But he also feared that these pursuits were unproductive. He commented,‘I felt checked in my own mind from wasting time & aspiring to such amusement.’70 Once Oswald was in his own lodgings, rather than residing with the duke and duchess at Castle Mona, he had access to more opportunities to socialize. But this caused him to worry about obtaining a balance between mixing with people and attending and chatting with patients who also lived at a distance from each other. The former was ‘certainly not “redeeming the Time”’, he commented, and the latter was ‘in every point of view very unprofitable’.71 This sentiment adhered to notions of Christian manliness wherein every moment must be accounted for and be socially and economically proftable.72 The combination of loneliness and retaining a sense of one’s own masculine standing was thus especially challenging for young men. Given some leeway to perform a mode of masculinity that incorporated less respectable behaviours, due to youth or homosocial associations, which would alleviate their feelings of social isolation, they also had to police these behaviours since they undermined their professional ambitions. After visiting patients early in 1813, Oswald recorded, Come home wrote a letter to father & shortly after prepared for dinner . . . where spent a pretty pleasant evening in a family way which is by far the best conversation played at cards till 10 oclock & came home at ½ 12. Cards or any games that waste time I would wish to avoid and I have little relish for them. But to spend an hour at them mainly for the sake of sociability can only be considered as faulty in so far as it wastes time & in many ways besides that is time wasted if a man allows them to lead him to gambling or discord & dissolution he must be a weak man.73

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As this suggests, Oswald often did not know what kind of public man he should be, and he was anxious to avoid being perceived as vicious or even light-hearted. On this occasion, his journal entry reveals further self-excoriation since being out till after midnight meant he missed the last post for his letter to his father, leaving him to berate himself for disappointing his family. Dunlop similarly found it diffcult to balance his time between study and leisure at Chatham and onboard ship. His new companions distracted him from homesickness with company and cards, but his journal entries show that his sociability also revealed to him his lack of self-control and propensity to late nights and unmanly weakness.74 His account of his weeks onboard ship speak of the slow passage of time, the tropical heat producing a languor and his dissatisfaction with himself that his plans to study were ‘lost, in an ocean of apathy and sloth’, crowded out by gossip and cards.75

Distance and Proximity: Social Connections A major feature of loneliness is lack of satisfying social contact. As Snell observes, ‘Loneliness may be defned as suffering self-recognition of separateness’.76 Oswald’s journal reveals that he felt this acutely, although it was framed and experienced by the connected frames of patronage and masculinity. One of the major sources of uneasiness in his early career was his status of dependence on patrons, especially navigating his obligations to them and their family in return for their favour and support. Required to board at patrons’ residences, he assessed them according to their goodness, kindness, provision of food and fnancial support, and their manner in conversation with him, all of which related to their capacity to forge meaningful social, professional and, perhaps, emotional connections with him. This is revealed in his reports of what he perceived as his superiors’ distance, expressed not only in their cold hearts, as explored earlier, but also their silences.77 He frequently bemoaned the Duke of Atholl’s taciturnity and silence in his company, when dining at his table, which he worried might be the result of his own behaviour and felt to be ‘cutting’.78 Whether he felt well-treated by patrons or not, his inferior status and duties to them led him to express feelings that closely align with loneliness, including social isolation, physical and mental discomfort, and alienation. He ascribed his distaste to his ‘pride or delicacy’ and acknowledged that he had to ‘get over such childish fastidiousness for such actions when properly managed seem to offer the surest paths to friendship and confdence’.79 Yet this remained diffcult. He remembered his time with George Bell’s family in 1810, for example, as one when he felt ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed. In many ways, Oswald’s experience of the emotions cluster of loneliness was through these cognate and painful feelings. Even when he detected that he was beneftting from ‘superiors’ acting on his behalf, he felt uneasy. After visiting Mr Gawne, he wrote, [he] introduced me to many of his acquaintances amongst them to Mr La Motte, Surgeon. If I mistake not he did not do it with a view to my professional establishment but rather as a politeness which he as a public man wished to perform. Even in this point of view feel obliged to him.80 As Oswald noted some pages later,‘a complete dependence on superiors is very galling to pride especially when perpetually in view of the person on whom you depend’.81 As well as the diffculties that Oswald encountered in navigating the practicalities and distant emotional and social relations between him and his patrons, he had to contend with the meanings of his ‘Dependant circumstances’ for his masculine identity.82 Independence was a quality of

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full manhood and citizenship. As Matthew McCormack explains, this ‘entailed domestic attachment as well as public freedom’ and was a self-identity that drew ‘upon a political culture that privileged freedom from obligation [and] self-ownership’.83 Independence and dependence, as McCormack reveals, and Oswald clearly felt, was a hierarchical relationship, where the dependent was disempowered.84 But as Oswald was learning, the empowering position of independence was not quickly or easily achieved since it required time and conducive relationships, to acquire. No wonder that he admired a Mr Wilson and noted that he ought ‘to cultivate’ his favour because he ‘has an independent mind & manner honest frm & decided & far advanced in years & experience.’ Such manly traits were not just constructive for Oswald, they were also aspirational, given that he worried about his own ‘timidity’, which added to his sense of dislocation.85 Young men who were still in training remained, therefore, in a somewhat liminal and discomforting phase of life. As Oswald remarked at the start of his journal about his ‘antagonists’,‘If they knew the fragile means on which I stand in this world & the state of that family for which I wish to succeed surely they would hesitate to obstruct.’86 Two decades later, when Dunlop contemplated the changes of his circumstances, he called upon new tropes of masculinity: I have certainly set out on in the great race of life, and I pray heaven that I may be preserved from the dangers and the snakes which undoubtedly attend it. I must confess also that the parting from my friends has been felt deeply, But I must keep up my heart, and erect myself as every thing depends on myself now.87 The language of bodily erectness was central to the manly emotionalized body and to the emerging requirements of male self-reliance, which Dunlop evokes at the end of his sentence.88 For Dunlop, masculinity was a tool to tackle the troubling feelings of being separated from home and friends and becoming self-reliant. As shown earlier, ideals of manliness could be used to discipline the self, when the paths to alleviating loneliness, through sociable distraction, could themselves be problematic. Codes of masculinity were also adapting to the challenges of modernity. It is possible to see Dunlop grappling with this. In January 1845, while waiting with other ‘medical expectants’ at Chatham, before his voyage to India, he refected, I have been thinking of a subject for the last few days, which is of the greatest importance, and whose bearings, will greatly affect my afterlife, if I live. I allude to the gradual change which will undoubtedly come over my way of thinking by a residence in the army. I have been brought up quietly and perhaps not improperly. Naturally of a mind to which the pleasures of domestic life are most agreeable and altho’ perhaps not altogether unacquainted with my own powers in some things, still very unwilling to push myself forward in anything, and having nothing of that energy, and presumption which form the character of a ‘pushing man’.89 For Dunlop, one way to both alleviate isolation and move away from his attachment to agreeable domesticity was to be a ‘pushing man’. This was a feature of individualism and entailed a sense of energetic movement forward to the future, along with a degree of entitlement and confdence.90 He went on to hope that his job as an assistant military surgeon would draw this quality out of him and necessitate a ‘promptitude of action’. He contrasted this with civil practice, which, he declared, would entail him negotiating other rival practitioners and ‘professional intrigue’ at the same time as trying to ‘advance his professional character and position’.91 368

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Of course, this bleak account of establishing professional status echoes the deep anxieties that Oswald recorded a generation earlier and paints the backdrop to his feelings of social isolation. Interestingly, Oswald also referred to a ‘pushing man’, when describing Captain Murray, who acted as a Croupier at the duke’s table. In Oswald’s opinion Murray was ‘blustering’, ‘frank’ and ‘only interested in pushing his way’.92 Oswald, however, held the view of a more deferential, polite society that operated through patronage. Thus, he noted that while this might lead to ‘familiarity’ and could be emulated, yet he worried that such pushing might be seen as ‘over politeness’ and censured. By the 1840s, pushing had prevailed, though, as Dunlop’s journal reveals, young men still might fnd it diffcult to enact, especially when feeling vulnerable and missing their families. Oswald’s comment, cited earlier, that it was troubling to be ‘perpetually in view of the person on whom you depend’, captures how young men worried about how others saw them, and felt exposed to public scrutiny, feelings exacerbated by weak social connections.93 Oswald’s journal reveals the pain he felt at lacking friends who could help him navigate these circumstances. His journal entries indicate that he only very gradually came to feel at ease in company, a process that seemed to coincide with his move away from Castle Mona, the Duke of Atholl’s residence, to take up lodgings in Douglas. Nonetheless, alongside his alienation from the socially distant duke and, to a lesser extent, duchess, he constantly worried about those he interacted with as peers or clients. Sometimes he remarked that he felt ‘neglected’ or excluded from the ‘company’.94 Deeply concerned about making his mark in society as a medical practitioner, he questioned his self-presentation at several junctures. Was he too quiet? Did his reluctance to play cards and lack of talent in playing a musical instrument affect his standing? He confessed to his journal that he was ‘always afraid of being wrong & of offending’.95 It is not surprising that he scrutinized the behaviour of other members of the company. In late January 1813, he dined with the Deemster (a judge on the Isle of Man) and a company of ‘unknown people’: Nothing entertains me more in company than to cipher the secret emotions of the various personages & still greater would it be to know if the opinions & form from that had any truth or correctness. My mind is often so engaged in this that I run a chance sometimes of neglecting the conversation & employment I be engaged in at the time.96 He was painfully aware that at his stage of life accurately interpreting the moods of his ‘audience’ and fashioning an accomplished professional persona had enormous consequences. He reminded himself that since medical practitioners were ‘public men’, actions can ‘break our reputations’. He went on:‘A Physicians success depends almost altogether on popular fame. A few malevolent insinuations unless he is a man of ability and address is suffcient to blot his character forever.’97 What Oswald sought in his social interactions, therefore, was clarity, candidness and openness from those around him. After he moved to live in lodgings, he confessed to his journal that he was worried that although his ‘situation requires me to shew a somewhat respectable table & establishment’, his purse did not stretch that far. He needed to keep up appearances to succeed but feared debt. Even worse, ‘I have no friend to confde in.’98 Similarly, he longed for honesty. He denounced, sham friends—worse than enemies & that I had a friend who would candidly tell me my faults & the worst that is said of me that I might act without hazard & not do wrong unwillingly—or if I have an enemy, that he were but open & unkind who would correct my faults or whom I could boldly confront or contemn for his.99 369

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At times, he worried that the lack of reliable friends and fear of what others thought of him was contributing to ‘mental affiction’, which ‘I have no doubt has led to many of the forgoing foolish fears & conjectures’.100 As he settled into life in Douglas and recorded the expanded list of people he was meeting,however,he began to confde in other men. For example,he detailed a ‘long Dark ride’home: when in the course of conversation told Mr [Gawne] that if there were any who set themselves to oppose and obstruct my success either from selfsh motives or designs against me that all they could do would be to injure a young man whose hopes of success in this world were his profession and that they could do nothing else for I was determined to resist evil and cruelty and if they had views wherein I had a part to act they would meet with disappointment.101 Perhaps in articulating his particular fears and situation as a ‘young man’ he not only uncovered the ‘pinch-point’ of loneliness in practice for those in his situation, but also found a way to establish the social networks that would help him feel more connected.

Conclusion Oswald and Dunlop’s journals show that it is possible to historicize loneliness when it was becoming a category which people applied to themselves and others in the 19th century. Analysing their experience deepens our understanding of loneliness in several ways. For young men in the early stages of their professional lives, being distant, or ‘alone’, was a vulnerable condition that forced them to question the state of their mind and habits and could cause powerful feelings of dislocation, discomfort and disruption. We can expand the pinch-points of life when loneliness is experienced, therefore, from childhood, adolescence and old age to include the early 20s for professional men in this period. Their experiences also show that we can include feelings like shame, embarrassment and humiliation into the emotions cluster of loneliness. These emotions were most strongly felt when they were poorly aligned with the gender values the young men needed to demonstrate. Thus, Oswald talked of being ‘plagued & ashamed’ simply because he kept having good luck at cards, which seemed, in his perception, not to match his aspirant professional status.102 Oswald’s experience of loneliness as a state of being scrutinised also reveals that it is possible to add exposure to the metaphors applied to evoke its sufferings. For young ‘public men’ who were building a nascent career, not only did loneliness include feeling socially isolated, dependent and lacking in friends, but it entailed feelings of personal inadequacy. As Oswald refected,‘In every company I see party work going on and from all I can gather it appears that my abilities are called in question. I can say that I am afraid of examination by any I have seen in this Island however in a professional view especially’. He wished to be less visible: ‘Let me go quietly and steadily on without any endeavour to shine.’103 For young men, modern masculinity was demanding and contributed to the conditions for loneliness. It directed them away from the safety of families into an uncertain, competitive, lonely world, it provided them with high standards to attain, and if it proffered some ways to ameliorate the discomfort they felt, it demanded that they manage the temptations that such distractions offered through harsh self-discipline.

Notes 1 Diary of H.R. Oswald Snr, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh [NLS], MS 9003, describing his frst six months as surgeon to the Fourth Duke of Atholl, Governor General of the Isle of Man (1812–13)

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2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

fo. 16v. I am very grateful for Michael Brown’s generosity and support, frst for alerting me to the two men’s journals, sharing them with me, along with his expertise, and second for his cheerful willingness to talk through these subjects. Medical Offcers of the Malta Garrison entry, No 160 Assistant Surgeon John Dunlop MB (Ed 1845) LRCS (Ed 1845), 6 Feb. 1823 [Greenock]—30 July 1867 [Jamaica], accessed 17 Apr. 2022, www. maltaramc.com/regsurg/d/dunlopj.html. NLS, MS 9003, fo. 1r. For Oswald’s surgical identity, see Michael Brown, Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793–1912 (Cambridge, 2022). Journal of John Dunlop, NLS, MS.9296; in it, he describes his life as a medical student in Paris and his impressions of France and of his fellow students. In 1846 he joined the army as an assistant surgeon and the last part of the manuscript describes his voyage to India 1845–6), inside cover, 22 Oct. 1845. Keith Snell distinguishes between ‘objective’ alone-ness and ‘subjective’ aloneness. The former is the state of living alone; the latter refers to the feelings of loneliness experienced even when other people are present. K.D.M. Snell,‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42, no. 1 (2017): 4–5. These are identifed in Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6–20. Ibid., 6, 8, 10. Ibid., 31. Snell,‘Living Alone’, 3, 6. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 35, Snell,‘Living Alone’, 23. Ibid., 10. NLS, MS 9003, fo. 45r; NLS, MS.9296, 99–100. Michael Brown, Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Snell,‘Living Alone’, 4–5. Cited in John Tosh,‘ “All the Masculine Virtues”: English Emigration to the Colonies, 1815–1852’, in Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family & Empire, ed. John Tosh (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 174. For the public health challenges due to loneliness, see Snell,‘Living Alone’, 4. For several of these themes, see Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities. Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 10–19, 35–50. Sociological studies show the powerful impact of hegemonic notions of masculinity on men’s experiences of loneliness today, see J. Ratcliffe, A. Wigfeld and S. Alden, ‘A Lonely Old Man’: Empirical Investigations of Older Men and Loneliness, and the Ramifcations for Policy and Practice’, Ageing and Society 41, no. 4 (2021): 794–814. Tosh,‘Masculine Virtues’, 180 and passim. Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 88–91. Also see Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 67. Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 69–83. Marie Hendry, Agency, Loneliness and the Female Protagonist in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 2–4; Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 33. Julia Wells, ‘The “Terrible Loneliness”: Loneliness and Worry in Settler Women’s Memoirs from East and South-Central Africa, 1810–1939’, African Quarterly Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 47–64. Stephen Bending,‘ “Miserable Refections on the Sorrows of My Life”: Letters, Loneliness, and Gardening in the 1760s’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 25, no. 1 (2006): 42. For an example of the links between loneliness and emigration, see Bernadette Whelan,‘Women on the Move: A Review of the Historiography of Irish Emigration to the USA, 1750–1900’, Women’s History Review 24, no. 6 (2015): 900–16. NLS, MS.9296, 88. NLS, MS.9296, 89–90. NLS, MS.9296, 49–50. NLS, MS.9296, 90. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Ch. 8; see also Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 12–13. Dunlop was the generation of men who, in Tosh’s thesis, preceded those who were encouraged socially and culturally to leave the domestic circle, from around the 1880s. Tosh, A Man’s Place, Ch. 8; NLS, MS.9296, 89–90.

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Joanne Begiato 32 Psychologists claim that ‘nostalgia is a psychological resource that regulates loneliness, A.A. Abeyta, C. Routledge and S. Kaslon, ‘Combating Loneliness with Nostalgia: Nostalgic Feelings Attenuate Negative Thoughts and Motivations Associated with Loneliness’, Frontiers in Psychology 11, no. 1219 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01219. For nostalgia and the family in the later Georgian period, see Joanne Begiato, ‘Selfhood and “Nostalgia”: Sensory and Material Memories of the Childhood Home in Late Georgian Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2 (2019): 229–46. 33 NLS, MS.9296, 101–2. For the role of nostalgia for the childhood home in the formation of national culture, see Begiato,‘Selfhood and “Nostalgia”’. 34 NLS, MS.9296, 101–2. 35 Thomas Dodson, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018). 36 Abeyta et al.,‘Combating Loneliness’. 37 NLS, MS.9296, 103–4. For the changing nature of homesickness and its waning cultural toleration in a society that ‘celebrated the freely moving individual who maximized happiness and who could be at home anywhere in the world’, see Susan Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4 and passim. 38 NLS, MS 9003, fos 2v-3v. 39 NLS, MS.9296, 136. 40 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 23v. 41 Ibid., fo. 7v. 42 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 14, 196–7. 43 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 26r. 44 Ibid., fo. 75v. 45 Ibid., fo. 20v. 46 Ibid., fo. 12v. 47 Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 180–1. 48 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 30r. 49 Ibid., fo. 6v. 50 Ibid., fo. 42r. For emotional objects and their power, see Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, eds, Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 51 NLS, MS.9296, 120. 52 Ibid., 121. For Scott’s role in making the Scottish nation, see Juliet Shields, Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 53 For example, Lady Mary Coke, in her journal, 1767: Bending,‘Miserable Refections’, 41. 54 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 9v. 55 Ibid., fos 12r, 28v. 56 NLS, MS.9296, 118–19. 57 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 58r. 58 By March, he noted that with the alleviation of his stomach complaint, his ‘sensation of depression & stupidity is also only occasional’, NLS, MS 9003, fos 52r, 86r. 59 Ibid., between fos 5–6. 60 Ibid., fos 36r, 36v. 61 Ibid., fos 39–39v, 40r. 62 Bending,‘Miserable Refections’, 41. 63 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 40r. 64 NLS, MS.9296, 117–18. 65 Ibid., 115. 66 Ibid., 129. 67 Ibid., 113. 68 Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 83–7; Rosalind Carr, ‘The Importance and Impossibility of Manhood: Polite and Libertine Masculinities in the Urban Eighteenth Century’, in Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth L. Ewan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 58–79; Kate Davison,‘Occasional Politeness and Gentlemen’s Laughter in 18th Century England’, The Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014): 921–45. 69 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 80v. 70 Ibid., fo. 23r. 71 Ibid., fo. 40v.

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‘Small Uneasinesses and Petty Fears’ 72 William Van Reyk,‘Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 1053–73. 73 NLS, MS 9003, fos 35v, 36r. 74 NLS, MS.9296, 92. 75 Ibid., 111, 112. 76 Snell,‘Living Alone’, 4. 77 NLS, MS 9003, fos 4–6. 78 Ibid., fo. 6v. 79 Ibid., fo. 4. 80 Ibid., fo. 26r. 81 Ibid., fo. 27r. 82 Ibid., fo. 4. 83 Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 27, 201. 84 McCormack, Independent Man, 27. 85 NLS, MS 9003, fos 47r, 49r. 86 Ibid., fo. 10v. 87 NLS, MS.9296, fos 89–90. 88 Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 50–2, 69–83. 89 NLS, MS.9296, 96–9. 90 For the rise of individualism that rewarded those who moved over those who stayed, see Matt, Homesickness, 58–9, 149–51; Tosh,‘All the Masculine Virtues’, 180. 91 NLS, MS.9296, fos 96–9. 92 NLS, MS 9003, fo. 9r. 93 Ibid., fo. 27r. 94 Ibid., fo. 15v. 95 Ibid., fo. 27v. 96 Ibid., fo. 41r. 97 Ibid., fos 32v–33r. 98 Ibid., fos 34v, 35r. 99 Ibid., fo. 10r. 100 Ibid., fos 13r, 3v. 101 Ibid., fos 43–43v. 102 Ibid., fo. 55r. 103 Ibid., fo. 56r.

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25 LONELY PLACES IN EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLYNINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH BALLADRY Katie Barclay She’s taen her petticoat by the band, Her mantle owre her arm, And she’s awa to Chester wood, As fast as she could run. (Tamlin, Child version 39F)1 At Chester’s wood, Margaret meets Tamlin, a man stolen by the fairies (perhaps when he was a child). They have sex and she falls pregnant. Returning to Chester’s wood to seek plants to aid an abortion, Margaret once more meets Tamlin, who offers to father her child if she rescues him. To do this, at midnight, or in some versions, on Halloween, she must wait until he passes with the fairies on his horse, and she must pull him into her arms, holding on as he changes into various challenging forms. If she succeeds, then she will be rewarded with a husband. A popular ballad, references to Tamlin occur in lists as early as the sixteenth century, but the prominent surviving versions largely originate in the second half of the eighteenth century, persisting in an evolving oral tradition across the UK and in print until the present.2 Like many ballads associated with the oral tradition, the main events of the song happen in a woods or other rural location, away from home and community. There, men and women, often travelling alone, meet and experience magical creatures, attractive lovers, threats to life or dangerous occurrences (like childbirth), and these encounters act as transformative events for the protagonists and compelling stories for a listening audience. The ‘lonely place’ signals a moment of adventure, potential and transformation. This chapter explores the possibilities of lonely places, and their emotional resonances, using material from the Scottish ballad tradition collected by the antiquarian William Motherwell in the early nineteenth century.3 Loneliness was not a well-used word in the period Motherwell was collecting, but ‘lonely places’ were scattered across eighteenth-century literature, usually signalling rural or wilderness sites, deserts and similar locations that were far from habitations.4 The lonely place became particularly signifcant for the Romantics during the period that Motherwell was collecting, as they sought to aestheticize the experience of being alone in nature.5 Often tied to the pursuit of the sublime, Romantic lonely places were desolate and melancholic but also opportunities for creativity. If artists of this period gave particular attention to the possibilities that arose in ‘lonely places’, they nonetheless drew on a long European heritage. Sites of spiritual transformation and 374

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communing with God, following biblical precedents, were often solitary and tied to deserts and wilderness spaces.6 The association between solitude and rurality allowed early modern religious art to use wilderness scenes as a symbolic reference to the solitary spiritual life, even when the life depicted was, in practice, lived in a monastic cell.7 The potential for spiritual connection and transformation was not restricted to the domain of the religious, however, but available to others who might use solitary opportunities for creativity and inspiration, not least to produce art and literature.8 More broadly, that forests, woods, riverbanks and similar rural spaces held ‘magical’ potential was a staple of European fairy tales, folklore and ballads, where fairies, elves, hags and other creatures abounded.9 As such, woods and wildernesses could be productive of a wide range of emotions. The suicide victims that appeared in Dante’s hell were in a forest, a site that spoke to their melancholy and their dislocation from society.10 References to lonely places in eighteenthcentury art and literature then signalled not just that a site was far from human habitation but the emotional potential that such sites might hold for those that visited; conversely, wilderness, woods and similar places offered the creative possibilities that solitude held. Lonely places were not limited just to the domain of fction. Some accounts described real locations, but as importantly, the cultural meanings that came to attach to the lonely place in the popular imagination shaped how people interacted with their environments. For those who lived alongside fairies and elves, the existence of such creatures shaped where people built, walked and avoided.11 Yet even without such belief systems, cultural ideas associated with particular geographies might shape how people experienced and encountered their worlds—the mysteries of the forest might cause a walker pause or for their heart to quicken as they entered; the aesthetics of the sublime educated audiences in the appropriate emotional response to waterfalls or signifcant geographical features.12 Cultural knowledges about particular types of space offered people an emotional repertoire that they used when encountering such places in practice. Theorists such as Henri Lefevre suggest that space should be considered not only as a specifc geographic location or building but as a holistic environment that includes the material world, including landscape, buildings and furnishings, the people within such places, and the cultural ideas that attach and give meaning to all of the former. Space is produced as an experience and its meanings arise dynamically as people use and interpret a particular place.13 Emotion is a central part of this experience, where emotions both attach to space—woods become associated with fear and so produce fear for those who enter—and arise from a particular use of a place—meeting a lover transforms the meanings that woods might hold,perhaps creating excitement or passion.14 Early modern Europeans drew on broader ideas about what a lonely place incorporated to identify and defne particular geographic locations as ‘lonely’, a designation which in turn produced particular expectations about the emotional experience that would be encountered there. This chapter explores the emotional possibilities that were attached to the lonely place in a long-eighteenth-century Scotland, acknowledging the interaction between our personal experience of emotion and the emotional expectations that attached to sites, not least informed by wider cultural ideas. As the possibilities for transformation and connection that the lonely space offered might suggest,‘lonely’ in this chapter might not easily seem to map onto the modern concept of loneliness. Yet, as explored across this volume, part of what made a space ‘lonely’ was its separation from the world of people, sociability and community. The lonely place was at least in part informed by what it was not. Thus, this chapter begins by exploring how eighteenth-century Scots located the ‘lonely place’ in relation to community and how the use of lonely places contributed to its meaning. Having done this, the chapter then considers what happens in lonely places and the emotional opportunities that were attached to such locations through a reading of several Scottish ballads. It concludes by arguing that while lonely places were sites beyond society, the events that occurred within them refected what society refused within its communal space, and thus, the 375

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emotions of the lonely place arose from a dialogue between solitude and sociability. Signifcantly, while the emotional experiences that occur in lonely places are broader ranging than the feelings we might associate with modern loneliness, they are nonetheless informed by a distancing from society that contributes to the exclusion of the individual within the lonely place. In this sense, the lonely place produces loneliness, if we understand the latter as an emotional experience occasioned by exclusion and distance from community. Much of the argument in this chapter arises from ballads that explore issues of love, family life, infanticide and sexuality. This is partly a refection on those chosen to make this argument, but they form a signifcant part of Motherwell’s corpus. Motherwell collected his ballads from the elderly poor, believing like many antiquarians of the period that he was salvaging an oral tradition that was being lost to the modern world and that refected an older way of life and ‘authentic’ Scottish culture.15 Many of his contributors were women, and the themes of the collection refect their own interests and song repertoires, which may well explain why these topics are especially prominent.16 The ballads collected however were not always especially Scottish. Later collated with others and classifed by the American folklorist Frances James Child, many of these songs could be found across the United Kingdom and further afeld.17 Individual singers, however, adapted them to local environments and ideals, allowing access to a lonely place that refected broader European trends but also had its regional peculiarities and local stories.

Scottish Sociabilities and Exclusions Eighteenth-century Scotland, as I have argued elsewhere, was shaped by an emotional ethic— caritas, or neighbourly love.18 Scots of all faiths, but especially underpinned by the teachings of the Church of Scotland (the Kirk), were expected to conform their emotions, behaviours, comportment and relationships to a set of loving principles. These included living a moral life, shunning sin (not least sexual sin), being modest, honest and upright in one’s dealings, living peacefully and avoiding confict, offering charity and hospitability to those in need, and displaying gratitude to those offering benevolence. The practice of caritas was expected to be a fully embodied experience, refected in how one dressed and moved one’s body, how one thought and interpreted the world, how one responded emotionally to events and how one made decisions about what to do. As an ethical practice, this could be challenging, and so there was also space for failures in loving behaviours, which required the community to bring one back into social order through their discipline. The emotional ethic of caritas was thus signifcant to social relationships and through that to how people ordered their society, including the inclusion and exclusion of its members and the use of physical space. A loving community was a watchful community, where neighbours showed an interest and care in each other’s lives. For many ordinary Scots, this watchfulness was enabled by their living arrangements, where many families occupied one or two rooms, where bedroom and bed sharing were commonly practiced and where privacy was restricted.19 Care was also offered through hospitality to family and to strangers. Sometimes accompanied by a payment in kind or in cash, hospitality for travellers, vagrants, peddlers and others moving through an area was commonplace and bound by rules of engagement that smoothed the inclusion of strangers into a home and family.20 Those that stayed for any length of time in a particular region became more closely bound into neighbourly relations, often experienced as an intensifcation of the ‘watchful’ community who maintained morality.21 Living in the spirit of neighbourly love created an environment that placed particular emphasis on community and social relationships and encouraged individuals to identify with their families and communities and the affective connections that they offered. 376

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The importance of this affective community to individuals and social order can perhaps best be demonstrated in the practices of inclusion and exclusion that were to maintain its boundaries. Individuals who refused to live morally or to conform to community norms were expected to be, and often were, excluded by a range of practices of different levels of signifcance. Those suspected of living immorally or who had a poor reputation might experience shunning by their neighbours. This could range from people refusing to enter a property or to entertain those deemed immoral to a refusal by the whole community to engage with a person; the latter might include not providing employment, trade or credit. Shunning might arise from the community’s own sense of morality but could also be directed by the Kirk Session as a punishment for those who refused to conform to church discipline. Here, shunning was tied to the practice of excommunication, particularly ‘lesser excommunication’, which preceded a fnal exclusion from the church body. Shunning, in the form of banishment, also operated at a more formal level as one of the punishments used by courts for criminal offenders. Banishment was a complex tool, where individuals could be excluded from small geographic regions (like towns and villages) or from the nation and for different lengths of time—from weeks or months to life.22 While under a punishment of banishment, individuals should not be offered support or resources from the community, and those that provided care could themselves be subject to prosecution. The use of shunning and banishment as punishment is suggestive of the signifcance of neighbourliness for this community, where exclusion from it could be held out as a signifcant threat and encouragement to good behaviour. There is, of course, a practical disadvantage offered to those who are refused resources, employment and ultimately a home within a community, but part of the punishment was the refusal of the affective connections, including love, care and belonging, that were so signifcant to sustaining well-being. For those entrained in a culture that placed particular emphasis on neighbourly love and where people lived so closely together, such exclusions may well have been especially challenging. When fgured as an emotional response to exclusion from community and a lack of place, such feeling might be considered as a form of loneliness. This is perhaps especially suggested by the accounts that survive of Scots who lived under these conditions. Not only did some individuals fnd being shunned distressing, increasing nervous disorders and a dulling of sensibility, but many who lived on the road or in the margins of society offered accounts of themselves marked by their ‘independence’.23 This is particularly evident in how those who lived in the interstices of communities described their relationships to those they clustered together with, including in family-like relationships, where each member was to be self-suffcient and so the ties that bound them described as less central than they were for those who lived within community. ‘Independence’ marked a failure to commit fully to love through a shared dependency, and conversely, love reduced the possibilities of managing alone.24 The loneliness produced, particularly by banishment, was therefore experienced not simply as distress but as an affective distancing from the others who shared their lonely places. Notably the emotional experience of inclusion and exclusion was supported by the spatial arrangements of Scottish society. If small houses and a lack of privacy contributed to the production of caritas, the emotions of exclusion were enforced by physically distancing offenders from the community. This can be seen locally in the refusal of access to homes or businesses but, for the purposes of this chapter, is especially manifest in the removal of offenders from towns and cities, leaving banished people and vagrants to cluster in the rural areas that marked the ‘in-betweens’ of settlements. Such spaces—flled with wildernesses and woods, open felds and riverbanks—were the magical, lonely places of folklore and fction; that the banished, travellers, vagrants and other marginal people also dwelled in such spaces contributed to their mystery. Bandits living in woods and offering a threat to respectable travellers was a trope of early modern folktales, as well as a 377

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very real threat to social order for some communities.25 For eighteenth-century Scots, the practice of banishment ensured that the lonely place had a signifcant human dimension. Lonely places were defned not by their distance from people but from community—from the settlements that represented morality and good order—and where the types of people that might fll them could offer similar threats to the magical creatures that abounded. Thus, the loneliness of the ‘lonely’ place was not limited to creative possibilities and engagements with the divine but refected the emotional distancing and distress of those excluded from a community of love. Conversely, the loneliness of banishment could be ended by reintegration into the community at the end of punishment; Scots prosecuted as vagrants, for example, could lose their vagrant status by working and living in service for a year.

Lonely Moralities in Scottish Balladry If the drama of many Scottish ballads superfcially appears to be located in the ‘lonely place’, a closer reading of the material is suggestive of the how such spaces were framed in relation both to ‘community’ spaces, such as families and households, and to the moral norms that mediated daily life. The management of sexuality is prominent here. The Kirk held its congregants to a strict moral code, prohibiting sexual activity outside of marriage, and the disciplinary apparatus of the church continued to operate into the nineteenth century.26 Despite this, there was signifcant space within Scottish culture for romantic love that contested family expectations and for illicit sexual behaviour that arose from the passions of lovers headed towards marriage. These ideas were especially prominent during the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century as new ideas about self and society gave greater space to romantic love as a marker of liberty and democracy and as the distinction between cupidity (lust) and caritas declined, giving all forms of love a new moral force.27 Changing ideas about love and sex had notable results, and the number of children born outside of marriage climbed across this period. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland had become the classic case study in illegitimacy.28 Scottish ballads provided space to explore love, sex and illegitimacy within a culture where these behaviours were being newly reconfgured. As Diane Purkiss and Lyndal Roper both suggest, stories of the supernatural also provided opportunity to explore sexual practices that were more challenging to talk of openly, allowing incest, rape and homosexuality to be expressed obliquely.29 The lonely place offered a convenient site, beyond the strict moral norms of society, where people could explore the possibilities and consequences of love and sex outside of marriage. Tamlin offers a convenient example of a ballad where such dynamics emerge (Figure 25.1). The heroine of the tale, often but not exclusively named Margaret, usually begins her adventure in her home, often a castle, and seeing the woods from her window runs down to adventure there. In some versions, prior to leaving, Margaret is engaged in the traditional feminine occupation of ‘sewing a silken seam’, a task that appears in many ballads and is something that women were encouraged to do rather than leave home. This is often set up as a juxtaposition, such as in Child Waters, a ballad with a similar story plot to Tamlin, that begins ‘I beg you bide at hame, Margaret, / An sew your silken seam; / If ye waur in wide Hielands, / Ye wald be owre far frae hame’.30 Home and sewing are situated in opposition to the world beyond. The castle/home in Tamlin can be viewed as synonymous with ‘community’, the location of Margaret’s parents and a moral order where pregnancy should occur in marriage. This is sometimes reinforced in the song by Margaret’s angry mother, who instructs her to return to the woods to seek plants for an abortion: ‘Up starts Lady Margaret’s mother. / And an angry woman was she: / There grows ane herb in

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Figure 25.1 ‘Tam Lin’, from the 1853 edition of the Scots Musical Museum, ed. James Johnson and Robert Burns (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1853), held by the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

yon Kirk-yard / That will scathe the babe away’.31 Sewing a silken seam was a mark of respectable femininity and orderly behaviour left behind by the adventurous. The woods were enticing—Margaret looked out her window with longing and ran towards them:‘she lang to gang to Charter woods’.32 The reasons for her rapid advance are ambiguous— does she run towards love or to ensure that she is not hindered on the way? In either case, the community offered by the castle seems limited or unsatisfactory. One interpretation is that offered by a 2012 version of the ballad. It begins,‘Janet sits in her lonely room / Sewing a silken seam’, and so renders the heroine’s dissatisfaction as a loneliness that will be countered by the love found in the forest.33 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature would rarely have positioned a ‘bower’ as a ‘lonely place’ due to the association of ‘lonely’ with particular rural geographies, and an alternative reading is that Margaret feels constrained by her social position and the woods offer a temptation or adventure—love not being the only opportunity offered by a forest. In the forest, often while picking fowers—a popular sexual metaphor—Margaret encounters Tamlin and they have sex. Whether this was consensual is debated by modern readers, complicated by the fact that force was rarely a bar on marriage or a future relationship in Scottish balladry (and at times in social practice).34 Many rapes that were prosecuted in eighteenth-century

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Scotland occurred in lonely places, likely as these types of cases—stranger rapes in public spaces— were unambiguously challenges to social order and so a threat that required management.35 Thus, the lonely place held a sexual threat to women in the cultural imagination. At the same time, that Margaret willingly placed herself in a dangerous and sexually potent location, where she ‘picked fowers’, was suggestive that she exercised some agency or desire. Whether at risk from sexual violence or from her own passions, the woods were a threat to Margaret in a society where female chastity was prized and shaped reputation and treatment. For the ballad’s knowing audience, Margaret’s entry into the woods signalled risk, excitement or perhaps fear—the thrill of anticipation that the adventure had begun; the act of sex and the subsequent pregnancy situated this adventure as one to restore female honour. The ballad offers Margaret two pathways to redemption: an abortion or marriage. Failure in either would leave her with an illegitimate child and the social consequences of her immorality being publicized. Abortion and the related possibility of infanticide were typically positioned as cruel actions by a mother in ballads, and so the alternative of fghting for a husband and father becomes the desired option. Margaret’s ‘test’, which is to hold on tight to Tamlin as he changes form multiple times and tries to escape, is not a subtle metaphor—the unmarried mother who persisted in hanging on to her child’s father, even as he tried to escape and changed in nature, would be rewarded with a happy ending. This is reinforced by the nature of the physical changes to Tamlin, which typically include a wild animal, a poisonous snake and something hot (like an iron in the fre). Here, the possible responses of a man to news of his girlfriend’s pregnancy— including aggression, deceit and anger—are manifested in physical form, and women advised on the need for persistence to ensure a husband. That Tamlin takes a fairy form is also signifcant here. The fairy world within Scottish folklore was a place of lost time and temptation. Fairy domains were places of endless dancing, feasting and drinking; men and women who entered for one dance would fnd it lasted years. Moments passed in revelry, while family and responsibilities remained outside and unsupported. Moreover, the pursuit of pleasure was a risk to the soul, where too much time spent in the world of the fairies led to damnation. As Tamlin informed Margaret: ‘O Elfn it’s a bonny place, / In it fain woud I dwell; / But ay at ilka seven years’ end / They pay a tiend to hell’.36 Thus, Tamlin requires rescuing not only for the sake of Margaret and the child but for his own spiritual salvation. Once achieved, the couple can become a family and return to the castle, moving not only from the ‘lonely place’ to ‘community’ but from sin to morality. Within Tamlin then, the lonely place was rendered as a site where morality was endangered and contested, but which did not preclude a happy ending marked by a return to society and moral order. Notably, premarital sex here was not situated as damning in itself but rather as an opportunity for the protagonists to do the ‘right’ thing. For Margaret, this included choosing to give birth, rather than opting for abortion, and fghting to save Tamlin from the temptations of the fairy realm. For Tamlin, this involved choosing marriage over revelry and freedom from responsibility. The ‘lonely place’ became a site where re-entry into the community could be negotiated; within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context, this involved an explicit exploration of the meanings and consequences of sexual immorality, where premarital sex acted as ‘threat’ to community but was not itself an act of narrative closure. In this, the ballad engaged in contemporary debates around the morality of sexual practices during the period. The lonely place might be an opportunity for pleasure but the life it offered resulted in exclusion from community and ultimately distanced the sinner from God. Tamlin offered a tale with a happy ending. In some versions, Margaret even returns home in triumph and news of her success travels through the kingdom: ‘These news hae reachd thro a’ Scotland / And far ayont the Tay, / That Lady Margaret, our king’s daughter / That night had 380

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gaind her prey’.37 But lonely places are not only sites for redemption but also the location of sin that damns. Infanticide ballads, which offer accounts of women who murder their children, are good examples of this. The Cruel Mother tells of a woman who became pregnant to her father’s clerk and entered the ‘greenwood sidie’ to give birth, after which she killed the children (twins or triplets) and returned home, where she was haunted by their ghosts. The ballad shares several features with that of Tamlin. The tale begins in a community setting—York or London in some versions—and the female protagonist is described as pregnant in her father’s household.38 The sexual immorality that led to her pregnancy is not central to the plot, but rather it is the ethical decisions that she made afterward that become critical to the narrative. These decisions were made in the green wood where she went to give birth, leaving her community and entering the ‘lonely place’. The cruel mother gave birth in forest, where signifcant and symbolic features in the landscape aid her delivery. She ‘leaned her back unto a tree / And there began her sad misery’; in some versions, the tree is an oak, which was broken by her labour. Sometimes the tree is a thorn, that might also prick her: ‘She set her foot unto a thorn, / and there she got her two babes born’.39 Oak trees, representative of strength, power and monarchy, combined with painful thorns, so closely associated with illicit love, illegitimate pregnancy and infanticide, effectively conveyed the physical power and pain of childbirth, while also signalling the ethical contexts from which the birth arose.40 For the purposes of this chapter, they are also signifcant to the ballad drama in situating the cruel mother beyond community and its attendant supports; she labours with the lonely landscape. That she was isolated from society is also articulated explicitly in this ballad, where the protagonist is described in a refrain as ‘All in a lone and a lonie O’ or ‘Sing hey alone and alonie O’.41 Notably, this line appears in the frst verse of the song, at the same time as we are introduced to the cruel mother and her pregnancy. That she was alone is tied less to the ‘lonely place’ than to her moral condition, the illicit pregnancy, and so the story reinforces how her condition excludes her from her community and creates an opportunity for ethical decision-making. The cruel mother murdered her children and buried them in the woods before returning to her father’s house. Far from her transgression remaining in the woods, however, she immediately meets her children playing ball outside of her home. Looking upon the children, she observed that had she such children she would have treated them kindly; the children contest this, confronting her with her crime and explaining that she has damned herself to hell: ‘O mother dear but heaven’s high / That is the place thou’ll ne’er come nigh. / O mother dear but hell is deep / ’Twill cause thee bitterlie to weep’.42 The cruel mother’s actions ensured that she would never return to the Christian community, having made the immoral choice when in the lonely place. Like Tamlin, some versions of the song locate this consequence as an endpoint in a life of revelry:‘For thou was a lady thou lived in Lurk / And thou fell in love with thy fathers clerk / Thou lived [loved] him seven years and a day / Till thy big belly did thee betray’.43 Hell was an immediate consequence of murdering her children, but it was also the endpoint of a life of sin. Had other decisions been made, redemption and return to the Christian community might have been possible. The Cruel Mother deploys the generic conventions of the ballad tradition to locate key dramatic moments in liminal sites, such as forests, but notably its spatial-ethical dynamics are also found in songs that describe events using a more realist imagery. The ballad Mary Hamilton, for example, offers an account of a lady-in-waiting to the queen who fell pregnant after having sex with the king; she gives birth in her bedroom before disposing of the child, often in the sea. Her crime was discovered, and she was subsequently executed.44 If the morality of this tale is not reinforced by the physical distancing enabled by a journey into a forest, the spatial dynamics of the household are nonetheless used to situate its different members in particular moral positions. Mary 381

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Hamilton was sent from her family home to the monarch’s household, situating the court as a liminal space that will test her moral character. Here, seduced by the king, she failed, separating herself from the remainder of the royal household by engaging in pleasure rather than work:‘She hadna been in the king’s court / A twelve month and a day, / Till of her they could get na wark, / For wantonness and play’.45 Like The Cruel Mother and Tamlin, her sin was not of a moment. Her pregnancy then similarly becomes the critical event that determines her moral pathway. As for The Cruel Mother, this was a journey that she took independently of the community. The key ethical quandaries of the drama happen while she was alone—she went to the garden to get herbs for an abortion; she gave birth; she took the child to the sea wrapped in a blanket. Despite this, news circulated that she had given birth:‘Word is to the kitchen gane, / And word is to the ha, / And word is up to Madame the Queen, / And that is warst of a’.46 Hamilton here is positioned against a larger household, not defned by individuals but locations in the house that signify particular social groups (the kitchen is suggestive of the servants; the hall signifes the lords and ladies of the castle). Her ‘aloneness’ within the castle is reinforced by her positioning against the remainder of its members. Spatial positioning is also used here to signify social order, where the monarch was ‘up’ and came ‘down’ to meet her subjects:‘Down and came the queen hersell, / The queen hersell so free: / ‘O mary Myle, whare is the child / That I heard weep for thee?’47 The monarch’s intervention led to Hamilton’s death sentence, and she then travelled from the castle to the gallows, moving from a liminal site of ethical quandary to her moral ending: ‘When she gaed up the Cannogate, / She gied loud lauchters three; / But or she cam to the Cowgate Head / The tears did blind her ee’.48 Like in The Cruel Mother, infanticide is an unforgiveable act that permanently removed the possibility of returning to the moral fold, and illicit pregnancy operates as the ‘lonely place’ where ethical choices were negotiated.

Lonely Ambiguities in Scottish Balladry Tamlin and The Cruel Mother have clear narrative arcs that lead to redemption or damnation following the protagonist’s moral choices, but in song as in life, the ethical issues that arose from illegitimate births were not always clear-cut. Child Norice tells the story of a handsome young man that sent gifts to the lady of the castle, asking her to meet him in the green woods.49 The messages were intercepted by the lady’s husband, Lord Barnard, who dressed as a woman and went to meet Child Norice in the forest. Taking a sword from his skirts, the lord beheaded the young man and took his head back to his wife in the castle. Lady Barnard was distressed on seeing the head, confessing that this was not her lover but her son. Previous to marriage, she had an illegitimate child who she raised in the forest. Her husband was devastated when he learned that he had killed her son, as he would have been happy to raise the child in his household. He then cursed her for her role in the child’s death: ‘an ill death may ye die!’ Several versions end there, but others have the mother turn this curse on Lord Barnard for his actions. This led Lord Barnard to curse himself: ‘Then I’ll curse the hand that did the deed, / The heart that thought him ill, / The feet that carried me speedily / This comely youth to kill’.50 The husband and wife die on the same day as the murder. As in the other ballads, a moral quandary is set up at the outset of the tale, which is followed by a venture to a lonely place where a resolution emerges, and this is followed by a return to society where consequences are realised. In this instance, it is not the illicit pregnancy that triggered the critical incident but rather the husband’s jealousy. However—as in Tamlin and The Cruel Mother—the key event was preceded by unresolved immorality. If Lady Barnard had behaved well in raising her child, she had not disclosed his existence to her community (something that is indicated by Child Norice being raised in a forest). That Lady Barnard had not resolved her 382

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sin and been restored to moral order and society had set in motion a set of tragic events. Both the lord and lady were culpable here—she for her secrecy and he for his jealousy and murderous actions. The result was a tragic ending, whether the family survived to live in the knowledge of the child’s death or whether they followed him to the grave. The moral resolution was less clear, however. If the ‘good death’ is peaceful and marked by an assuredness of salvation, the ‘ill death’ was suggestive of a violent end and a lack of clarity as to one’s eternal destination.51 It was to die in uncertainty. Lord Barnard may have been able to return to his community from the lonely place after the murder, but he had irreparably damaged his household. Whether he could restore love and order in his home and regain his salvation are left open ended. Barnard Castle becomes its own lonely place. The lonely place of the Scottish ballad was not necessarily a site of melancholy or distress. For some there might have been revelry and pleasure or the opportunity for love. For others, there might have been the physical pain and suffering of childbirth, jealousy, anger and the desire to end a life. Yet if the lonely place could be flled with a diversity of humanity and feeling, it was also marked by its separation from a loving community and from a moral order that assured salvation. This distance from community marked the protagonists in these tales as ‘alone’. Their adventures, even when they involved others, happened independently of others—the rescue of husbands and the murder of children were acts conducted without support. Within the lonely space, individuals could make decisions that restored them to the loving community, but equally it could sever the protagonist from ever rejoining. The latter—not least when it led to hell—was anticipated as producing signifcant long-term suffering. Here, lonely experiences could lead to a long-term loneliness, the feelings that arose when the loving community was no longer available.

Conclusion Balladry offered a medium for long-eighteenth-century Scots to explore the moral implications of a changing culture around romantic love and its physical expression. Within them, premarital sex and unmarried pregnancy were no longer terrible sins in themselves, but they could signal a life of sinful pleasures in need of reform and offered a critical moment where individuals were forced to make moral choices about their future. The decisions that they made had long-term consequences, enabling a return to the loving Christian community or reaffrming their lack of suitability for return. Explored through spatial metaphors, the ‘lonely place’ of woods and wildernesses offered a dramatic domain through which these moral decisions could be explored and manifested. In this, the lonely place was never separate from society but rather a site that allowed individuals to articulate their future relationship with the community to which they would inevitably return. Given that the lonely place acted as site of negotiation and moral quandary, the range of emotions encountered in such locations could be complex and multiple, suggestive of the broad feelings enabled by human dramas. Often tied to sin, many of these emotions, whether love, jealousy, anger or fear, can be read as illicit passions that should be managed within the Christian life to ensure a moral order.52 Here, ballads reinforced the lessons in emotional moderation offered by the Kirk (and within the Christian tradition more broadly), warning audiences of the threat that such feelings posed to social order. The tales are less forthcoming on the experience of the lonely place when exclusion from community became a permanent condition. Yet there are clues. Not only did Christianity offer a rich account of the suffering that was experienced in hell, but the ballads themselves noted that an unhappy ending was marked by tears. The cruel mother was informed her fate ‘’Twill cause thee bitterlie to weep’, 383

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while Mary Hamilton found ‘The tears did blind her ee’ at the end of her life. To be excluded permanently from society was distressing, something also affrmed by surviving personal histories of those who experienced shunning and banishment. The lonely place was not immediately the occasion of loneliness, but the exclusion from society that might result was ultimately associated with distress and suffering.

Notes 1 This version of Tamlin appears on p. 64 of Motherwell’s manuscript, collected from Widow McCormick in February 1825, and is classifed as 39F in Frances James Child’s England and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). Child’s classifcation is used in this essay to give easy identifcation across versions. Motherwell’s manuscript is Glasgow University Library MS Murray 501. Motherwell’s manuscript is abbreviated to Motherwell’s MS, following convention. 2 The Tam Lin website provides a list of over 46 versions, as well as references to the tale that pre-exist surviving versions:‘What Makes a Version’, Tam Lin Balladry, accessed 18 Jan. 2022, https://tam-lin.org/ versions/index.html. 3 For more information on William Motherwell, see William Bernard McCarthy,‘William Motherwell as a Field Collector’, Folk Music Journal 5 (1987): 295–316; Mary Ellen Brown, William Motherwell’s Cultural Politics, 1797–1835 (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2001). 4 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 5 Jacqueline M. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998); Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch, eds, Wild Romanticism (London: Routledge, 2021). 6 Karl A.E. Enenkel and Christine Göttler, eds, Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Beth C. Spacey, ‘ “A Land of Horror and Vast Wilderness”: Landscapes of Crusade and Jerusalem Pilgrimage in Arnold of Lübeck’s Chronica Slavorum’, Journal of Medieval History 47, no. 3 (2021): 350–65. 7 See particularly the section ‘Landscapes of Solitude’ in Enenkel and Göttler, Solitudo. 8 Peter McQuillan,‘Loneliness versus Delight in the Eighteenth-Century Aisling’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 25 (2010): 11–32. 9 Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Alexander Porteous, The Forest in Folklore and Mythology (Mineloa: Dover Publications, 2012); James M. Mackinlay, Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs (Glasgow: Goodpress, 2019). 10 Emma Barlow,‘Emotional Minds and Bodies in the Suicide Narratives of Dante’s Inferno’, Cerae 7 (2020): 23–45. 11 Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London: Random House, 2010); Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). 12 Margrit Pernau,‘Space and Emotion: Building to Feel’, History Compass 12, no. 7 (2014): 541–9; Razak Khan,‘Local Pasts: Spaces, Emotions and Identities in Vernacular Histories of Princely Rampur’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 693–731; Helen M. Hickey and Stephanie Trigg, ‘Landscape, Climate and Feeling’, in The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700, ed. Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (London: Routledge, 2019), 43–58. 13 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Wiley, 1992). 14 Katie Barclay, The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 15 David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1972). 16 Katie Barclay, ‘Composing the Self: Gender and Subjectivity within Scottish Balladry’, Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 337–53. 17 Child, England and Scottish Popular Ballads; Thomas Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts, Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). 18 This argument I make in this section is outlined at length in Barclay, Caritas, especially Chs 4 and 5. 19 Barclay, Caritas; Katie Barclay,‘Making the Bed, Making the Lower-Order Home in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Home Is Where the Start Is: Interrogating Eighteenth-Century Domesticity, ed. Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge (London: Routledge, 2021), 266–82.

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Lonely Places in 18th- and 19th-Century Scottish Balladry 20 Katie Barclay, ‘Family, Mobility and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement, 1450–1850, ed. Heather Dalton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 127–48. 21 Katie Barclay,‘Marginal Households and Their Emotions: The “Kept Mistress” in Enlightenment Edinburgh’, in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Sue Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2015), 95–111; Katie Barclay,‘Mobile Emotions: Bigamy and Community in Scotland, 1660–1830’, in Courtship, Marriage and Marriage Breakdown: Approaches from the History of Emotion, ed. Katie Barclay, Jeff Meek and Andrea Thomson (London: Routledge, 2020), 66–80. 22 Elizabeth Ewan,‘Crossing Borders and Boundaries: The Use of Banishment in Sixteenth-Century Scottish Towns’, in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain, ed. Sara Butler and K.J. Kesselring (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 237–57. 23 Barclay,‘Marginal Households’; Barclay,‘Family, Mobility and Emotion’. 24 Barclay,‘Family, Mobility and Emotion’; Barclay, Caritas; Katie Barclay,‘Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, in Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 142–59. 25 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 2010). 26 Barclay, Caritas. 27 Allan H. Pasco, Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth: And Early Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2016). 28 Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sexuality and Social Control: Scotland 1660–1780 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 29 Diane Purkiss, ‘Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body, the Child’, Gender and History 7, no. 3 (1995): 408–32; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft. Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994). 30 Child Waters, Child version 63E; this version is from the Harris manuscript from Perthshire circa 1790, held by Edinburgh University Library Special Collections. 31 Child version 39F. 32 Child version 39G; Motherwell’s MS, 595. 33 ‘Tam Lin’, track on Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, Child Ballads, Wilderland, 2013, studio album. 34 A. Acland, ‘Essay: Is Tam Lin a Rape Story?’, Tam Lin Balladry, last modifed Mar. 2015, https://tamlin.org/analysis/Tam_Lin_and_rape.html; for a discussion of rape in Scottish culture, see Katie Barclay, ‘From Rape to Marriage: Questions of Consent in the Eighteenth-Century United Kingdom’, in Interpreting Sexual Violence: 1660–1800, ed. Anne Greenfeld (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 35–44; Katie Barclay,‘ “And Four Years Space they Loveingly Agreed”: Balladry and Early Modern Understandings of Marriage’, in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Janey Nugent (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 23–34. 35 Katie Barclay,‘Malignant Passions and Carnal Desires: Rape in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’ (Working Paper). 36 Child version 39G. 37 Ibid. 38 The Cruel Mother is Child 20. 39 Child version 20E; Motherwell’s MS, 390, from the recitation of Agnes Lyle, Kilbarchan, 24 August 1825. 40 Vic Gammon, Desire, Drink and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600–1900 (London: Routledge, 2008); David Atkinson, ‘History, Symbol, and Meaning in “The Cruel Mother”’, Folk Music Journal 6, no. 3 (1992): 359–80. 41 Child version 20H, Motherwell’s MS, 401, from Agnes Laird, Kilbarchan, 24 August 1825; Child version 20E. 42 Child version 20H. 43 Child version 20E. 44 Mary Hamilton is Child 173. For a full analysis of Mary Hamilton see Deborah Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997). 45 Child version 173B, Motherwell’s MS, 337. 46 Child version 173B. 47 Child version 173C, Motherwell’s MS, 265, from Mrs Crum, Dumbarton, 7 Apr. 1825. 48 Child version 173L, Motherwell’s MS, 280, from the recitation of Mrs Trail of Paisley.

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Katie Barclay 49 Child Norice or Child Maurice is Child 83. 50 Child version 83E, Motherwell’s MS, 165, from the recitation of Mrs Thomson, Kilbarchan, seventy years of age, as learned from her mother at the Water of Leven, Dumbarton, when she was ten years old, March 1825. 51 Lucinda McCray Beier,‘The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 43–61. 52 Alan Brinton,‘The Passions as Subject Matter in Early Eighteenth-Century British Sermons’, Rhetorica 10, no. 1 (1992): 51–69.

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26 NAVIGATING ‘LONELINESS’ IN THE REFORMED LUNATIC ASYLUM Britain, 1800–1860 Mark Neuendorf

Introduction Early champions of public lunatic asylums would have considered it anachronistic to investigate ‘loneliness’ in these institutions. To the popular mind, the ‘sullen atmosphere of darkness, mysteriousness, secrecy, loneliness, and despair’ that defned the unreformed madhouse was summarily eradicated across Europe and the Atlantic by the enlightened benevolence of 19th-century philanthropists and legislators.1 Indeed, the reformed asylum, characterized by outdoor labour, socialization and religious instruction, was viewed as the very antithesis of painful solitude, a space where people experiencing ‘the most solitary of affictions’ came together as a ‘family’. Testimony from several generations of psychiatric service users has, of course, problematized these claims. Recent scholars, infuenced by the cultural turn in the humanities, have attempted to revive the complexities of institutional life, in which the homeliness of ward life masked the insecurity and potential trauma inherent to forced isolation. Key to this scholarship is an assumption that the material environment of the asylum provided a space through which competing ideas about healthy sociability were promoted and negotiated.2 As Barbara Taylor described the experience of asylumdom, in her historical memoir about confnement in Friern Hospital, the modern institution was that which reinforced the ‘remorseless aloneness’ of mental illness but also offered opportunities for emotional support and comradeship.3 The experience of isolation in early-19th-century asylums was similarly complex. In meeting the popular desire to segregate the insane from society, medical superintendents simultaneously acknowledged the need to create an ‘asylum’ for their patients, which both offered safety and security and addressed their moral needs (e.g. engagement with community and religion). The doctors’ ideas about mental wellness were shaped by prevailing norms of heteronormative sociability, and the medical space was policed in such a way as to manage patients’ social attachments. In effect, these proto-psychiatrists sought to institute an ‘emotional regime’ in the asylum, aimed at shaping or transforming experiences of aloneness in these isolated institutions. Their experiments in emotional management offer important insights into the production of sociable or feeling bodies in early carceral institutions, and thus can enrich a new history of loneliness.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-30

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Of course, few inmates of early asylums would have viewed their incarceration through the lens of a modern experience of ‘loneliness’. Prior to the Victorian era, the primary concern for many incarcerated lunatics was not the pain of isolation, but the attendant loss of reputation, credit and liberty; confnement was a ‘legal death’.4 As Fay Bound Alberti has shown, this concept of loneliness—broadly defned as the emotional distress arising from a sense of social estrangement—is of modern usage and would not have been lexically available to many of the people that populated early mental hospitals (largely, paupers and the unlettered).5 Nevertheless, even the most marginal elements of European society in the early modern period guarded against exclusion, or breakdown of the ‘sociable community’.6 The necessity of social integration was felt only more acutely following the sentimental revolution of the long 18th century, which situated sympathy and sociability as the bases of civil society—and consequently, as sources of morality and mental wellness.7 This is not to deny that solitude remained a pervasive emotional ideal in modern Europe; indeed, in different ways, bourgeois and industrializing societies created powerful impulses for privacy and personal detachment. Rather, it is to suggest that moral health was gauged by one’s capacity to cultivate the moral affections while resisting forms of isolation or social withdrawal that were deemed to be harmful to the self or civil society. This tension was dramatized in the asylum’s medical space, and this chapter sets out to capture the diverse experiences of solitude, aloneness and community documented in mental hospitals from the opening decades of the 19th century. It outlines the core assumptions about healthy sociability that underpinned contemporary psychiatric therapeutics, as well as some of the strategies that medical staffs implemented to promote conviviality in their patients—or at least to restrict or transform seemingly damaging expressions of aloneness and solitude. Surviving evidence depicts the early asylum not merely as a rigid ‘total institution’ but rather as an emotional arena, in which the imposed emotional regime was negotiated or challenged by patients. Emotional navigation in such institutions was possible, though outright resistance to prescribed norms carried risks for patients, as this was regularly read as a sign of unreason. Nevertheless, across institutions for the insane, those referred to as lunatics willingly revolted against the emotional regime of the house, seeking instead to forge relationships on their own terms—and in some cases even cultivate solitude in opposition to the asylum’s mandates. As the evidence from early asylum records indicates, patients’ opportunities for emotional navigation were invariably affected by their social status, gender and race. This emotional navigation is extracted with care from various written medical sources. Generally, the expressions of emotion that were recorded in offcial sources were those that were viewed as in some way aberrant, and so carry the prejudices of the person that recorded them— usually by an institution’s medical superintendent or governing matron.8 Excavating expressions of ‘loneliness’ is particularly precarious, given that abandonment was a regular feature of many patients’ delusions in early asylums. Still, as Catharine Coleborne and Peter Stearns contend, a close reading of such institutional records can reveal otherwise obscured attitudes towards emotions in early mental hospitals, and even ‘provid[e] access to the emotional culture or norms’ of said institutions.9 In attempting to document the ‘performative space’ of the early asylum, this chapter primarily draws upon the manuscript sources from four representative institutions from the different levels of British psychiatry’s ‘mixed economy of care’: two publicly funded pauper lunatic asylums, the Newcastle Borough Lunatic Asylum and the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell; the York Lunatic Asylum, a charity hospital founded on voluntary subscriptions; and London’s Otto House, a so-called private madhouse for women of the upper classes.10 These asylums all adhered to some extent to the new medical orthodoxy, yet the varied backgrounds of the staff and inmates meant that they offered some diversity of experience, which are documented in the next section. 388

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Sociability and the ‘Moral Treatment’ Regime Nineteenth-century asylums,as with other institutions of welfare and social control,were designed to seclude their inmates partially from the outside world, to facilitate their rehabilitation. The desire to remove the disorderly mad from the community was united, in Western Europe, with a profound therapeutic optimism from proto-psychiatrists who contended that the insane could be restored to reason in carefully managed institutions. It was believed that the patient’s segregation from family or community was essential for breaking their morbid delusions.11 ‘Reformed’ asylums were modelled on the system of ‘moral treatment’ pioneered at the Quaker-run York Retreat, and schematized by Samuel Tuke, the grandson of that institution’s founder. Substituting traditional, corporeal treatments for insanity, such as mechanical restraint and purgatives, with socialization and occupation, the Retreat’s founders believed that they could restore the deranged mind to a semblance of the bourgeois norm. This was based on the sentimental ideal that the moral sense was not irrevocably corrupted by insanity, and so could be excited by kindness and conversation.12 This theory was heavily infuenced by Adam Smith’s specular model of sympathy, which posited that people moderated their behaviours to meet the regard of others—a process fundamental to identify formation and one that was intrinsically soothing.13 The alienist Henry Hawes Fox, whose family of mad-doctors had helped pioneer moral treatment, offered an explanation for sympathy’s consolation in the 1830s that fully developed the Smithian schema. He viewed the insane, specifcally those labouring under ‘partial insanity’—people whose morbid delusions centred on a single exciting cause—as uniquely positioned to identify ‘errors’ in the behaviours of others, owing to their heightened delicacy of feeling, and capacity to reason correctly outside of the subject of their delusions.14 Fox held that the continual observance of each other’s illusions has a tendency . . . to awaken in the mind of each a doubt regarding the soundness of his own views; for, notwithstanding the delicacy shewn to himself, he cannot fail to perceive that his own notions, on certain points, are esteemed erroneous by those around him.15 Complete isolation was deemed utterly detrimental to the patient in this therapeutic model, an idea that conformed to the early modern assumption that distraction was a powerful antidote to melancholy and despair.16 The sequestration inherent to asylumdom was to be counteracted by regular employment and continual exposure to conversation—all under the guidance of gentle but authoritative medical staff. The Tukes famously defned the Retreat as a ‘family’, and subsequent proto-psychiatrists sought to recreate such a ‘domestic circle’, by living under the same roof as their patients.17 Lay observers from the period were readily convinced that benevolent regard awakened healthy sympathy in even the most degraded asylum inmates.18 Describing a visit to Hanwell Asylum in 1834—a jewel of Britain’s medical modernity—the sociologist Harriet Martineau depicted the patients as actively sociable, underscoring the salutary infuence of conversation.19 Though some patients continued to display signs of derangement, the overwhelming impression was that talk and song promoted soothing affection, with the desire for companionship said to encourage the most refractory patients to restrain their ravings. For writers like Martineau, the ‘natural play’ of the social affections was therapeutic in itself: I saw the worst patients in the establishment, and conversed with them, and was far more delighted than surprised to see the effect of companionship on those who might be supposed the most likely to irritate each other. Some are always in a better state 389

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when their companions are in a worse; and the sight of woe has evidently a softening effect upon them.20 Implicit here is the assumption that the insane remained innately sensitive. Few contemporaries doubted that lunatics retained ‘amiable qualities’ through their distraction;‘sympathy, condolence, a readiness to assist in emergencies and to wait on the sick’ were said to be the ‘virtues of the insane’.21 Most physicians would have agreed with Samuel Hill, the medical superintendent of the North and East Ridings Asylum in Yorkshire, that ‘exciting [lunatics’] fner feelings’ would indelibly ‘extinguish or change those passions which, through insanity, are apt to gain an ascendancy.’22 Charitable works were thus lauded as useful employments for the insane, particularly the wealthy. For similar reasons, refecting the gendered ideals that shaped conceptions of health and morality, Hill also cited as evidence the ‘soothing effects’ that two pregnancies in the hospital had on the ‘female patients’:‘With one exception they considered it a favour to be permitted to nurse the infants, who were always treated in a tender and affectionate manner.’23 All of this points to link between sociability and mental wellness in the moral treatment paradigm. Indeed, for asylum superintendents, a progression from withdrawal to congeniality could signify the restoration of reason, a point neatly illustrated by the case notes relating to Adrienne J., a patient committed to Otto House in 1858. Adrienne was confned on the advice of her family, who reported that ‘her usual disposition is quite altered & she dislikes those she was formerly much attached to.’24 This aversion was attended with delusions and a more general emotional and social withdrawal. As indicated by the medical records, Adrienne’s rapid improvement was gauged by her engagement with the asylum family: July 8. Much better. Notices things. Played the piano yesterday. 12. Better. Tries to speak but cannot. Has seen her friends whispers a little. Speaks to attendant . . . 14. Much better. Can answer questions. Plays the piano. Walks in the garden unattended. 16. Improving rapidly. 19. Going on well. Talks, & writes to her friends. 23. Much better. Playing the piano.25 One week later, Adrienne was discharged from the asylum, ‘cured’. Increased participation in the social life of the house, coupled with a rapprochement with her friends, marked to the medical offcers a return to mental health. For asylum staffs, a key aspect of moral treatment was thus the effective management of the physical space, with a view to limiting isolation. As with most carceral institutions, asylum attendants acknowledged some diffculties with managing the affections of large patient cohorts, and certain acts of separation were normalized on perennially overcrowded wards. As a matter of course, institutions for the insane across the board imposed a strict separation of the sexes, and propriety also dictated that bed-sharing should be avoided.26 It was also deemed necessary to separate patients according to their illness classifcation, as it was held that exposure to refractory patients could inhibit the recovery of convalescents. Broadly speaking, though, patients were expected to engage in the society of the house, a principle around which the medical space was organized. Evidently, this regime was a qualifed success in certain instances, with asylum offcers extolling any achievements in their published annual reports. However, not all cases culminated in this sociable ideal, and one issue which vexed offcers of all classes of asylum was the occasional necessity of forced isolation. In limited cases, staff were permitted to isolate refractory patients temporarily, if ordered by a medical man (and asylum medical offcers were all men 390

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in this period). This was, theoretically, a managerial last resort and primarily for dealing with those patients ‘whose alienation [appeared to admit] of no alteration from companionship’.27 Asylum superintendents were sensitive to rumours of blanket seclusion being utilized in asylums, following the publicized failures of the so-called separate system of prison discipline: namely, the disastrous trial of solitary confnement at Pentonville Penitentiary, which seemingly drove large numbers of convicts mad.28 Rumours of malpractice swirled in medical circles as reformist mad-doctors—in attempting to eliminate mechanical restraint from asylums—trialled isolation as a procedure to secure and calm violent patients. This systematized seclusion, increasingly in padded cells, was viewed in some quarters as a betrayal of the principles of moral treatment, and critics of the ‘non-restraint’ system were quick to condemn the practice as another form of the reviled solitary confnement.29 Critics were almost certainly correct in their claims that such seclusion was widespread in asylums, even if some of it was conducted out of view of the medical offcers, at the initiative of the nursing staff. It would have been tempting for superintendents to use the crowded state of wards to justify permanently isolating irascible patients, and some certainly did. Yet it appears that some medical offcers resisted the desire to warehouse troublesome patients; whether it be from a belief in the virtues of moral treatment or the necessity to ‘conform to public expectations’, they were mindful to pronounce their aversion to seclusion, regardless of the harmful consequences to the peace of the house.30 Thus, despite being vexed by the behaviour of a female patient, whose bullying was thought to have ‘prevented’ the recovery of those around her, the medical staff at York Lunatic Asylum nevertheless asserted that it would be ‘an act of unkindness to seclude her constantly’, and so they allowed her to remain in the public areas of the house until she could be transferred to a more secure institution.31

Managing Isolation Though derived from philosophy, moral treatment was realised through custodial practices, with nursing staff carefully managing the medical space so that healthy sociability could be promoted. Adherents to moral therapy went to some lengths to entertain large groups of inmates, outside of the regimen of labour that characterized the institutional routine. Patient populations were brought together in popular amusements, providing arenas through which to cultivate sociability; medical offcers of pauper lunatic asylums were willing to sanction mild commotion if they thought it benefcial for breaking down aloneness. John Conolly, for instance, approved of music as a therapeutic pastime and noted that it was common to fnd refractory male patients at Hanwell dancing to ‘a lively performance on the fddle’.32 Board and card games and billiard tables were common features of hospital dayrooms, creating ‘place[s] where inmates could interact’.33 Vigorous outdoor activities were also encouraged. At Newcastle Borough Lunatic Asylum, large groups of patients on both sides of the house ‘heartily’ entered into athletic games together. Organized dances, overseen by the medical staff, were the cornerstone of the social life in pauper lunatic asylums. A regular occurrence—held weekly in some institutions—they provided inmates with an opportunity to mix with patients of the opposite sex. Staff praised these events for exhausting the patients, and some critics evidently saw them as an extension of the routinization of the custodial institution.34 However, contemporary reports simultaneously depict these entertainments as invigorating and pleasing (see Figure 26.1). As one outside observer concluded, ‘such rational recreation induces habitual cheerfulness, and thus proves one of the aids by which the moody sufferer is often restored to reason.’35 And though organized dances were rigorously policed to maintain bourgeois standards of decorum, it is clear that patients and staff sought to recreate a somewhat rowdier working-class culture where possible. At Hanwell, female nurses 391

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Figure 26.1 Colney Hatch, lunatic asylum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

were found to sneak across to the men’s side during work hours to dance with the male patients, a practice that attracted a severe reprimand from the authorities but that nevertheless testifes to the willingness of both inmates and low-status attendants to seek togetherness in their relative isolation.36 The doctors’ strategies to lessen segregation were not confned to the medical space. Where possible, patients were encouraged to interact with the wider community. Single lunatics and, occasionally, groups were taken for exercise outside of the asylum grounds, with convalescent patients sometimes allowed to walk without supervision. Proprietors of most asylums afforded ‘trustworthy’ patients the privilege of attending religious services in nearby towns, and some were allowed to mix with the community in popular entertainments; paupers from Newcastle attended a local theatre, as well as public lectures at nearby Gateshead.37 Locals were regularly welcomed into the grounds of pauper lunatic asylums, and doctors recognized the good that could arise from convalescent patients meeting the public, both for their recovery, and in breaking down the stigma surrounding insanity. It should be said, medical offcers were mindful of the sensibilities of the ‘insane poor’. Reporting on the curious neighbours that peered over fences at the newly opened Newcastle Lunatic Asylum, superintendent James Crichton-Browne warned that he would have to ‘put a stop’ to the practice, as it made apparent to inmates their alienation from the society of their equals:‘it is painful to my patients to suppose that they are regarded, with curiosity which would be laudable in a menagerie but which . . . is indelicate, where sensitive & afficted human beings are concerned.’38 The interaction between the public and the asylum population was thus carefully managed, with access invited in cases where outsiders might aid the 392

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patients’ recovery or enhance the social or economic standing of the asylum. Thus, at Hanwell, the hospital’s governors and other local worthies were invited to attend social events, including the Christmas dance, and a bazaar that was operated by female patients. At the North and East Ridings Asylum in Yorkshire, male patients farmed produce, which they sold to visitors from nearby communities; the sight of this commerce on the hospital’s grounds was said to give ‘an air of freedom and business-like life’ to the institution, which ‘shed a wholesome and cheering infuence over every body within bounds of the Establishment’.39 A key distinction between private and pauper asylums was the level of public access. Private madhouses for the rich traded in discretion, catering to the families of lunatics, who demanded confdentiality and seclusion from prying eyes.40 Hawes Fox, for example, aiming at a genteel clientele, advertised the privacy from ‘exposure’ offered by his institution, built on a plot ‘without a public thoroughfare’.41 This demand also infuenced genteel peoples’ expectations of the internal management of these institutions. One of the frst publicized scandals arising from asylums in the 19th century related to the indiscriminate mixing of insane naval offcers with ‘common mechanics’ in overcrowded cells, including the sharing of beds.42 Throughout the century, the lack of privacy continued to create tensions in madhouses that catered for the wealthy.43 Overcrowded wards, enduring surveillance and forced sociability grated with educated patients, who were accustomed to cultivating ‘abstracted solitude’ (that which David Vincent describes as the ‘capacity to be alone amidst company’).44 In the words of one of the most outspoken ‘alleged lunatics’ of the Victorian era, John Perceval—the son of assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval—a great indignity of confnement in Ticehurst House was the erosion of his perceived right to privacy as a man of means. The asylum was ‘too public for a person in affiction’, as they were ‘constantly exposed in going out and in coming in, to the gaze of many other different individuals’.45 Perceval objected to associating with low-born servants and other patients on the grounds that he was a ‘gentleman’ and was particularly incensed that attendants subjected him to ‘impertinent observation, sudden intrusion, want of respect, and even ridicule’—to say nothing of his disdain for the ‘whistling, singing, futing, ffng, fddling, laughing’ that had become the norm in public asylums.46 While he acknowledged the need for companionship and society, he simultaneously believed it to be degrading to mix with people he was not ‘suited to’. Most importantly, forced attendance was viewed as demeaning to an independent man:‘I have confdence in my resolution and habits to [enjoy society] only in moderation, and to leave it, if by chance necessary.’47 Some aloneness was still desirable. Medical writers were divided on whether wealthy or educated lunatics should be indulged with solitude. For instance, the question of whether they could be trusted to eat alone—another point of contention for Perceval—was decided in the negative by W.A.F. Browne, who believed this encouraged ‘negligent and flthy habits’.48 Yet the ambitious and upwardly mobile caste of mad-doctors understood that to secure a more ‘respectable’ class of patients, some concessions would need to be made. In promoting madhouses for the leisure classes, they stressed that private quarters could be readily accessible to those who were used to retirement from prying eyes. When outlining plans for an asylum for the affuent, William Ellis proposed a range of entertainments which, while bringing patients into contact with the society of the house, would simultaneously enable the quiet contemplation that was becoming a norm in the middle-class household (e.g. botany, art and literature).49 The women at Otto House were allowed to take up the solitary pastime of nature photography, a privilege which several seem to have relished. That one such patient could return to the house dirty and unkempt suggests that such activities allowed them to escape close surveillance.50 Systemically overcrowded, pauper lunatic asylums offered comparatively fewer options for ‘abstracted solitude’. Moreover, it is debatable whether the educated classes gave much thought to the sentiments of the lower orders, who were seen to lack a stereotypically middle-class emotional 393

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self-mastery.51 It is clear though that, whatever the views and concerns of their perceived superiors, many pauper lunatics also resented the forced publicity of the asylum. Some patients outwardly opposed surveillance and constant company, expressing ‘a simple desire to be alone’.52 In working people, such social avoidance could be read as a continuation of derangement. Patients like the pauper Hannah S. at Hanwell, who exhibited a ‘fond[ness] of solitude’, were apt to excite the suspicion of medical offcers. Hannah’s practice of ‘isolating herself from companionship, or conversation with others’ concerned her overseers who, while acknowledging a general mental improvement, remained nevertheless convinced that she was still ‘not of sound mind’.53 Yet even here,medical authorities could endorse quiet repose for convalescent paupers. Matron Catherine M.E. MacFie of Hanwell applied for workrooms to be ftted out for suitable female patients to read, write, knit or sketch. Such rooms were needed, MacFie concluded, because there were numerous industrious women who were put off by the ‘business’ (read: busy-ness) of the public areas, and who thus ‘prefer[red] confning themselves to their sleeping apartments . . . rather than encounter many, and, to them, strange faces elsewhere.’54 By mid-century, dayrooms and infrmaries were regularly decorated with objects that facilitated quiet refection or solitude. At Newcastle, Crichton-Browne praised the distribution of ‘[c]heap ornaments, busts, and pictures’ through the wards, as well as the circulation of books and periodicals.55 At its opening, the asylum was supplied with at least nine newspapers and periodicals from across Britain, ranging from the popular London Illustrated News to the middle-brow Punch.56 Critics of the asylum regarded such ornamentation as evidence of the drab monotony or shallowness of moral therapy.57 Yet as MacFie’s comments imply, such objects were nevertheless intended to enable quiet paupers to cultivate a private ‘mental space’ and perhaps capture some moments of reverie and aloneness within the unrelenting publicness of the asylum (Figure 26.2).

Figure 26.2 The Hospital of Bethlem (Bedlam), St George’s Fields, Lambeth: the men’s ward of the infrmary. Wood engraving by F. Vizetelly, 1860. Source: Wellcome Collection.

394

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Intimacy and Comradeship on the Wards Effective management of patients’ ‘loneliness’ necessitated careful scrutiny of the nature and intensity of their affections. Though published medical texts from the early 19th century display little interest in the emotional attachments of confned lunatics, it was readily apparent to medical superintendents that not all lunatics benefted from ward sociability and that not all kinds of sociability were advantageous to moral treatment. Asylum offcers’ records reveal their concerted efforts to police what were viewed as subversive or aberrant emotional expressions from their charges, in their attempts to achieve the desired, sociable ideal. Close surveillance of the institution’s emotional culture was a priority for those practicing ‘reformed’ therapeutics. Even within the asylum’s population of marginalized and maligned, certain patients stood out as outsiders. Those who lacked a requisite grasp of the English language found themselves effectively barred from communicating with most staff, who could interpret their so-called jabbering as a mental defect.58 Petty animosity was rife among patients in some institutions, and fghts and arguments common. Figurative ‘others’ were often victims of this aggression. As early as the 1815, at the House of Commons Select Committee into Madhouses, legislators were made aware of the brutality levelled at some foreign-born patients, with reformer Edward Wakefeld exposing the mistreatment of a Polish soldier confned in Bethlem Hospital, who was singled out ‘as an object of resentment’ by a British serviceman and suffered violence at his hands.59 To combat marginalization, asylum offcers implemented some measures to assimilate isolated ‘others’ into the institutional family, with mixed success. Medical staff were able to make basic changes to the structure of the medical space to encourage cohesion, be it in moving antagonistic patients away from frequent targets or allowing friendly patients to bunk together. In some instances, superintendents, who generally distanced themselves from the day-to-day management of patients, coordinated with patients’ connections to facilitate their integration. For instance, at Hanwell in 1851, the medical superintendent met with ‘the secretary of the Polish association’ to consult on the treatment of a Polish patient, Ferdinand T.60 Though it is not clear that this dialogue directly prompted closer attention from the day-to-day staff, it is worth noting that, offcially at least, the medical offcers described the patient as successfully assimilating into the patient population. No episodes of outward bigotry were recorded in his case notes, and Ferdinand seems to have been content under the moral treatment regime; he laboured alongside other workers in the grounds and even took up English lessons with a fellow patient.61 One broad aim of many superintendents of public asylums was to overcome sectarian divisions between Protestants, Catholics and the growing Jewish population in these institutions. Asylum chaplains in England and Scotland, though drawn from the established Protestant churches, often provided broadly non-denominational Christian services that could appeal to people with varying beliefs.62 Where possible, efforts were made to provide services that directly catered to the faith of the diverse religious in the asylum population. In terms of the internal management of the house, asylum chaplains were also integral to the integration of listless or lonely inmates. Religious instruction was a cornerstone of moral treatment, with legislators and medical men coming to conceive of spiritual attendance as having a tranquilizing effect on the mad (those labouring under religious delusions aside).63 It seems that some chaplains also cherished the role of emotional support. Typical are the comments of John Moodie, a Scottish minister, who wrote that while they were ‘received as a clergyman and expected to act as one’, the institutional chaplain was nevertheless treated by patients ‘as a friend’, whose ‘sympathy is looked for, and sought after’.64 Desperate patients certainly turned to these spiritual guides for consolation amid their painful solitude. The chaplain at the York Lunatic Asylum, the Reverend John Heslop, was 395

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consulted by a patient, the former naval surgeon Henry N., who ‘complained bitterly’ about being confned to the asylum grounds.65 Dr N. evidently found much solace in Heslop’s attentions, meeting regularly with the preacher. So comforting was this seeming friendship that he wrote to the clergyman some months after being removed from the asylum, expressing ‘regret’ at his removal and a desire to return (which he would eventually do).66 Many patients shared Henry’s comfort in the asylum, showing themselves to be unable or unwilling to reintegrate into their communities. For patients who experienced trauma in the outside world, the asylum and its ‘family’ could appear to provide a more secure surrogate.67 These institutions could insulate inmates against abuse and neglect experienced in the home, as Marjorie Levine-Clark notes of pauper women.68 Some doctors played to their assumed role as paterfamilias. In 1847 a male convalescent patient at York Lunatic Asylum walked to Leeds rather than be discharged to his family’s care, believing that ‘his father . . . would not be kind to him.’ As the superintendent noted, this concern ‘arose from an unfortunate remark of his father’s on a visit’ to the asylum, tersely concluding,‘The lad has reason for his fears.’69 This was only ever a qualifed sympathy, though. Despite the optimism and dedication of some superintendents, for many the asylum family proved a poor substitute for the social affections of the home or community, and some patients were inevitably frustrated in their efforts to integrate—or indeed, outright resisted the entreaties of staff. Case books and other institutional records reveal a disconnect between the expectations of some senior offcers and chaplains— shaped by the middle-class norms of their milieu—and the patients’ needs. Prejudices invariably shaped their perspectives. While Dr N. undoubtedly received genuine care and reassurance from Revd Heslop, a man of comparable status, other lonely patients received short shrift from chaplains. Moodie, for instance, noted that while a personable chaplain would not fail to ‘soothe and cheer’, he qualifed this by stating that the good effects of their companionship were most likely to be felt by those whose ‘educational advantages’ had already instilled them with the requisite talents to pull them out of indolence.70 The needs of patients from the lower orders did not always feature in the thoughts of the spiritual advisers, who could be quick to pass censure when support was needed. Moreover, for all their anxiety about patients’ solitude, asylum offcers were less than welcoming of relationships that unsettled the emotional regime of the house. Some inmates outwardly resisted the emotional norms imposed by the medical offcers, seeking instead to combat their isolation through proscribed interpersonal attachments. Broadly speaking, medical offcers viewed intense relationships with disdain, obviously concerned about patients’ potential to withdraw from the ‘rational’ society they were constructing in the asylum (and, indeed, of confdants feeding each other’s delusions). Conolly, for instance, used the closeness of two female patients as a case study of mental aberration, in his clinical lectures: Patients take a great dislike to some, while on the contrary they will sometimes take such a fancy for one or several of the other patients that they will not be parted from them. This is particularly exemplifed in the case of two females in the Hanwell Asylum, who sleep, take their meals, & in fact do every thing together, and [visiting physician] Dr Hitchman, during the clinical visit, remarked that if they were separated, they would most likely pine & die.71 The women, it was said, were a curiosity in the house, as they shunned the company of patients and medical staff alike. The doctors acknowledged that their relationship provided powerful emotional support, however expressed alarm that this attachment simultaneously transgressed gendered norms. The nature of their delusions—including the women’s belief that they were 396

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the masculine fgures of God and Christ, respectively—and their habit of swearing at medical staff that approached them clearly disarmed Conolly, who attributed the intensity of the pair’s disorder to their intimacy. Close or unrestrained friendships were thought to threaten the strict hierarchy enforced by asylum staffs—an anxiety shared by medical workers through to the dissolution of asylumdom in the late 20th century.72 Nineteenth-century asylum workers showed themselves to be particularly concerned by patients—including non-British inmates—who sought to combat isolation with militant combination. Hugh Grainger Stewart, the second medical superintendent at Newcastle District Asylum, described three Irish patients who, despite clear personal differences, could ‘be seen in deep consultation day after day, plotting and arranging what is known only to themselves.’73 These compatriots, united in their relative isolation and marginalization, forged powerful fraternal ties, despite differences of opinion; guided by a particularly zealous leader, the group made various demands and, for a time, conducted a hunger strike. As with Hanwell’s intimate pair, this sociability was viewed as transgressive by the medical man; in the fractious midVictorian period the doctor attributed such actions to a latent Fenianism—a concerted challenge to the moral treatment regime.

Negotiating the Pains of Separation Incarceration in a lunatic asylum was a painful experience for many inmates, invariably exacerbating their perceived isolation from the home. It is in the rupturing of domestic ties that ‘loneliness’, in its modern form, was most clearly manifested in early asylums. As Jane Hamlett puts it, ‘Committal to an asylum was often, for those patients aware of their circumstances, a painful experience. The recognition that family members were responsible for this could powerfully reconfgure relationships.’74 Feelings of anger and betrayal pervade the writings of many ‘alleged lunatics’. Perceval famously articulated his ‘hate’ for his family, who he saw as responsible for his emasculating incarceration. Asylum case records show that others openly conveyed sadness at their separation, though some caution is necessary when evaluating these descriptions, given the ease with which expressions of intense loss were attributed to patients’ mental states. For instance, the delusions of Laura J. at Otto House were recorded as centring on a belief that ‘every one, almost, is plotting against her in order to separate her from her mother’.75 Medical staff would interpret any displays of sorrow within this diagnosis, which would invariably infuence their recording. Similarly, it is not implausible to suggest that such a delusion would indelibly shape the patient’s experience of loneliness. Nevertheless, given its prominence, we can reasonably say that loneliness—conceived of as a yearning for community or household—was a recognized aspect of the ‘performative space’ of the 19th-century asylum. Nurses and superintendents often recorded the acute loss expressed by inmates upon discussing separation from family and friends. Moreover, despite this separation, patients were not necessarily insulated from family tragedies playing out beyond the madhouse walls: for Laura J., news of her beloved mother’s death left her ‘much affected.’76 As part of a new preoccupation with the obscured causes of social malaise, proto-psychiatrists scrutinized displays of domestic affection (or disaffection) for evidence of a patient’s mental state. As Akihito Suzuki puts it, with reference to the contemporaneous alienist William Hood, the 19th-century mad-doctor came to ‘[assume] the role of a patrolman of domestic harmony and propriety’.77 As we have already seen, sociability and rapprochement with friends could signal to doctors a return of the mental faculties. At Otto House, medical superintendent Alexander Sutherland was particularly sensitive to his patients’ demands to meet with their families, and 397

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carefully gauged their responses to such encounters. Maria C. was reported to have been ‘rather excited lately on seeing [her] husband.’ Whether Sutherland viewed this excitement as a desirable outcome was not elaborated; however, a later comment that the patient was,‘Going on very well. Much more sociable than she used to be’, suggests that such displays of spousal affection may have been perceived as contributing in some way to recovery.78 In another instance a maniacal patient, on becoming ‘Much quieter & more rational’, simultaneously showed herself to be ‘Very anxious to go home.’79 Such refections were steeped in sentimental ideals about the heteronormative family, and the belief that the domestic sphere was the locus of the moral sentiments.80 Conforming with their wider views on the salutary effect of sociability, asylum doctors saw some medical beneft in indulging patients’ familial affections, in limited circumstances.81 John Conolly, for instance, advocated for families to attend to patients at asylum infrmaries if they were severely ill.82 Crichton-Browne preferred to admit patients’ families to recreational dances, instead of the ‘curious strangers’ that were invited at some asylums, believing that friendly faces ‘encourage[d] healthy feelings’ in the lunatics while also ‘enhanc[ing] their interest in their amusements’.83 By the mid19th century it was common for patients to be boarded out with their families on ‘trial’ periods ahead of discharge. For their part, many families of incarcerated lunatics that enter the historical record display deep concern and dismay when separated from their parents, spouses, siblings and children. This is true for people of all classes, though losing the services of a potential wage-earner undoubtedly hit many working-class families hard: a distress that was heightened as they sought to navigate obstacles to accessing confned family members. Restrictive visiting hours posed an acute problem for labouring people. Early in the 19th century, Urbane Metcalf, an ex-inmate of Bethlem Royal Hospital, voiced concern that ‘working people’ were unable to visit poor lunatics on the single allotted visiting day each week, leading to demands that the hospital authorities expand visitation for the ‘convenience’ of the ‘patients[’] friends’.84 With the advent of central county asylums for pauper lunatics, families faced the additional frustration of lengthy and potentially costly travel to and from distant asylums, a fact which exacerbated the perceived isolation of their loved ones. To counteract patients’ aloneness, asylum offcers could encourage distant families to send letters to the asylum. Apart from the emotional support these messages provided, such communication ‘anchored the patient within their own kinship groups and ensured that an identity of shared memories . . . deepened and grew’.85 This undoubtedly eased the anxieties of many patients and families; for those that desired a more tangible closeness, personal visits were allowed in most circumstances, and if this was not possible, discharge could be seen as a necessity. Thus, when pauper lunatics from around the north-east of England were moved to Newcastle Borough Lunatic Asylum in 1865, the sister of Elizabeth E. made efforts to ‘get her removed to the Northumberland County Asylum at Morpeth, in order that she may be near her friends.’86 This sort of negotiation between communities, patients and medical offcers was not uncommon; families were active in the management and discharge of confned relations and did not hesitate to overrule doctors that cautioned against the premature removal of inmates (albeit with mixed results).87 Domestic sentiments were at the heart of many escape attempts recorded by asylums across the 19th century. In 1852 Edward T., a patient at York Lunatic Asylum, managed to escape from his attendant during a walk outside of the grounds, hastening immediately to visit his family; convincing them that he had ‘recovered suffciently to remain’ at home, they subsequently appealed for his discharge from the asylum.88 In some such attempts, collusion was evident. In November

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1845, the patient John C. and an accomplice made a brief escape from York to see the former’s family before returning to the institution. During this absence, the patient evidently discussed a more permanent removal with his family; two weeks later, John escaped home again, this time closely followed by an attendant, who attempted to ‘bring him back’ by force. This was resisted by the inmate and his brother, who ‘threatened to injure any person attempting to touch John C.’89 This spectacle—of families harbouring escaped lunatics and threatening the authorities charged with their recapture—played out in institutions across Britain in the 19th century and highlights the emotional pull of home and togetherness for patients and their households.90 Undoubtedly, ‘[e]conomic considerations were often uppermost’ in the minds of the families that sanctioned such a rash action, as it was for relations during regular discharges.91 Pauper families, in particular, may have been willing to maintain a lunatic relation if it meant economic self-suffciency. Nevertheless, it is also likely that pangs of ‘loneliness’, or at least a desire for a return to traditional patterns of fellowship provoked these and similar efforts to abscond from the institution and its stifing emotional and disciplinary regimes. At the very least, it seems evident that the social divide between the asylum and some communities further alienated many psychiatric service users from affective ties outside of the institution’s walls—pains which were only exacerbated by the suspicion with which many families viewed these medical authorities.92 It is in this new social dislocation—the now widespread unmooring of individual from family and community—that the asylum can have been said to create the conditions in which a ‘modern epidemic of loneliness’ could materialize. This was especially true of the relative outsiders who were sent to these institutions in increasing numbers across the 19th century.93 The few surviving scraps of documentation relating to the incarceration of already-marginalized peoples highlight the potentially harrowing experience of removal, for both patients and their connections. Few cases are as disturbing for the 21st-century reader as that of the pauper Edward W. confned at Gloucester Asylum, related in passing by Leonard Smith. Edward, a ‘Man of colour’, was one such inmate alienated from the outside world due to his incarceration; no information about his treatment was passed onto his wife, Mary, who was forced to write to the medical superintendent to seek clarifcation about his health: I have been very much grieved by reports that have Been in circultaion I have been told by Sivearal people that he is dead and that he was Stuffed wich I hop and trust is not the cause fore of all things I hope and trus the Lord will permit him to diey a Natoural Death.94 Smith simply notes that ‘Mrs Williams . . . had fallen victim to more than one form of prejudicial perception’, though it is worth refecting on the reasons for this disconnect—and its emotional impact on the family and patient.95 The fault for such ‘prejudicial perception[s]’ invariably lay with an institution that remained closed to outsiders, and a medical hierarchy that sought social distance from the working poor. Clearly, the imposed separation proved traumatic for family outside the asylum. We can only speculate on how this distance shaped the experience of ‘loneliness’ for Edward and inmates like him, whose thoughts and feelings were not captured in the written record. As he was a Black man, confned in the period before the politics of race and difference in asylums received concerted legislative attention, the seeming disconnect between patient, family and medical staff would almost certainly have been a cause of ‘frustration’, as Robert Ellis puts it.96 Indeed, there is little reason to doubt that his experience was any less traumatic than it was for his friends and family, unable to penetrate the institution’s walls.

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Conclusion Philanthropists overstated the case when they argued that the reformed asylum had eliminated loneliness and despair, though there is similarly no simple correlation between institutionalized seclusion and painful solitude. The moral treatment regime was designed to facilitate sociability, and forward-thinking asylum administrators proved resourceful in shaping the affections of their charges. Despite their best efforts, though, the disconnect between the demands of the medical faculty and desires of certain patients meant that the emotional regime constructed in the medical space inevitably failed to issue conformity from inmates, some of whom sought to defne healthy sociability on their own terms. More pressingly, the concrete divisions imposed between institution and certain communities invariably created the conditions in which modern forms of ‘loneliness’ could fourish.

Notes 1 ‘Impressions and Recollections of Hanwell Asylum, Chapter II’, Hogg’s Instructor (Edinburgh, 1852), 8 193–6. 2 Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Cara Dobbing,‘Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845–1906’, in The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, ed. Joseph Harley, Vicky Holmes and Laika Nevalainen (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 193–211. 3 Barbara Taylor, The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 151. 4 William Belcher, Belcher’s Address to Humanity (London, 1796), 1. 5 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 242–54. 6 Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 29. 7 Bound Alberti,‘Loneliness’, 248–9. 8 For a critical consideration of the usefulness of medical case notes, see Jonathan Andrews,‘Case Notes, Case Histories, and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine 11, no. 2 (1998): 255–81. 9 Catharine Coleborne and Peter N. Stearns,‘Institutional Records: A Comment’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, ed. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter N. Stearns (London: Routledge, 2021), 92–3. 10 On the interplay of space, buildings, bodies and display rules which produces emotions, see, for example, Katie Barclay, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland, 1800–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), esp. 5–6; Mark Neuendorf,‘Emotions and the Body’, in Sources for the History of Emotions, ed. Barclay, Crozier-De Rosa and Stearns, 224–36. On the ‘mixed economy of care’ that defned the early nineteenth—century mad-trade, see Leonard D. Smith,‘The County Asylum in the Mixed Economy of Care, 1808–1845’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective, ed. Bill Forsythe and Joseph Melling (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 33–6. 11 Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Affictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700–1900 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1993), 136–8. 12 Louis Charland,‘Benevolent Theory: Moral Treatment at the York Retreat’, History of Psychiatry 18, no. 1 (2007): 61–80. 13 Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 14 Henry Hawes Fox,‘Northwood’s Lunatic Asylum’, The Medico-Chirurgical Review 48, no. 8 (1836): 607. 15 Ibid., 608. 16 Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 94. 17 Hawes Fox,‘Northwood’s’, 605. 18 House of Commons, Report from the Committee of the House of Commons, on Madhouses in England (London, 1815), 47.

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Navigating ‘Loneliness’ in the Reformed Lunatic Asylum 19 Harriet Martineau,‘The Hanwell Lunatic Asylum’, The Mirror, or Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 23, no. 666 (14 June 1834), 395. 20 Ibid., 396. 21 Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire (Leeds, 1848), 6. 22 Third Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire (Leeds, 1850), 16. 23 Ibid., 16. 24 Otto House Casebook 2, Library of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, N—005, 2v. 25 Ibid., 2r. 26 See, for example,York Lunatic Asylum Lady Visitors’ Report Book, 13 Oct. 1814–13 Mar. 1830, Borthwick Institute for Archives, NHS/BOO/1/8/4/1, entry for 14 Jan. 1815. 27 W.A.F. Browne, What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be (Edinburgh, 1837), 90. 28 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland,‘ “He Must Die or Go Mad in This Place”: Prisoners, Insanity, and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–52’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 92, no. 1 (2018): 92–108. 29 Leslie Topp, ‘Single Rooms, Seclusion and the Non-Restraint Movement in British Asylums, 1838– 1844’, Social History of Medicine 31, no. 4 (2018): 754–73. 30 Akihito Suzuki, ‘Psychiatric Therapeutics and “the Public” in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 10 (2002): 123. 31 York Lunatic Asylum Medical Superintendent’s Monthly Report Book, 9 Feb. 1842–3 July 1860, Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York, NHS/BOO/1/9/1, entry for 3 Apr. 1848. 32 John Conolly, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane (London, 1847), 55. 33 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 34. 34 Scull, Most Solitary of Affictions, 285. 35 The Illustrated London News 12, no. 603 (15 Jan. 1853), 44. 36 See, for example, Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Hanwell, Female attendants’ fne book 1845–1869, London Metropolitan Archives, H11/HLL/C/05/001, fo. 32. 37 Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Borough Pauper Lunatic Asylum, First Annual Report for 1865 (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1866), 19. See also Leonard D. Smith,‘ “Your Very Thankful Inmate”: Discovering the Patients of an Early County Lunatic Asylum’, Social History of Medicine 21, no. 2 (2008): 240. 38 NBA/1, 31 July 1865. 39 Eighth Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire (Leeds, 1855), 6. 40 Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 143–4. 41 Hawes Fox,‘Northwood’s, 606. 42 John Weir, Papers Relating to the Management of Insane Offcers, Seamen, and Marines, Belonging to His Majesty’s Naval Service (London, 1814). 43 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 59. 44 David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 23. 45 John Perceval, A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, during a State of Mental Derangement; Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity (London, 1840), 148. 46 Ibid., 227, 3, 229. 47 Ibid., 229. 48 W.A.F. Browne, What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be (Edinburgh, 1837), 171. 49 William Ellis, A Treatise on the Nature, Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment of Insanity (London, 1838), 202–3. 50 N—005, 1. 51 On the social and gender ideologies that shaped 19th-century emotion theories, see, for example, Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotions, 1830–1872 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), ch. 4. 52 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 30. 53 Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Hanwell, Female Casebook 4, London Metropolitan Archives, H11/HLL/ B19/3, fo. 528. 54 Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Hanwell, Matron’s Report Book, London Metropolitan Archives, H11/ HLL/C/4/1, entry for 8 Feb. 1844.

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Mark Neuendorf 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86

Newcastle Borough Asylum, First Annual Report, 12. NBA/1, 23 Oct. 1865. Scull, Most Solitary of Affictions, 285. Robert Ellis, London and Its Asylums, 1888–1914: Politics and Madness (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 210–11. House of Commons, Report, 46–7. Middlesex Lunatic Asylum, Hanwell, Male Casebook 2, London Metropolitan Archives, H11/HLL/ B20/2, fo. 120. Ibid., fo. 121. See, for example, Annual Report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane, for the Year 1852, Edinburgh, 1853, 39. Early champions of the penitentiary similarly viewed chaplains as sources of moral guidance for as-yet unhardened criminals (Cox and Marland,‘He Must Die or Go Mad in This Place’, 87–92). Thirty-Fifth Annual Report by the Directors of James Murray’s Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth (Perth, 1862), 55; see also, for example, Annual Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum (London, 1850), 20. York Lunatic Asylum Chaplain’s Report Book, Borthwick Institute for Archives, BOO 1/10/1/1, entry for 18 Nov. 1844. Ibid., 6 Sept. 1845. See, for example, David Wright’s example of a Buckinghamshire lunatic who expressed ‘a great horror of being sent back [home]’, owing to the death of her daughter there during her incarceration: David Wright,‘The Discharge of Pauper Lunatics from County Asylums in Mid-Victorian England: The Case of Buckinghamshire, 1853–1872’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society, ed. Melling and Forsythe, 105. Marjorie Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity: Female Insanity and Family Relationships Among the West Riding Poor in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 25, no. 3 (2000): 354–5. See also Dobbing,‘Pauper Lunatics’, 201–5. NHS/BOO/1/9/1, 18 Dec. 1847. Thirty-Fifth Annual Report by the Directors of James Murray’s Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth (Perth, 1862), 56. ‘Notes of Clinical Lecture on Insanity delivered at the Hanwell Asylum in 1848 by Dr Conolly & Dr Hitchman’, Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, X Manuscripts, Lecture Notes, fos 3–4. Taylor, Last Asylum, 152. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Borough Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Second Annual Report for 1866 (NewcastleUpon-Tyne, 1867), 16. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 56. N—005, 1r. N—005, 1r. Akihito Suzuki, ‘Framing Psychiatric Subjectivity: Doctor, Patient and Record-Keeping at Bethlem in the Nineteenth Century’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914, ed. Forsythe and Melling, 130. N—005, 8v. N—005, 28r. G.J. Barker-Benfeld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 215–17. The one instance where a patient’s complaints about their isolation were routinely disregarded was if they had previously displayed animosity towards or directed violence at family members. For instance, Maria P. at Otto House was recorded as,‘Always talking about going home’, a desire for togetherness that clearly manifested in the modern malady of ‘loneliness’ and yet one which was ultimately disregarded by the consulting doctors, owing to a report at admission that the patient was ‘sometimes violent & threatening under insane apprehensions with regard to her children’ (N—005, 33v). Conolly, Construction, 49. Newcastle Borough Asylum, First Annual Report, 20. Urbane Metcalf, letter to the Committee sitting at Bethlem Hospital, c.1818, Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives, SCP—04. Cara Dobbing,‘The Family and Insanity: The Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862–1910’, in Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910, ed. Carol Beardmore, Cara Dobbing and Steven King (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 140. NBA/1, 30 July 1865.

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Navigating ‘Loneliness’ in the Reformed Lunatic Asylum 87 On the politics of discharge, see David Wright,‘The Discharge of Pauper Lunatics from County Asylums in Mid-Victorian England’, 93–112. 88 NHS/BOO/1/9/1, 5 Apr. 1852. 89 Ibid., 30 Nov. 1845. 90 See, for example, Smith,‘Your Very Thankful Inmate’, 244. 91 Ibid., 246. 92 Andrews,‘Case Notes’, 262–3, 267–8. 93 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland,‘ “A Burden on the County”: Madness, Institutions of Confnement and the Irish Patient in Victorian Lancashire’, Social History of Medicine 28, no. 2 (2015): 279–80; Ellis, London and Its Asylums, ch. 6. 94 Smith,‘Your Very Thankful Inmate’, 244. 95 Ibid., 245. 96 Quoted in Ellis, London and its Asylums, 211.

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27 ‘THERE IS A TRACE OF YOU IN THE AIR OF THAT ROOM’* Practices of Coping With Separation From Friends in Late-19th-Century Finland Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta

Delving into 19th-century women’s letters, one soon becomes aware that friendship between women was often expressed in a different way than is common today. Women’s letters paint a multifaceted picture of intimacy between women—of its codes of conduct, its ways of expression and of the central place of friendship in women’s lives. Homosociality was a fundamental component in the lifestyle of the elites and women, therefore, naturally spent much time together. The term ‘elite’ is understood here as a very heterogenous group of people from baronage to bourgeois or civil servant families. Although many elite women organized at least parts of their lives around their friends, one could not always be with them. It was unavoidable that sometimes a life change such as a marriage, new position or a long trip separated even the closest of friends.1 This chapter explores the ways in which Finnish elite women coped with separation from their friends between 1870–1902. This is done by analysing letters of four pairs of female friends: Augusta Hisinger and Mimmi Meinander, Alma Husberg and Minna Forss, Charlotte Wirzenius and Jenny Nordgren, and Vera Hjelt and Cely Mechelin. Although the women lived in a specifc geographical context, their experiences of separation can be seen as case studies from which generalizations for 19th-century European women can be made. The Grand Duchy of Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. The women lived in an age of fast societal change, as Finland was on its way of becoming a nation-state. The end of the century was redefned by economic liberalization, industrialization, urbanization, mass mobilization and the birth of civil society. Strict social barriers were lowering, and education, wealth and respectable lifestyle began to matter more than ancestry. The rising new elites started to occupy public offces and took a central role in the project of nation-building.2 For the women studied here, born in the Swedish-speaking middle- and upper-class families, these widespread changes brought new educational and professional opportunities. Many of them were among the frst to obtain formal teacher’s education from the newly established teacher seminaries. Boarding schools and seminaries were opportune spaces for the genesis of new, intimate friendships across the widening elite classes.3 Among the women at the centre of this study, the question of friendship aroused intense and tender emotions as it did with their peers across Europe. In their eyes, the value of friendship was high: a good female friend was a precious treasure and one of life’s guiding lights. Overall, these views were inherent to the social climate of the period, as the late 19th-century Finnish elites 404

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-31

‘There Is a Trace of You in the Air of That Room’

recognized friendship as a topic worthy of serious deliberation. In their view, a true friendship was something more than a pleasant leisure activity flled with casual familiarity. Instead, both women and men yearned for a bosom friend with whom they could identify and share all their joys and worries. The ethical ideals of friendship were highly elevated, as the pursuit of perfect harmony of souls and consensus on major values were seen as the key demands of intimacy. As elsewhere in the Western world, the language used in the letters of the Finnish 19th-century elites was lavishly emotional and affectionate. While this strong emotional intensity may seem startling, the contents of these letters cannot be reduced to mere rhetoric. As many scholars have argued, the textual choices made by letter writers played an important role both in dealing with one’s own emotions and in building close personal relationships. Indeed, for the late-19th-century Finnish women as for women elsewhere, correspondence provided an arena in which notions of friendship and longing could be both interpreted and reproduced. It goes without saying that many of these intimate friendships would deserve a queer reading. Because we have no evidence of the lesbian nature of the relationships discussed here, we will make no such assertion. It must be mentioned, however, that it was considered customary for female teachers to live together to preserve decency.4 Temporariness characterizes the longing examined in this chapter. It can be described as a strong desire for a missing friend that could be felt very physically, as if something were out of place. The longing women were not necessarily lonely, nor alone. Many of the women had their other friends and family around them whenever they wanted. The loneliness they felt was generated from the feelings the absence of a friend created. The loneliness explored here was a space or a moment in time without a certain friend. It can be further argued that the longing experienced by the late-19th-century Finnish women was in part enhanced by the combined effect of the societal demands imposed on womanhood. As women were accustomed to a strong sense of community and being constantly in service of others, it is no exaggeration to claim that they did not easily develop tolerance for being alone.5 For a woman dedicated to her adored friend, long separation was an upheaval that plunged everyday life off its beaten track. Thus, it cannot be denied that the women studied here were capable of suffering loneliness. Memory was for them a tool to alleviate their pain. In recent decades, memory has been a matter of intense scholarship; for example, Pierra Nora’s concept lieux de mémoire has been useful to explore collective memory.6 For the purposes of this chapter, individual memory is more central. To follow historian Dmitri Nikulin, it is the explicit or declarative memory of the longing friend that is in play. Nikulin writes, A widely accepted division of memory is that between the explicit (or declarative) and the implicit (or procedural), which parallels the distinction between thought and action. Within declarative memory, one distinguishes episodic memory of events of personal (‘autobiographical’) experience from semantic memory, which is the memory of facts and stands for knowledge that does not depend on a particular context or a concrete event in one’s life.7 Hence, for the purposes of the present chapter, memory of autobiographical experience, episodic memory, is an analytical tool. A friend connects the memory of experience to ‘those things, names and events that can be remembered’.8 To remember we need techniques of memory, memorization and ‘putting the remembered in imaginary loci’. Nikulin reminds us that this was well known and widely practiced in antiquity . . . putting an image representing the memorized thing in an imaginary place or location in a house, street, shelf or the like, in a certain order that corresponds to the order of things, events, or words to be memorized.9 405

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Plato’s concept of anamnesis, recollection, is also useful.10 Recollection is needed because ‘in order to be preserved, memory needs to be reproduced’.11 To examine the process of recollection, this chapter separates the memory practices used by the 19th-century women in their letters into four categories. The frst of them is letter-writing itself; the second mediated contacts with the longed-for person; the third is faith, dreams and astral ways; and the fourth category is emotional objects. We will explore these in order, beginning with letter-writing itself.

Correspondence as a Memory Practice The lifelong friendship between a noblewoman12 Augusta Hisinger (1841–1902) and a judge’s daughter Mimmi Meinander (1838–1918) began when they, as children, studied at the same boarding school in Borgå (Porvoo).13 In their youth, their friendship was fuelled by a lively correspondence and frequent visits. Their frst major separation occurred in the late 1860s when Hisinger went on a study trip to continental Europe and then settled in Helsingfors (Helsinki). Both women stayed unmarried and ran their own schools for small children. Their professions made visits possible only during the holidays.14 For Alma Husberg (1850–1905) and Minna Forss, née Rancken (1848–1931), teaching was both the reason for their separation and the vocation that originally brought them together. They became close during their studies at the teacher-seminary in Ekenäs (Tammisaari), and after they both graduated in 1875, they maintained their friendship through letter-writing. Husberg was a teacher in her hometown, Lovisa (Loviisa), and Forss in Nykarleby (Uusikaarlepyy) and Helsingfors.15 Charlotte Wirzenius (1852–1934) and Jenny Nordgren née Jusélius (1853–1933) befriended each other as students in Heurlin’s school for girls in Åbo (Turku). Their correspondence began in earnest after Nordgren concluded her studies and returned to Björneborg (Pori), where she worked as a teacher until she married a wealthy bank manager. Her friend Charlotte Wirzenius, a daughter of a judge, was orphaned at a young age. As with many other women in this study, she was one of the early graduates of the seminary in Ekenäs and made her life’s work as a teacher.16 Vera Hjelt (1857−1947) held a multitude of professional roles in her life; she, too, was an Ekenäs educated teacher. The recipient of Hjelt’s letters, Cecilia ‘Cely’ Mechelin (1866–1950), was the only child of senator Leo Mechelin who spent much of her time taking care of her ailing parents and thus travelled much around Europe. Hjelt and Mechelin both lived in Helsingfors and corresponded only when travelling.17 At the end of the 19th century, many practices of remembering were shared across the Western world. One of the most important was the active need to record daily life in letters, diaries, and memoirs. Even the most mundane memories were considered important enough to be captured and preserved for posterity.18 As elsewhere in Europe, correspondence was a fundamental part of the lifestyles of the Finnish middle and upper classes. The responsibility for writing letters to maintain families’ social networks was mostly left under women’s purview. Letters were still written and read collectively, but as the century progressed, letter-writing became more and more private and intimate.19 When friends rarely met each other, letters were crucial to the survival of the relationship. Even when the friends’ separation was temporary, letters brought comfort and reminded both parties of the joy of future reunion.20 This is why the present study not only uses letters as sources but also studies them and their writing as memory practice. Letters served as a space where feelings of longing and loneliness could be grappled with concretely. After the death of her only sister Bertha, young Charlotte Wirzenius felt bereft and saw her future bleak. Despite the presence of many other friends, she missed her school friend Jenny Nordgren, who now lived in a different town. In her letters, Wirzenius refected on the future plans they had made together and imagined how wonderful it would be to spend time together 406

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again.21 The longing Wirzenius felt for her friend was especially emphatic when she noticed the lack of her sister Bertha’s constant presence:‘You know, when I sit here alone in the evenings, and the storm howls outside, it becomes so awful and empty around me, and though no one, no one can ever become what Bertha was to me, it would be fun to have a human being to talk to’.22 Wirzenius’ sorrow for her sister and her yearning for her friend became intertwined, and corresponding seemed to alleviate the pain of both’. At least from early modern correspondence onwards, much space in letters has been given to metatext, to comparing notes of sending and receiving letters.23 In Vera Hjelt’s case, this was also a way of remembering the friend. She gave much attention to longing for hearing from Cely Mechelin and, when she fnally received a letter, to the immense joy she felt to be united with her friend in this way. Once Hjelt wrote that she was like a faithful dog, running along tracks to fnd the lost master, waiting, and never losing hope.24 On another occasion, she wrote that after a letter from Mechelin had arrived she had walked around all day with the letter in her pocket. In her typical humorous way, she commented that she now had the very emancipated manner of walking with a hand in one’s pocket (Figure 27.1, 27.2).25

Figure 27.1 Vera Hjelt (1857–1947). Source: Helsinki City Museum.

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Figure 27.2 Cely (Cecilia) Mechelin (1866–1950), 1890. Source: Helsinki City Museum.

Letter-writing was conventionally interpreted as socializing and conversing with the letter’s recipient.26 Consequently, the importance of immediacy was emphasized in writing. Hjelt made a conscious effort to describe to Cely Mechelin the events that were taking place around her at the very moment she was writing. This was to make Mechelin part of the cosy homely activities, but also to bring Cely into those activities. Hjelt wrote about Anna shouting her greetings and Fanny popping in to say hello.27 These women shared a home with her. The feeling of being part of loved ones’ activities essentially eased longing. Historian Anne Ollila has written about the Finnish Hällström family who sat down to write letters together every Saturday. Thus, when the daughters were travelling, they knew how to connect with their family through the ritual of simultaneous writing. Sharing experiences through writing about them in their letters they increased the cohesion of their family.28 Timing was also of essence. Through letter-writing, women sought to ensure that separated friends were able to be present in each other’s thoughts at the right time. In her letter, Alma Husberg, a recent graduate of the Ekenäs seminary, wanted to let her friend Minna Forss

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know the most opportune time for a meeting of their minds. She wrote that if everything went well, she was going to meet three of their friends on the coming Sunday: ‘think of us at that time, although our thoughts certainly always are with all of our beloved much-missed friends’.29 Similarly, Vera Hjelt wanted to ensure that Cely Mechelin knew that, despite her absence, their group of friends was going to celebrate Cely’s name day in the usual way during the morning coffee with the usual name day pastries.30 Even if Hjelt’s congratulatory letter would not reach her in time, she felt both Cely and the group would in this way join in the celebration, regardless of the distance. Although somewhat illusory, letters excelled as tools for cutting distances, diminishing the space between friends when they were separated. Much effort, as a result, was put into describing certain events to build up a sense of simultaneousness and acuteness.

Mediated Contacts as Memory Practice While letter-writing brought great comfort to long-distance friends, it was not necessarily enough to alleviate their deep longing. Instead, many women strove to enshrine the memory of their friends through intentional and determined acts of recollection.31 In their quest for remembrance, they attached value to various practices that can be called mediated contacts. A wide variety of objects or persons could be considered relevant, but the most important uniting factor was that they needed to have a signifcance in the absent friends’ lives. Contacts with a friend’s family members, or other blood relatives or friends, were helpful. This was the case, for example, with Alma Husberg who found much solace in the conversations she had by chance when she was on her way through the city of Borgå, where she visited an old seminary friend, Julia Winter, whom she had not seen in a very long time. To her surprise, Husberg also met Minna Forss’ young fancé there. Husberg found the visit wonderful in itself but explained in her letter to Forss that to hear her friend’s fancé talk about her added value to the meeting, as it helped Husberg cherish the memory of her dear friend.32 In friends’ absence, the buildings, places and activities related to the friends’ life carried similarly important meanings and acted as substitutes for the much-missed friend. A room could recall their presence. As a means of keeping the memory of a longed-for friend fresh, it was useful to fll a space with them. To accomplish this, Vera Hjelt would talk quietly to her absent friend Cely and read her letters repeatedly both aloud and silently.33 She would go to the room where Cely had last been, as if a trace of her was indeed still there. In August 1901, when Cely Mechelin left Bromarv, where their group of friends had spent some joyful summer weeks, she left a huge void. Hjelt wrote that everyone had tried to fll it in their own ways. She herself sought solitude: When the horse took you, I hurried in. I resisted the invitation of the neighbours to have a cup of coffee with them. Instead, I sat on the red fowered couch on the veranda and contemplated in a warm and lively way of my darling Cely for an hour and a half until the maid brought me a cup of coffee.—Dearest Fanny was so happy that you had stayed in her room as she felt there was a trace of you in there left. This is what we often think when we go into that room.34 In October 1901, Hjelt wrote that she had been trying to fnd ways to alleviate her longing for Cely, given the long time she was spending in Stockholm. For this reason, she had visited Mechelin’s grandmother’s grave and had gone to see the dark windows of Mechelin’s

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empty apartment in Helsingfors.35 A month later, she wrote that watching steamships in the harbour served as a way to meditate on Mechelin’s absence. As the steamers were visible through her apartment windows, she could watch the ships from home. Sometimes she even used a pair of binoculars. The ships had a dual meaning—they had taken her friend away but would also someday return her.36 She also attached much importance to the places connected to Mechelin’s charity work with the blind. Mechelin, a typical only child of her high social class and time, dedicated her life not only to the well-being of her parents but also to philanthropic work. In her letters, Hjelt mentioned that she had decided to write an article for her Christmas magazine (Julhälsning) about the activities of blind people.37 A bit later she and Anna Herzberg also visited the home for the blind people38 that Mechelin had founded to leave a Braille version of a text translated by Herzberg, and noted that in there everything reminded her of Cely.39 Perhaps surprisingly, learning English was a similar exercise in remembering, for Mechelin had taught Hjelt English in the past. Hjelt wrote, ‘You cannot imagine how intensively I think of you when I study English. For me it is a memory of happier times. I have decided I will not let this dear memory fade.’40 These less happy times referred not only to the friend’s absence but also to the dire political situation in Finland, where everyone was on edge, wary of what they considered oppressive Russifcation. The Mechelins were in a precarious situation in leading the opposition to the emperor and defying censorship; sympathetic to the cause but less politically active, Hjelt conveyed subdued messages of the political climate at home and her personal sadness caused by her friend’s absence in her letters. However, as the letters indicate, the memory practices employed by the 19th-century women did not necessarily always fall within the scope of intentional memory, and thus, the link between a mediated contact and a much-missed friend could be elusive. Sometimes a tenuous situational resemblance was enough to prompt an act of remembrance. While on a holiday trip in the summer of 1875, Alma Husberg wrote to Minna Forss: Do you know that here lives a pastor Forstadius, whose family life in my opinion is very similar to your childhood home. I always think of you every time I am with them. It is, of course, my imagination that sets up this resemblance, but it is my pleasure to do so.41 As this quotation illustrates, not all mediated contacts began deliberately. Instead, they could come into being as a result of involuntary memory.42 Husberg had most likely never visited the home of her friend’s childhood, but the mental image of a lively parsonage that the Ranckens had inhabited was enough to delight her and alleviate the sorrow of their long separation. The similarity probably caught Husberg’s eye, especially because the recent graduation and forthcoming entry into working life made the reunion with her seminary friends uncertain.

Faith, Dreams and Astral Ways as Memory Practices In the 19th century, women who missed their loved ones commonly attempted to fnd solace in the spiritual realm. For example, Margaret Fuller, an American journalist and author, envisioned that the distance between her and the man she loved could be pierced with telepathy and angelic intervention.43 Similarly, women in the Grand Duchy of Finland used the power of their

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imaginations and faith to cope with separation from their friends. Although secularization began to increase in Finnish society towards the end of the century, religion still played a key role in women’s lives as a source of comfort and support—and as elsewhere, in Finland, too, it took new forms.44 Both men and women considered true friendship an irreplaceable and rare gift from God which needed to be tended carefully. So believed, for example, Augusta Hisinger, who, in her old age, described friendship as a compensation that she had received from God for the family members she had lost too early.45 Western ideas of friendship were so intertwined with Christian beliefs that a friend’s love could be perceived as a type of grace and prayer as a way of deep bonding.46 Many Finnish epistles of the period included heartfelt wishes that a distant friend would remember to pray on behalf of the letter writer. For example, in July 1875, Alma Husberg wrote wistfully of her hope that her ‘Beloved Minna’ would sometimes remember Husberg in her prayers. She expressed how reassuring it would be to know that she had a friend who would pray for her even when her own strength was running dry.47 Prayer could thus be understood as a joint activity with the power to connect the minds of the separated friends and even ensure that they had a regular chance to reminisce about each other simultaneously—for example, during their evening or Sunday mass prayers. Vera Hjelt was a Theosophist and therefore considered dreams and perhaps even astral ways a viable way of being in contact with her friend Cely Mechelin.48 The descriptions of these devices were accompanied with humour as there are hints that Mechelin was not always equally enthusiastic about Hjelt’s esoteric views. In 1899, Hjelt wrote how much she missed Mechelin and regretted that her clairvoyance did not reach beyond the Tiroler Alps—where the friend was travelling. She noted that she had dreamt of Mechelin and her family, and the vision had made her worry that they were not well.49 However, not all dreams caused worry. In November 1901, she had dreamt how a large and beautiful bird had wrapped its wings around Mechelin and embraced her repeatedly. Hjelt had contemplated how well Mechelin deserved this act of love.50 In July 1900, she was delighted to receive Cely’s letter, and wrote that ‘when you learn to read in astral light, you will see how I kiss the letter and am so, so happy!’51 In 1901, when she was sitting in the steamship Torneå returning from Sweden, she wrote that Cely was more dear to her than ever. When she wrote, a drop of ink fell onto the paper. She considered the drop as an oracle answer that Vera’s confessions of her feelings were welcome to Cely.52 When separated, close friends described numerous imagined ways to cross the long physical distances between them. This was not only specifc to women—men also wrote how they could almost feel their missing friends’ presence near them.53 Many letters contained fantasies of fying or of instant transfers. For example, in 1879 Alma Husberg wrote to Minna Forss that if she could transfer her body directly into her friend’s chamber, she would do it most gladly.54 Similarly, writing from her terminally ill little sister’s sickbed in 1871, Charlotte Wirzenius imagined a way to meet her school friend Jenny Nordgren:‘Do you know how willingly I would be a little bird so I could fy there and see you at your home, but I would like to be invisible so you wouldn’t notice me.’55 This fight of fancy was prompted both by the yearning for an absent friend and by the fatigue and pain caused by the hopeless state of an ill sister. In her helplessness, Wirzenius longed for a moment’s reprieve from the burdens she was carrying. Even for a moment, she wished to be free as a bird and fnd peace in the presence of her beloved friend. The imagined invisibility was to ensure that Wirzenius could have seen her friend at home in her most relaxed state—stripped of any needless social pretences (Figure 27.3).

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Figure 27.3 Jenny Nordgren née Jusélius (1853–1933), 1894, carte de visit. Source: Courtesy of Åbo Akademi University Library.

Emotional Objects as Memory Practices Objects great and small could also serve as reminders of the tenderness between close friends and relieve the pain of a long parting. These so-called emotional objects, the fourth category in memory practices discussed here, gathered a manifold of emotional meanings and were used to create, negotiate and strengthen interpersonal relationships. According to Martin Lyons, love letters, locks of hair or similar items could become ‘fetish-objects’ that were caressed, kissed and, as we saw with Hjelt keeping Mechelin’s letter in her pocket, carried around on one’s person.56 Such emotional strategies were not common only in heterosexual relationships, but also in intimate female friendships. During major life changes, emotional objects provided feelings of security and happiness. After moving to her frst own home in Helsingfors, Augusta Hisinger hoped to keep her dear childhood friend Mimmi Meinander close to her heart. One remedy for her longing appeared in a form of a lamp mat which Meinander had woven and gifted to her. ‘That you knitted in a lot of kind thoughts and shared memories—that I know, and it seems as if my little lamp shines brighter whenever it stands on this mat’, wrote grateful Hisinger in December 1870.57 For Hisinger, it was important to furnish her new home with objects which reminded her of one the most important friendships in her life. With the power of shared memories, her new home seemed brighter and more comfortable. 412

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Emotional objects were not only reminders of the feelings pertaining to friendship, as they could also represent a much-missed friend herself.58 A good example was a pen that Cely Mechelin gifted to Vera Hjelt sometime in the spring of 1902. Hjelt went so far as to call the pen Cely and noted that59 at these times when I have written so much, I have such great delight in the swan pen. You don’t know how often I thank you for it. Just to think that you have given me two such things as Annie Besant’s portrait and the pen. I look at the portrait daily with seriousness and warmth, and the pen I have nearly always in my hand. I don’t have any other things to which I devote myself to as to these!60 The importance of an emotional object was naturally emphasized when friends were separated from each other.61 In separation overfowing affection for a friend needed to be channelled in a new way—devotion to an object could be seen as devotion to a friend. Hjelt’s devotion to the pen was bodily—when holding the pen, she embraced her friend. Her closeness was further enhanced when she could look at Cely in a photograph. Indeed, photos were extremely important and certainly perhaps the most common emotional objects once photography became common. Compared to paintings, they were quick to prepare and less costly. Photographs were also often considered to be lifelikenesses. When Hjelt received new photographs of her friend and her adored parents, she promised to buy a triple frame for the pictures and set the frame up on her desk so that her eyes would then be able to rest on that esteemed and beloved group.62 She clearly did what she promised and later wrote, typically again speaking to her friend in the third person, ‘here I sit and watch Cely’s photograph, and wink at her at times. One has to have some imagination, without it one would be completely poor!’63 Elizabeth Edwards points to photographs’ ‘relationship with their referent, their reality effect and their irreducible pastness, photographs impose themselves on memory’.64 As if to emphasize the meaning of photographs as emotional objects, Hjelt returned to the triple photos in the following letter, and wrote that looking at Cely’s father, Leo Mechelin, made her feel strong, looking at her mother Alexandra Mechelin made her feel noble, and looking at Cely made her feel warm.65 Interestingly, she wrote that she wanted a new photo of Cely for Christmas. Cely was urged to tell the photographer that she must face the camera: ‘I like portraits in which the sitter looks at me, not shows coiffure’.66 This seems to suggest that Hjelt also wanted to keep up with the appearance of the friend, to keep her own remembrance of her realistic as time passed. For Edwards, photographs are perhaps the most ubiquitous and insistent focus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century memory. The photograph infuses almost all levels of memory, even those of which it is not directly part. It constitutes a meta-value of memory construction, its tentacles spread out, blurring and constructing memory in its own insistent image.67 Photographs flled up the empty space that a friend’s absence had created. While examining Naemi Ingman’s diary entries from 1879, Ollila has observed how photographs of dear relatives were put in the place of absent loved ones on the Christmas Eve dinner table. The pictures were present for viewing purposes only, but it could still be imagined that the absent ones participated in the Christmas party and were present through their pictures.68 As Edwards 413

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posits, ‘photographs express a desire for memory and the act of keeping a photograph is, like other souvenirs, an act of faith in the future’.69 In Hjelt’s thinking, this was expressly present as well. The distance to the friend, the narrow waters between Sweden and Finland, would soon carry her friend back.

Conclusions This chapter has discussed the multivalent experience of loneliness by examining the ways in which the late 19th-century women made their friends present in their lives regardless of their physical absence. The women, who wrote the letters analysed here, were mostly, in Finnish terms, early women professionals, teachers who had the means to support themselves and thus to mould their lives to the direction of their own choosing. They made a myriad of different life choices which infuenced their friendships. However, the freedom of steering one’s own destiny did not always guarantee the possibility of staying corporally present in a friend’s life. In addition to the traditional restrictions created by marriage and travel, entering the workforce brought with it its own unique challenges. The friendships studied in this chapter were of signifcant length which served to strengthen the emotional ties between the friends—and made loneliness, being without the friend, certainly even more intense. The long duration of the friendships also helps when we ponder whether the expressions of longing were mere rhetoric. They were not: even if they followed their culture’s customary patterns and rhetoric guidelines and moved within the allowed scale of feeling and intimacy, they found personal, intimate and witty expressions for their longing. Loneliness and longing for an absent friend are recurrent themes in the correspondence of the women studied. The letters convey a wealth of memory practices to which the women resorted both in order to alleviate their loneliness and to surpass it. Correspondence itself served as a link, even though it sometimes took days to reach the travelling friend. Correspondence was an important means to alleviate the pain of longing. The culture of friendship was transnational and widely shared in the Western world—for example, through literature. In many ways, the techniques of memory the women revealed in their letters were tangible. As Nikulin reminds us, a practice known from the antiquity,‘putting an image representing the memorized thing in an imaginary place or location’ is exactly what these women did. Through this ancient idea it becomes clear that convention is a tool for expression, not a prison. Instead of looking into the friend’s eyes, the women would look into the eyes of a friend in a photograph and strengthen their friendship regardless of the physical distance between them. Similarly, there were memorabilia, emotional objects, to remember friends by and physical spaces where the friends’ presence had left its marks, be these concrete or imaginary, engendering a forceful emotional spatiality to work against loneliness. There were the rooms where the friends had slept, the apartment buildings in which they lived, and the friends’ relatives or even people who just happened to remind them of their friends. As this chapter has shown, absence did not necessarily need to mean lack of intimacy even though it caused loneliness. It is rather that absence required intimacy to change its forms. In a way, mediated intimacy, such as staring at portraits and holding a pen, brought back the desired state of presence even though it was an illusion and strengthened friendship in situations where it otherwise would have been in danger of dissolving. In this way, loneliness was a means to bring oneself closer to the absent friend, create a space where one could interact with memories and perhaps use various objects to narrow the geographical gap between friends. 414

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Notes * This chapter is based on the conference presentation by MK at the ESSHC Belfast 2018; the overall conception and the case of Vera Hjelt originates from that paper and her work. MV has further developed the ideas and brought the other pairs of friends into the discussion. 1 Eva Helen Ulvros, Fruar och mamseller: Kvinnorna inom sydsvensk borgerlighet 1790–1870 (Lund: Historiska Media, 1996), 195, 209; Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 39–40. 2 Kaarlo Wirilander, Herrasväkeä. Suomen säätyläistö 1721–1870 (Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura, 1974), 395–8; Irma Sulkunen, ‘The Mobilisation of Women and the Birth of Civil Society’, in The Lady with the Bow: The Story of Finnish Women, ed. Merja Manninen and Päivi Setälä, trans. Michael Wynne-Ellis (Helsinki: Otava 1990), 42–53; Hanna Elomaa,‘Suomi 1800-luvun loppupuolella’, in Rakkautta, ihanteita ja todellisuutta: Retkiä suomalaiseen mikrohistoriaan, ed. Katriina Mäkinen and Leena Rossi (Turku: Turun yliopisto, 1996), 15–21. 3 Anne Ollila, Jalo velvollisuus.Virkanaisena 1800-luvun lopun Suomessa (Helsinki: SKS, 2000), 123–6. 4 Mimmi Meinander’s collection, vol 1, Hisinger to Meinander, Wasa, 25 Mar. 1867, Åbo Akademi University Library (ÅAUL), Manuscript Collections (MC); Ollila, Jalo velvollisuus, 133–5, 199–28; Vesa Vares, Helmi Krohn 1871–1913. Naisen velvollisuusetiikka ja yksilön ratkaisu (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 2005), 73–5; Anu Lahtinen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen and Kaisa Vehkalahti,‘Kirjeiden uusi tuleminen’, in Kirjeet ja historiantutkimus, ed. Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Anu Lahtinen and Kirsi VainioKorhonen (Helsinki: SKS, 2011), 9–27 (15–16); Reetta Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi: Aate, tunteet ja sukupuoli Tengströmin perheessä 1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 2019), 25–6, 37, 195–201. For a queer reading for Vera Hjelt’s friendships, among others, Rita Paqvalen, Queera minnen. Essäer om tystnad, längtan och motstånd (Helsingfors: Schildts & Söderströms, 2021). 5 Ollila, Jalo velvollisuus, 104–13. 6 Dmitri Nikulin, ‘Introduction’, in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 14–15. 7 Ibid., 5–6. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Dmitri Nikulin,‘Memory in Ancient Philosophy’, in Memory, ed. Nikulin, 35–84 (35–6). 10 Ibid., 44. 11 Ibid., 59. 12 In the Finnish context, nobility refers to the wide class of nobles, not only the high aristocracy. The nobles had their privileges and served as an estate at the Diet. 13 Since the women studied here were Swedish-speaking, Swedish placenames are used throughout, and when mentioned for the frst time, the Finnish equivalent, if one exists, is given in brackets. Bromarv and Viitasaari are written in their modernized form. 14 ÅAUL, MC, Mimmi Meinander’s collection, vol. 1, Augusta Hisinger to Mimmi Meinander, Lausanne 1869; Helsingfors 8 Oct. 1870; vol. 2, Biographical note 1 and 2. The envelope for the notes; ‘Mimmi Meinander’, Borgåbladet, 5 Sept. 1918, no 73; Mia Grönstrand, W.R.B.G.: Walter Runeberg: elämä ja taide (Norderstedt: BoD-Books on Demand, 2021), 142. 15 Gunnar Forsander, Ekenäs seminarium: Matrikel 1871–1971 (Ekenäs: Ekenäs seminarium, 1971), 80, 129; Henrika Zilliacus-Tikkanen, När könet började skriva. Kvinnor i fnländsk press 1771–1900 (Helsingfors: Finska vetenskaps-societeten 2005), 148–54; Miira Vuoksenranta, ‘Ystävyys kuin virvatuli—löystyvät ystävyyden siteet entisten Tammisaaren seminaarilaisten kirjeissä 1870-luvulla’, Ennen ja Nyt: Historian tietosanomat 21, no. 1 (2021): 22–43 (25). 16 Göta Tegengren, ‘Matrikel över lärare och elever i Heurlinska skolan i Åbo’, in Heurlinska skolan i åbo, en minnesskrift: 1961 (Åbo: Heurlinska skolan, 1962), 105–315 (209, 311); Forsander, Ekenäs seminarium, 164. 17 Marjo Kaartinen,‘Vera Hjelt and the Calling of Theosophical Universal Work, 1894–1904’, Approaching Religion 1 (2018): 17–30. 18 Tutta Palin, ‘Kuvia menneisyydestä. Muistojen tuottamisesta 1800-luvun loppupuolen säätyläiskulttuurissa’, in Aina uusi muisto: Kirjoituksia menneen elämisestä meissä, ed. Katarina Eskola and Eeva Peltonen (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, 1997), 254–5; Anne Ollila, Aika ja elämä. Aikakäsitys 1800-luvun lopussa (Helsinki: SKS, 2000), 64. 19 Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Kirjoittaen maailmassa. Krohnin sisaret ja kirjallinen elämä (Helsinki: SKS, 2006), 64–5; Ulvros, Fruar och mamseller, 23–8.

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Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta 20 Ollila, Aika ja elämä, 58–9. 21 ÅAUL, MC, Jenny Nordgren’s collection, Charlotte Wirzenius to Jenny Nordgren, Åbo, 23 Oct. 1872; Åbo, 21 Jan. 1873. 22 ÅAUL, MC, Jenny Nordgren’s collection, Wirzenius to Nordgren, Åbo, 21 Jan. 1873. 23 Ulvros, Fruar och mamseller, 27–8; Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen,‘Intertextual Networks in the Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5, no. 2 (2004): 255–69. 24 The National Archives of Finland (NA), Cely Mechelin’s Collection, Box 3, Vera Hjelt’s letter to Cely Mechelin, Helsingfors, 24 Nov. 1901 and Bromarv, 13 Aug. 1899. All Hjelt’s letters referred to are from this collection, Box 3. 25 Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors 10 Nov. 1901. 26 Ollila, Aika ja elämä, 20–1. 27 Hjelt to Mechelin, [Bromarv] Favorita, 16 June 1901. 28 Ollila, Aika ja elämä, 20–2; Kai Häggman, Perheen vuosisata. Perheen ihanne ja sivistyneistön elämäntapa 1800-luvun Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1994). 29 ÅAUL, MC, Rancken, släkten, vol 1, Alma Husberg to Minna Forss, Lovisa, 31 Oct. 1875. 30 Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors, 17 Nov. 1901. 31 Hanna Elomaa, Idylliä etsimässä: Identifkaatiot ja itseymmärrys tammisaarelaisessa sivistyneistöperheessä 1880-luvulta 1930-luvulle (Turku: k&h, 2006), 234–6. See also Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). 32 ÅAUL, MC, Rancken, släkten, vol 1, Husberg to Forss, Lovisa, 16 Feb. 1880. 33 Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors, 9 Dec. 1901. 34 Ibid., [Bromarv] Favorita, 23 Aug. 1901. 35 Ibid., Helsingfors, 26 Oct. 1901. 36 Ibid., 3 Nov. 1901. 37 Ibid., 26 Oct. 1901. 38 This institution still carries her name, as it functions as Celia, a national centre for accessible literature and publishing in Finland of the Ministry of Education and Culture. 39 Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors, 24 Nov. 1901. 40 Ibid., 28 Sept. 1904. 41 ÅAUL, MC, Rancken, släkten, vol 1, Husberg to Forss, Viitasaari, 19 July 1875. 42 For example, Palin, Kuvia menneisyydestä, 258–9; Ollila, Aika ja elämä, 76–7. 43 William Merrill Decker, ‘Longing in Long-Distance Letters: Nineteenth Century and Now’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016), 171–84 (173). 44 Ollila, Jalo velvollisuus, 147. 45 Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 199; ÅAUL, MC, Mimmi Meinander’s collection, vol 1, Hisinger to Meinander and Emilia Mallén, undated. 46 Marcus, Between Women, 62–6. 47 ÅAUL, MC, Rancken, släkten, vol 1, Husberg to Forss, Viitasaari, 19 July 1875. 48 Kaartinen,‘Vera Hjelt’, 17–30. 49 Hjelt to Mechelin, Bromarv, 7 Aug. 1899. 50 Ibid., Helsingfors, 10 Nov. 1901. 51 Ibid., Bromarv, 6 July 1900. 52 Ibid.,‘Out on the Blue Waves’, 13 June 1901. 53 Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 197–8. 54 ÅAUL, MC, Rancken, släkten, vol. 1, Husberg to Forss, Saturday evening, 4 Oct. 1879. 55 ÅAUL, MC, Jenny Nordgren’s collection, Wirzenius to Nordgren, Åbo, 9 June 1871. 56 Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 179; Heini Hakosalo, ‘Tubipommi ja rautlasi: emotionaalisia esineitä 1900-luvun alkupuolen suomalaisissa tuberkuloosiparantoloissa’, Historiallinen aikakauskirja 114, no. 2 (2016): 165–76 (167); Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 47. 57 ÅAUL, MC, Mimmi Meinander’s collection, vol 1, Hisinger to Meinander, Helsingfors, 9 Dec. 1870. 58 For example, Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 47. 59 Hjelt to Mechelin, Bad Neuenahr, 27 May 1902. 60 Ibid., Bromarv, 1 Aug. 1902. In the next letter, she writes that there has been a terrible accident: the pen fell and broke. She will send it to Stockholm (to Charlotte Busch) the next day to be fxed. Hjelt to Mechelin, Bromarv, 12 Aug. 1902.

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‘There Is a Trace of You in the Air of That Room’ 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 47. Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors, 26 Oct. 1901. Ibid., 17 Nov. 1901. Elizabeth Edwards,‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 221–36 (222). Hjelt to Mechelin, Helsingfors, 24 Nov. 1901. Ibid. Edwards,‘Photographs’, 221. Ollila, Aika ja elämä, 64–5. Edwards,‘Photographs’, 222.

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28 ‘ONE OF MY OWN KIND’ Jessie Currie’s Experience of Loneliness in British Central Africa, 1891–1894 Julia M. Wells

Loneliness was a defning experience for women who migrated to Britain’s African colonies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reading memoirs of the period, few emotions come up more often than loneliness. Tales of solitude, remoteness, alienation and intense homesickness pervade British women’s writing from Africa. One such woman was Jessie Monteath Currie (c. 1865—?), who travelled to British Central Africa in 1892 to join her husband on a remote mission station at Mount Mulanje. Her 1920 memoir, The Hill of Good-Bye: The Story of a Solitary White Woman’s Life in Central Africa, vividly describes her years in Africa, including the intense loneliness she experienced during her time on the mission. Jessie Monteath was born in Dunblane, around 1865. Little is known of her early life; her father, John Monteath, was a draper and both her parents had passed away by 1891. On 20 April 1891, at age 26, she married Adam Currie in Dunblane.1 The Reverend Currie was born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1865 and was educated at Edinburgh University. From 1891 until 1894, Revd Currie was stationed as a Church of Scotland missionary at Mount Mulanje in the British Central Africa Protectorate (later Malawi). Revd Currie travelled to the mission station just a fortnight after his marriage; his wife joined him the following year (Figure 28.1). They remained in Africa until 1894, when they returned to Britain following a violent uprising at Mount Mulanje.2 After returning to Scotland, Revd Currie became minister of North Parish Greenock in 1898 and passed away in 1951.3 Jessie Currie authored several books in quick succession, all focused on Africa: With Pole and Paddle down the Shire and Zambesi (1918), The Hill of Good-Bye (1920) and The Hour of Splendour (1922). It is not known what happened to her after 1922. The Curries arrived at Mount Mulanje at a moment of transition, just as Britain was seizing control in the region. The British Central Africa Protectorate had been established in the early 1890s, and while missions had a longer presence in the region, they were still relatively recent—the frst permanent mission (Livingstonia Mission) had only been founded in 1875.4 In the Mount Mulanje area, Currie dwelled in what we might term a colonial liminal space: one of signifcant yet limited power, negotiated and uncertain. Unlike many women’s colonial memoirs, which typically centre on later periods, Currie did not live within an established and policed colonial state.5 Similarly, many of the typical trappings of colonial settler life and authority, such as elaborate etiquette rituals and social clubs, were not fully present due to the early period and the sparse European settlement. 418

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-32

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Figure 28.1 Revd Currie and local children, Mulanje, Malawi, c. 1893. Acc.7548/F/28, International Mission Photography Archive, c. 1860–1960, National Library of Scotland.

The memoirs and travel writings of women around the British Empire have received increasing attention from historians. They have formed the basis of substantial historical studies, such as in the works of Gillian Whitlock, Patricia Lorcin, Alison Blunt, Gillian Rose, Sara Mills, Mary Louise Pratt, Maria Frawley and Catherine Barnes Stevenson.6 They reveal a fascinating yet complex historical record that offers a far more intimate perspective on domestic life in Britain’s colonies than do offcial sources. Through such sources, these women come alive as complex, independent actors rather than as extensions of their husbands. Memoirs and travel writings cannot be separated from their role within their colonial context. Many of the common tropes that appear in settler memoirs—for instance, childlike Africans, unoccupied land—directly support the colonial project. As Alejandro Gómez writes,‘evocations of the past, as argued in the pioneering work of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1952), would not take place unless there were needs in the present that justify it.’7 Settler women’s memoirs helped to build and maintain the illusion of benevolent colonialism. Discussions of loneliness within these memoirs cannot be viewed as politically neutral either—settler women are typically 419

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framed as ‘solitary’ and ‘alone’, vanishing the local people from the narrative. They centre the author’s suffering and sacrifce while the real suffering of colonialism (that of the colonized) goes unmentioned. As she was a missionary wife, Currie’s work is also situated within a genre of missionary women’s writings. As Karen Vallgårda notes, there is still scholarly debate over to what degree missionaries acted as ‘evangelists of empire’.8 However, it is clear that missionary writings fed into wider imperial discourses, and indeed, these sorts of publications were a way in which women engaged with empire.9 Jane Haggis and Margaret Allen, for example, found that British Protestant women’s missionary publications about India helped ‘construct “emotional communities” of religion that worked to imbricate Indian and British women into imperial structures of feeling that are raced, classed and gendered.’10 Emily Manktelow’s work illustrates the dual nature of missionary families (like the Curries), who existed both as a family unit and as an institution with a spiritual and political role, and Helga Harnes notes the multiple private and public roles of the missionary wife.11 This chapter focuses on loneliness in Jessie Currie’s The Hill of Good-Bye, using Fay Bound Alberti’s characterization of loneliness as an emotion cluster ‘composed of a wide variety of responses that include fear, anger, resentment, and sorrow’.12 The frst section interrogates the complex meaning of identity and Britishness in a colonial African context. It considers culture shock and the unfamiliar environment, the use of settler rituals to dispel loneliness, and the permanent sense of disconnection created by Currie’s time in Africa. The second section moves to considering Currie’s personal sense of loneliness, exploring her relationships with her husband, other white settlers, the ‘mission girls’ and people from Chief Namonde’s nearby village. For many settlers like Currie, there was a close relationship between bouts of malaria, other illnesses and mental distress. Section 3, ‘embodied loneliness and physical illness’, explores the porous boundary between physical ill-health and loneliness in Britain’s African colonies. The chapter then concludes with a brief discussion of fear and vulnerability in The Hill of Good-Bye. Currie’s experience was entirely her own. Few white women lived on Mount Mulanje at the time; indeed, few lived in the British Central Africa Protectorate. No other settler had her collection of experiences or felt what she felt. However, while her story is unique and personal, it also speaks to a collective experience. There are many common threads between Currie’s experience of loneliness and that found in the memoirs of other British women who settled in African colonies. These women’s experiences in Africa varied greatly, depending on their location, time period, background and personality; nevertheless, a similar sense of geographic and social isolation pervades many of their writings. Loneliness appears frequently in white women’s writings from colonial Africa, often lamenting the distance from family and friends, and—for women living in rural areas—the lack of white society. Women worried in letters, diaries and memoirs about the many unfamiliar dangers, yet at the same time, boredom was also commonly expressed. There is also a thread of grief that runs throughout such memoirs; regardless of their situation, many British women who had migrated to Africa mourned their past lives in Britain. Physical and cultural distance echo through their pages, bringing novelty and exotic interest but also loneliness and sadness. While the specifcs were distinctive to their environments and experiences, the fundamental causes and conditions of their loneliness—the shock of migration and the loss of their familiar culture and networks—were common across countries and time periods. Indeed, the grief, isolation and loneliness of migration are themes that stretches across nations, continents and empires. Jessie Currie’s story exemplifes some of these themes, which are so important for appreciating the full experience of white women in colonial Africa. 420

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Britishness and Identity Most white women who settled in Britain’s African colonies experienced substantial culture shock, which contributed strongly to their feelings of loneliness. The majority of migrants came from Britain’s middle and upper classes, and they struggled to adjust to their new surroundings. When Currie arrived in Chinde, she found herself in ‘Peluchi’s hotel, a bamboo and mud house with a thatched roof ’and had to wash with muddy water.13 Currie found the environment deeply unfamiliar and at times hostile, highlighting the cultural and geographic distance between her new home and Scotland. Her sketches of the landscape around Mount Mulanje are a reminder of how foreign such a place would have been to a young woman from Dunblane (Figure 28.2). Many historians have described settler societies’ elaborate rituals around etiquette, personal care and housekeeping. ‘Keeping up appearances’ was viewed as all-important—not only because it underpinned the idea of white superiority but also for the emotional comfort that it brought to settlers. Maintaining the trappings of British society collapsed the distance between Africa and Britain, helping settlers feel more connected to ‘home’. It was a crucial way of allaying loneliness, feeling part of something larger than themselves and holding onto white identity.14 In Britain’s African colonies, strict codes of behaviour characterized settler society. As Anna Crozier notes, ‘the stress put upon formality in the bush was remarkably persistent, despite its obvious inappropriateness.’15 Crozier describes the careful enactment of social rituals, such as dressing for dinner and elaborate etiquette for greeting new arrivals. Dinners were often formal, served in evening dress with seating according to rank and the best silver, china and glasses. The Hill of Good-Bye is flled with Currie’s dedication to reproducing the niceties of British middle-class existence on the mission station. Not long after arriving, the doctor told her: ‘although we are in Central Africa,you know,it does not do to be careless with one’s appearance’.16

Figure 28.2 Jessie Currie, watercolour sketch of Mt Chiradzulo: The Hill of Good-Bye, facing 87.

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Currie was in agreement, writing that this was ‘very good advice which I followed to the letter’.17 ‘Although we are in Central Africa’, she commented,‘there is no reason that our table should not be home-like.’18 This included white ironed tablecloths, fowers in the napkins, shining glassware and ‘the fnest coffee’.19 This commitment to keeping up the standards of home appears throughout white women’s writings from colonial Africa. In 1922, Fanny Granger had her Bechstein grand piano carried to ‘C’ Mine at Belingwe by ox wagon; Alexandrina Kitto carefully built a sideboard to display the delicate bone china that she had brought from England.20 These objects would have brought an emotional comfort beyond their mere usefulness, providing a symbol of their continued cultural connection with home. Like many settler wives, Currie wrestled with the gulf between the standards expected and resources available. This is a frequent complaint in settler women’s memoirs from the period—most authors would have agreed with Currie’s comment that ‘what made the work harder was the want of proper utensils’.21 Currie describes in detail her diffculties with her oven and laundry. Hylda Richards, a settler in Rhodesia, would have sympathized: in her memoir, she describes becoming so frustrated at a fallen cake that she yelled at her servant and fung the cake out onto the veldt.22 It is likely that such struggles would have fed (and, indeed, exemplifed) the loneliness of settler women. Mundane household objects are important emotional and cultural anchors—material culture plays a profound emotional role for all of us. They are both the backdrop to our lives and also what we use daily to access our most basic needs. An inability to obtain familiar household items and carry out tasks in accustomed ways would have been a constant frustration and a reminder of these women’s geographic and cultural distance from Britain. Rudimentary brick ovens and clothes washed in the stream would have been a tangible symbol of their dislocation. More than any landmark or monument, it is these household objects that would have provided the everyday reminders of how far they were from home. We should not, however, view settler society as a simple transplant of British domestic norms. Circumstances forced Currie and her husband to adjust in many ways and ‘rough it’, from the food they ate to the way they lived.23 Despite dedicated attempts to recreate Britain through material culture and etiquette, such efforts could only ever be partially successful. In fact, they underscored the fundamental otherness of their situation—acting as a comfort but also subtly reinforcing the sense of loneliness and distance. The Curries were living in a particularly remote area early in Britain’s period of African imperialism, so their adaptations to the African context were especially marked. They ate rice, yams and sweet potatoes as their staple vegetables and roasted plantains in hot ashes. On one occasion, they even tried eating zebra. Their home was built with local techniques, using mud, and the church and school was wattle and daub.24 Similar descriptions are found in other early settler recollections. Andrea Cronje, born at the Morgenster Mission in Rhodesia, recalled that she used to make potehaai, a dish of mealie-meal and water, similar to that made by local Africans; the Addis family had mealie-meal porridge for breakfast each morning; local African women taught Emma Leach household skills; the Bodley family used an African remedy for malaria (boiling the bark of the Nkano tree), taught to them by their servant, Old Jack.25 However, even later settler colonial society showed the strong infuence of place. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that the reality of colonialism was ‘a product not just of conquest . . . but of ongoing negotiation bringing together the coloniser and the colonised’. Colonial power, he explains,‘created hybridisation’ and represents ‘a “third space” or “in-between space”, which emerged from a blending of the diverse cultures or traditions of colonial power and the colonised’.26 Even the hyper-British settler identity can be seen as a product of the colony. As Uma

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Kothari notes, ‘the need to maintain some level of stability in these diffcult and isolated environments meant that many invoked English rules, rituals and protocols even more fervently than they would have done at home.’27 Living at Mount Mulanje changed how Currie saw the world. Even her perception of race— one of the most fundamental and potent signifers in colonial life—started to shift. Currie wrote, ‘I was beginning to feel what struck me more later on, when the natives looked no longer black, but we, ourselves seemed a ghastly white.’28 At the beginning of The Hill of Good-Bye, Currie writes, When I sit alone, lost to things external, I see sights that few can . . . It is quite dark. Can I make it light to you? Can I make you see the sights that haunt me, and hear the sounds that thrill me even now? I would that I could.29 It highlights her ongoing sense of being different to others, even when she had returned ‘back home’ to Britain. Although Currie wants to ‘make it light’ to us, to share what she has experienced, she is unable to: the distance and loneliness persist. Currie’s years at Mount Mulanje left her permanently alienated, creating an unassailable divide that separated her from her British counterparts and a gulf that even her prose cannot overcome.

Loneliness in a Crowd From the very frst paragraph, The Hill of Good-Bye is dominated by loneliness. Its primary emotional tone is one of alienation, isolation and a lack of connection. Yet Currie is never alone—throughout the book, she spends essentially no time without people in close proximity. For white female settlers, loneliness was not the same as solitude. It was extremely rare for a white woman to live in British Africa without a husband or family. Settler families typically employed servants (often in large numbers), who had a constant presence within the house. In rural areas, settler homes were often located near African villages. Settler women’s memoirs include frequent descriptions of desperate loneliness; however, white women in African colonies were almost never alone or experiencing actual solitude—it is clear that there is a specifcally colonial meaning and experience of loneliness at play here. When women in Britain’s African colonies wrote about loneliness, they were not hankering for people, but rather for people like them, of the same class and race. Specifcally, they yearned for their families and the company of other white women with a similar background and outlook. Karen Blixen summed up the sentiment in Out of Africa, when she wrote, At times, life on the farm was very lonely, and in the stillness of the evening when the minutes dripped from the clock, life seemed to be dripping out of you with them, just for want of white people to talk to.30 Missionary Mathilde Goy expressed a similar yearning, writing, ‘I wish Christians at home could realise the loneliness of these far-away mission-felds, where the missionary and his wife are the only white persons, the only Christians on the station.’31 When Ada Slatter wrote in a letter home that ‘it’s a lonely life at times, I hardly ever see a woman’, she clearly meant white women—for her, African women did not count.32 This dynamic plays out across the pages of The Hill of Good-Bye. Currie’s desire for white female companionship appears frequently in the text:

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I might have been perfectly contented if a longing had not come into my heart to see a white woman. For over six months, an age it seemed, I had not seen one of my own kind. How nice, I thought, it would be to see a person dressed in pretty clothes with the little ornaments peculiar to the feminine sex. I even fancied that it would be a pleasure to count the buttons down the front of her bodice.33 Missionary Annie Hore wished for the same, writing that she would very much enjoy the companionship and conversation of an Englishwoman.34 Currie eventually realised that she did not just desire a respectable white woman as a companion but wanted an intimate friendship with someone who understood her. Currie met other white women while in Africa but largely failed to connect—despite their shared whiteness, they did not have enough in common to form close bonds. For example, she had the companionship of another white woman while travelling up the Zambezi. This woman was also a young wife, but Currie had little interest in her and made dismissive comments about her luggage and pet canary.35 When another missionary and his wife came to visit the Mulanje mission, Currie was tremendously excited. But Currie wrote,‘I was disappointed. I thought I would pour out my pent-up feminine thoughts, and she did not understand me.’36 Rather than spend time with Currie, the visitor read a novel in the drawing room. ‘But I did not blame her. She could not know the weary longing that was in my heart.’37 Currie was very happy, however, when another white woman (‘Miss W—’) stayed with them at the mission towards the end of their time at Mount Mulanje. Her frst visit was for a little over a fortnight, then she returned later, and the two women travelled together to Limbe to stay with Miss W—’s sister for a few weeks.38 In Miss W—, Currie found the warmth and easy companionship that she craved. She described Miss W— as having a kind manner, being willing to help, ‘never at a loss for what to say’, her ‘dear kind friend’ and being ‘a most kind and sympathetic companion’.39 Not only did they share similar positions, but they also enjoyed each other’s companionship and spent work and leisure time together. When Miss W— arrived for her second visit, Currie felt ‘that my troubles had gone, and that I could bear anything’.40 Currie’s habitual isolation from white society made her uncomfortable in larger social gatherings. When invited to a wedding at Blantyre, she realised that ‘it did not excite me as pleasurably as I might have expected. I dreaded society, and felt that it would be an effort even to speak.’41 She decided to go to the wedding but struggled:‘I sat down in the corner and envied the other ladies, who had come in to spend the evening, with their fow of talk. Mount Mlanje [sic] had struck me dumb.’42 A similar sentiment appears in The Land That Never Was, in which the protagonists found that they had ‘lost the gift of small talk’ upon returning to Britain.43 Currie found more comfort in animals, enjoying the company of hens, cats and ducks. Several of her pets, however, did not survive and she found the loss of her pet monkey particularly hard. Currie sadly wrote that they ‘buried it on the slope of Mount Mlanje [sic], and I mourned it as if it had been a child.’44 Many settler women’s memoirs from Britain’s African colonies include discussions of relatives back in Britain. Women frequently wrote of missing their families and distance is an ongoing theme in memoirs. Medical advice recommended returning to temperate climates for recuperative visits every two to four years, but this was only possible for wealthy settlers.45 It is diffcult for us today to imagine just how great the distance was for settlers like Currie—an immense physical and emotional barrier separating those in the colonies from those ‘at home’ in Britain. To get from Britain to Mount Mulanje, Currie had undertaken a fve-week ocean voyage, then a steamer trip to Chinde; she then waited for a week, and then spent around three weeks on a steamer travelling up the Zambezi River; after that, she was carried in a machilla (a hammock hung on poles) to the mission station. It is hardly surprising that she wrote,‘I have a foolish feeling that 424

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this journey will never end.’46 The distance and arduousness of the journey comes up frequently in tales of migration. Kathleen Daly Charter, for example, recalled travelling from London with her children in 1898, to join her husband in Rhodesia. They travelled by boat for over a month to Beira, then spent two days on a train to get to Umtali, waited a week for a coach, then took a two-stage coach ride to Salisbury.47 Like many settler women, Currie sought to reduce loneliness through correspondence with friends in Britain. The coming of the mail was a ‘great event’—her ‘surroundings were forgotten’, distance receded and it brought her back home.48 They received many letters from friends (though the mail took two months to arrive), and Currie would hurry into her bedroom with her ‘treasures’, curl up in bed, read the letters and imagine herself back home.49 ‘The jackal might howl wildly outside, the drums beat their loudest in the distance, I heard them not’, she wrote.50 ‘I was again at home in the little house with the white clematis round the porch; the cool health-giving air was on my face, and my friends were with me.’51 Goy also took great comfort in letters: Letters became very precious. It was sometimes an interval of many months between letters from friends or any word at all from the civilized world. When letters did come everything was put aside. If a meal were just ready, it was sent away to wait until the precious letters were read—joy and anxiety taking away all desire for food.52 While some white settler women found close companionship with their husbands, many did not have that level of intimacy.53 Currie was very clear that her husband was not a substitute for white female companionship: ‘However kind and tender a man may be he lacks that subtle sympathy and understanding which a good woman has. He lacks the patience to listen to the feminine trifes that interest most of our sex.’54 Currie refers to her husband in the text as ‘the Msungu’, or ‘white man’. When she travelled to Africa to meet her husband after their wedding, she was impatient to reach him. However, their meeting could hardly be called a passionate reunion. Distance and time had worked their effects and the disconnection is almost palpable in Currie’s description: I start up. We are drawing in to a landing stage. The others step out. There are mutual greetings. But I am like stone. I cannot move. A man enters my boat. He is white and thin, not like the man who left me on that sad morning. But it is my husband. My heart thaws. I rise to meet him. ‘You are a brick’, he says as he leads me from the boat.55 The relationship between Currie and her husband, as represented in The Hill of Good-Bye, was characterized by a lack of communication and openness. After her arrival on the mission station, the doctor (the only other white resident) went away to give them privacy. ‘Poor man’, Currie wrote,‘he thought that he was doing us a good turn, but how we wearied for his coming back. Even a honeymoon couple is better of a little society.’56 Currie’s emotional expression was constrained by her husband. ‘I hid my fears [of leopards]’, Currie wrote, ‘as my husband had told me when I arrived that I must never speak of being nervous in Africa.’57 It seems likely that he believed displays of emotion undercut their imperial and religious authority—revealing fear was revealing weakness and also showing a lack of faith in the power of a Christian God. Currie, however, was frustrated by this emotional repression. About her husband not listening to her concerns about leopards near the verandah, she wrote that ‘really, sometimes, it is a dreadful thing to have a husband’.58 425

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Currie did take pleasure in her husband’s resourcefulness and resilience. His skill in practical matters (such as inventing a new oven) led her to describe him as an ‘extraordinary man’.59 His lack of openness around his own fears meant she viewed him as a pillar of strength. When he did express fear of a stream crossing, Currie was horrifed and afraid:‘I had so long been kept up by his strength and protection that now being unexpectedly deprived of it, my heart grew sick.’60 She notes that at that time, she ‘took all he said for Gospel’ (a suggestive comment, indicating that she no longer did).61 The image of their relationship that emerges is not one of equals or close companions. Rather, it is characterized by male authority, female dependence and emotional distance. Hugh Morrison explains that the post-missionary period was an important and formative time for the missionary family.62 Currie’s writing highlights this point, illustrating that returning to Britain did not necessarily provide a resolution or reset relationships to how they were. Currie wrote: ‘I dare not speak of it to my husband now. The word “Africa” is a dangerous subject. Whether it disturbs his nervous system, or that it causes regret that his heart’s work was never accomplished, I cannot say.’63 A similar observation appears in Alyse Simpson’s biographically inspired work, The Land That Never Was, where after returning to Britain, the husband ‘refused to talk about his doings of the last six years: never to this day has he spoken about them to anyone’.64 These displays of stoicism and silence likely hid substantial emotional turmoil. One of the recurring themes in a number of settler women’s memoirs from colonial Africa is the authors’ inability to communicate with those around them, including their husbands, giving a distinctive inward focus and claustrophobia to the texts. The male fgures in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) and Alyse Simpson’s The Land That Never Was (1937) are characteristically silent. They appear on the periphery of the works, seldom speaking and almost appearing as bit parts, despite their leading role in the protagonists’ lives and households. In many colonial African memoirs, husbands are surprisingly absent—it gives the impression that children, laundry, the servants and general household management were a more signifcant part of many settler women’s daily lives than busy, exhausted and preoccupied husbands. Currie recorded only limited interest in white male visitors: they did not provide the ‘subtle sympathy and understanding’ and antidote to loneliness that she craved. Such visits broke the monotony and caused ‘quite an excitement’, but her comments primarily revolved around the practicalities of the visits, such as what food to offer.65 Although visiting men always treated her ‘with the greatest respect and consideration’, Currie noted that they were ‘men, most of them, who made up for their solitude and the lack of white woman’s society in a way highly disapproved of by the missionaries.’66 By this, she meant sexual ‘relationships’ (generally exploitative and coercive) between white men and African women.67 Such arrangements were common (though frowned upon) and helped white men overcome loneliness, but there was no comparable equivalent for white women.68 Currie’s loneliness was driven by cultural distance rather than any lack of physical proximity to other people. Currie spent every day alongside local women and men at the mission station, surrounded by ever-present ‘others’ who—in the colonial context in which she lived—did nothing to alleviate her profound sense of being alone. Most white settler women lived with African servants constantly present; while servants were not of the household, they were nonetheless in constant close proximity to settler families. As Dane Kennedy notes, white settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia were entirely dependent on the local African population and ‘functioned in the context of constant physical proximity’.69 Currie and her husband relied on Chief Namonde’s nearby village for food, labour and converts (Figure 28.3). Yet few settler women wrote of friendships with their servants or other African people living nearby. A small number did—Emma Leach, born in Yorkshire, was friends with the ‘native chiefs and their wives’ and was on visiting terms 426

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Figure 28.3 Jessie Currie’s sketch of Namonde’s village, c. 1891–1894: The Hill of Good-Bye, facing 40.

with them.70 These examples are relatively rare, however, and underscore the wide chasm of language, power and culture that separated settlers from the African people who lived with and around them. Currie’s interactions with the household staff were characterized by paternalism and their presence did nothing to alleviate her loneliness. She focused her Yao language learning on household management and often treated her staff like children, slapping them for ‘misbehaviour’ and giving sweets as rewards. Her attitude towards her domestic workers was very common among settler wives. As Kennedy explains, the most challenging arena for the regulation of racial distance was the settler household.71 This was particularly true for the Currie household, as many Africans lived on the mission (the boys had a special boys’ dormitory behind the house, the girls slept under the dining room table) and both male and female workers were employed in the house itself.72 Karen Hansen characterises the colonial servant-mistress relationship as ‘charged because of the spatial proximity of the white madam and her black manservant’, while Kennedy argues that infantilizing terms such as ‘boy’ helped minimize the sexual challenge of this close proximity.73 These terms also underscore the cultural and racial difference between master and servant, rendering companionship or intimacy impossible. The term ‘boy’ is used regularly by Currie, though she also refers to some of her domestic workers by name, such as her cooks and table attendants Bwanali, Kasawala, Mlenda and Kasaswichi.74 Currie was given the care of three local girls, Male, Ajaula and Achilandana. She taught them housework, reading, writing and sewing.75 In a fascinating merging of race and class, she commented that ‘as regards decency they were in some respects superior to many boys and girls of the lower classes back home’.76 However, she did not view Male, Ajaula and Achilandana’s perceptions as the same as those of white people. Currie insisted that her husband use corporal 427

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punishment, commenting that ‘they don’t feel so intensely as we do, therefore the lesson must be keener. You cannot appeal to a higher nature where it is not yet born.’77 This approach was fairly typical—settler women were commonly considered to be harsher towards servants than their husbands.78 Tough discipline of domestic servants gave frustrated, lonely wives a taste of power, a sense of control and a way to mitigate the intense vulnerability that many felt.79 There was a deep gulf of class, race and culture between Currie and ‘her girls’, too great for ‘subtle sympathy and understanding’. Such relationships could not ameliorate Currie’s loneliness—cultural distance prevented the companionship between Currie and ‘her girls’ from achieving the same intimacy or friendship that Currie had with Miss W—. Yet she still grew very fond of Male, Ajaula and Achilandana. Although their relationship was constrained within paternalistic and imperialistic paradigms, she nonetheless developed much affection for them and wrote that Achilandana was her ‘little companion and comfort in the time of trial’.80 Achilandana wished to return with the Curries to Britain, an idea that they did consider. Although it did not happen, Currie wrote that ‘there may be a happy awakening when we shall all meet again.’81

Embodied Loneliness and Physical Illness In The Hill of Good-Bye, Currie’s mental world and physical well-being are closely entwined. There is a porous boundary between her experiences of loneliness, mental illness, the extreme heat and physical illnesses, such as malaria. As Bound Alberti observes, ‘embodied loneliness needs to be understood as a physical experience as well as a mental one.’82 She advocates for ‘an understanding of emotions as historically situated products of the body as well as the mind’.83 It is impossible to understand the loneliness among white female settlers in British African colonies without an awareness of the impacts of their frequent physical ill-health. Although this chapter examines the writings of Currie, you could tell a similar story for many settler women in British Africa—struggles with illnesses and injuries (theirs and those of friends or family) is a common theme in settler women’s tales. Mathilde Goy’s husband suffered from (and eventually died of) severe malaria; Jane Moir wrote from Central Africa that she had had ‘horrid fever’ which left her ‘looking like Gorgonzola cheese’; Central African missionary Julia Smith was sick a number of times, including being ill in bed for three weeks at one point, and her baby died of measles; Emily Bradley’s baby ‘swelled up all over to the limit of his aching skin’ after eating a green mango.84 These are but a few examples—you could draw similar tales from almost every memoir penned by settlers from the period. Currie initially showed little concern for her health. On her way up the Zambezi, passing through Morambala Marsh (‘a dangerous place for fever’) did not worry her, as ‘each night I have taken a few grains of quinine so have no fear, besides it is the dry season and more healthy.’85 She was not even daunted by the fact that one of the other travellers had fever.86 Her relaxed attitude, however, did not last. The Curries, like most settlers and missionaries, developed malaria. After Jessie Currie’s frst attack of malaria, she had another one every three to four weeks, increasing in severity.87 Their predecessor, Revd Robert Cleland, had died of malaria, and Miss W—also died of the disease a few years after the Curries returned to Britain.88 Loneliness, depression and effects of malaria merge into one in Currie’s writing. ‘I awoke each morning with a sense of great depression. Of course I was full of malaria. I had a strange desire for something unusual to happen, anything in fact to break the monotony and terrible loneliness.’89 She continued to struggle against exhaustion, fnding that she ‘had no energy to combat my diffculties.’90 This was made worse by frequent malaria attacks and fevers, which left her ‘weak and spiritless’.91 She developed a ‘malarious depression which like some fend tries to hold me’.92 At points, Currie’s mental health degenerated sharply. She wrote, 428

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I was dull and languid; the present seemed to hold me in a stifing grasp; I could not think of the future . . . Everything I did was an effort. I confess it now, that sometimes in these latter days I lay down in the little summer-house in the garden, wishing I would die there and then.93 Emotional distress was common among British migrants in African colonies. Nervous disorders were a frequent cause of military and missionary personnel permanently leaving service.94 The cluster of emotional and physical symptoms reported by Europeans in the tropics was eventually formalized into the diagnosis of tropical neurasthenia. As historians such as Warwick Anderson, Dane Kennedy and Anna Crozier’s work has revealed, such a classifcation was socially and racially useful.95 It framed sufferers’ problems as medical, thereby destigmatizing their experiences and making them more socially acceptable.96 Tropical neurasthenia was a racially specifc condition, where the problem was defned as the environment and not the patient, thereby reinforcing ideas of tropical difference and a hostile tropical environment.97 Kennedy explains that ‘for most European-born settlers . . . the physical milieu of Africa induced a sense of ambivalence, a conviction that they were at odds with their host environment.’98 In Rhodesia, for example, it was widely believed that the climate in October and November (known as the ‘suicide months’) made white settlers mentally unstable.99 In the popular settler imagination, the African environment was innately hostile to the white body, both mentally and physically. In this way, the nervous symptoms that settlers experienced in tropical colonies actually reenforced and validated their white identities. Their bodies were providing irrefutable evidence that their proper place was ‘back home’ in Britain. The loneliness, sickness and dislocation of settler women like Currie was a physical and emotional sense of not-belonging that paradoxically conferred belonging, affrming the author’s British identity despite their presence in the tropics. As Kennedy observes, the cluster of symptoms that became labelled as tropical neurasthenia were not exclusively tropical, but nor were they imaginary.100 He argues that ‘there is little reason to doubt that the various neurasthenic complaints described by settlers were genuinely felt, and that most of these symptoms probably originated from the entangled effects of physical disease and psychological dislocation.’101 Some symptoms likely derived from tropical diseases such as malaria, but many probably came from the psychological stress created by the isolation and uncertainty of settlers’ lives.102 Currie’s story is a perfect example of this type of embodied loneliness, in which malaria, depression, lack of companionship and vulnerability merge together into a mingled emotional and physical distress.

Fear and Vulnerability The last element of Currie’s experience of loneliness to consider is that of vulnerability. Bound Alberti positions fear as part of the cluster of emotions that make up loneliness.103 There is a long literary history, Amelia Worsley notes, of gendered experiences of loneliness that are based on vulnerability rather than solitude. She explains that ‘loneliness describes vulnerable, often speechless female characters whose bodies, as well as their imaginations, are under threat of attack because they are in spaces far away from the protections of society.’104 Perceived vulnerability was even more heightened in a colonial context. In Britain’s African colonies, there were intense fears about the safety of white women. Frequent panics about potential and generally imaginary threats were common in settler societies like Kenya and Rhodesia. ‘Black peril’, the rape of white women by Black men (which in reality was almost unknown), captured the imagination of settlers and was greatly feared. It tapped into deep-seated insecurities among settlers, as it threatened both white women’s virtue and settler societies’ reproductive future.105 There are overtones of this sort of fear when Currie’s husband 429

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gives her a gun after they heard rumours of a potential attack against the white residents of Mount Mulanje by local chiefs.106 ‘“If the worst comes to the worst,” he said, “you will put the bullet in your own head”’.107 Vulnerability was particularly heightened for early settlers like Currie. Although they dominated their household and immediate surrounds, they were at the same time very vulnerable. The establishment of the British Central Africa Protectorate did not equate to a strong military presence or political stability on the ground in areas like Mount Mulanje in the 1890s. Currie admits that she was not fully aware of the danger they faced. ‘I know now’, she wrote,‘that the Msungu made light of many things not to alarm me, although he never dreaded the worst. I think the Doctor had a keener presentiment, as he said in after years: “We were just as safe out there as if we had been sitting on a powder barrel”’.108 Towards the end of her time at the mission, she and Miss W— experienced premonitions of trouble and smelt an odour of death or a coffn.109 Concerns about the mission’s vulnerability were not misplaced. While on a visit to Limbe, Currie heard that the mission had been attacked. The doctor and her husband escaped, but the mission was looted and property destroyed.110 After that, the Curries returned to Britain.

Conclusion Colonial memoirs such as The Hill of Good-Bye are remarkable historical documents. They are a fascinating lens onto the emotional norms of their period, helping us better understand white settler communities in Britain’s African colonies. At the same time, they also give us an intimate view—albeit fltered and imperfect—of their writers’ inner worlds. Currie herself repeatedly acknowledges the limits of literary expression and how constrained she is in her ability to ‘make it light’ for us. We look through a glass darkly at Currie’s life, but we look, nonetheless. What does it show us? It shows us a missionary wife and a woman wielding imperial power, supported by scores of African workers as she sought to maintain her links with home through observing ‘British’ rituals and keeping up ‘British’ standards (though many were, in fact, adjusted to colonial life). Simultaneously, we see an intensely lonely woman struggling with a mixture of mental and physical illness. Like many settler women, she longed for white female friends, fnding little emotional closeness with her husband and not able to consider African women as true companions. Despite growing very fond of ‘her girls’ at the mission, she could not transcend the colonial power dynamic that structured their relationship. The Hill of Good-Bye also paints a picture of vulnerability. Currie had arrived in Africa in an early colonial moment, in which power was still contested. As with most settlers, however, the greatest danger that Currie faced was medical. Physical and mental symptoms blur together into an experience of sickness, distress and embodied loneliness. Currie was just one settler out of many. However, her story has much to tell us about white settler women’s experiences throughout the empire. While every local context is different, there were also enduring themes which spanned both time and place. Loneliness is one of these. It is easy for women settlers to get lost amid wider histories of colonial territories—and even more so their emotional lives, which are readily reduced to generalizations or forgotten altogether. Close studies of texts like The Hill of Good-Bye can fll in the gaps and add detail to the picture. They help us put the emotional fesh on the bones of history.

Notes 1 Marriage record of Adam Currie and Jessie Monteath, 1891, Statutory Registers Marriages 348/7, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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‘One of My Own Kind’ 2 The couple’s son, also named Adam Currie, was born in the same year in Dunblane and was killed in action in 1918. 3 They may possibly have returned to Africa later, as a photograph of Blantyre hospital dated about 1915 includes a Mr and Mrs Currie. However, Adam Currie would be more likely to be referred to as Revd Currie, so this could be a different couple. Group portrait outside Blantyre hospital, Malawi, c. 1915: National Library of Scotland, International Mission Photography Archive, c.1860—c.1960, accessed 12 June 2021, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/digital/collection/p15799coll123/id/79850/rec/3. 4 Markku Hokkanen, ‘The Government Medical Service and British Missions in Colonial Malawi, c. 1891–1940’, in Beyond the State, ed. Anna Greenwood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 40–1. 5 For examples of other women’s memoirs and travel writing from British Africa, see Karen Blixen, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass (London: Penguin, [1937/1961] 1985); Ruth Fisher, On the Borders of Pigmy Land (London: Marshall Brothers, 1904); Ruth Fisher, Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda (London: Frank Cass Publishers, [1911] 1970); Mathilde Goy, Alone in Africa: Or, Seven Years on the Zambesi (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1901); Annie Hore, To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath Chair (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886); Jane Moir, A Lady’s Letters from Central Africa (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1891); Hylda Richards, Next Year Will Be Better (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1952] 1985); Alyse Simpson, The Land That Never Was (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1937] 1985); Julia Smith, Sunshine and Shade in Central Africa (London: Edwin Dalton, 1908). 6 For a sample of secondary literature exploring women’s colonial memoirs and travel writing, see Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire (London: Cassell, 2000); Patricia Lorcin, Historicising Colonial Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1994); Sara Mills, Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Maria Frawley, A Wider Range (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994); Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa (Farmington Hills: Twayne Publishers, 1982). 7 Alejandro Gómez,‘From Representations to Perceptions: Towards a New “Horizon of Expectation” in Historical Theory?’ Environment, Culture, and the Brain 6 (2012): 35. 8 Karen Vallgårda, ‘Were Christian Missionaries Colonisers?’, Interventions 16, no. 6 (2016): 865–86; Andrew Porter,‘ “Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 367–91; Emma Wild-Wood,‘The Interpretations, Problems and Possibilities of Missionary Sources in the History of Christianity in Africa’, in World Christianity, ed. Martha Fredericks and Dorottya Nagy (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 92–112. 9 Jane Haggis and Margaret Allen, ‘Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1880–1920’, Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (2008): 693. 10 Ibid., 692. 11 Emily Manktelow, Missionary Families (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); H. Harnes, ‘Pioneer Workers, Invaluable Helpmeets, Good Mothers’, Social Sciences and Missions 27, no. 2–3 (2014): 163–91. 12 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 223; Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This “Modern Epidemic”: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 242–54. 13 Jessie Currie, The Hill of Good-Bye (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1920), 2–3. 14 Uma Kothari,‘From Colonialism to Development: Refections of former Colonial Offcers’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44, no. 1 (2006): 121. 15 Anna Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 128. 16 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 32. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 54. 19 Ibid., 161. 20 Madeline Heald, ed., Down Memory Land with Some Early Rhodesian Women (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1979), 152, 199. 21 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 49. 22 Richards, Next Year, 79. 23 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 108. 24 Ibid., 47–8. 25 Heald, Down Memory Land, 2, 21, 105, 209.

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Julia M. Wells 26 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Re-Thinking the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 175. 27 Kothari,‘Colonialism to Development’, 121. 28 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 31. 29 Ibid., 1. 30 Blixen, Out of Africa, 26. 31 Goy, Alone in Africa, 21–2. 32 Ada Slatter, 3 October in Women Writing Home: Female Correspondence across the British Empire,Volume One, Africa, ed. Silke Strickrodt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006). 33 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 149. 34 Hore, To Lake Tanganyika, 214. 35 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 13. 36 Ibid., 150. 37 Ibid., 151. 38 Ibid., 235. 39 Ibid., 205, 220. 40 Ibid., 233. 41 Ibid., 180. 42 Ibid., 182. 43 Simpson, Land That Never Was, 217. 44 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 139. 45 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 116–18. 46 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 2–10. 47 Heald, Down Memory Land, 54–6. 48 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 222. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Goy, Alone in Africa, 22. 53 See examples: Richards, Next Year Will Be Better; Simpson, The Land That Never Was. 54 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 202. 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Ibid., 41. 57 Ibid., 40. 58 Ibid., 127. 59 Ibid., 60. 60 Ibid., 138. 61 Ibid., 192. 62 Hugh Morrison, ‘Reimagining the Protestant Missionary Family: The Malcolms of the China Inland Mission’, Journal of Religious History 45, no. 3 (2021): 465–88. 63 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 219. 64 Simpson, Land That Never Was, 217. 65 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 108–11. 66 Ibid., 108. 67 Kennedy, Islands of White, 175. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 148. 70 Heald, Down Memory Land, 209. 71 Kennedy, Islands of White, 152–3. 72 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 43, 73. 73 Karen Hansen, Distant Companions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 70; Kennedy, Islands of White, 140. 74 Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 54–5. 75 Ibid., 63. 76 Ibid., 46. 77 Ibid., 145. 78 Hansen, Distant Companions, 70.

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‘One of My Own Kind’ 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Ibid. Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 157. Ibid., 248. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 235. Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine’, Isis 100, no.4 (2009): 802. Goy, Alone in Africa; Moir, A Lady’s Letters, 86; Smith, Sunshine and Shade; Emily Bradley, Dearest Priscilla: Letters to the Wife of a Colonial Civil Servant (London: Max Parrish, 1950), 10. Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 6. Ibid. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 125, 220. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 227. Crozier, Practicing Colonial Medicine, 95. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Dane Kennedy,‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma’, in Decentring Empire, ed. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006), 157–81; Kennedy, Islands of White; Anna Crozier, ‘Sensationalising Africa: British Medical Impressions of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1890–1939’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, no. 3 (2007): 393–415. Kennedy,‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma’, 159. Ibid. Kennedy, Islands of White, 5. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 124–5. Ibid. Bound Alberti, Biography of Loneliness, 223; Bound Alberti,‘Modern Epidemic’. Amelia Worsley,‘The Poetry of Loneliness from Romance to Romanticism’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2014), i–ii. Kennedy, Islands of White, 128–9. Currie, Hill of Good-Bye, 130. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 233–4. Ibid., 246–7.

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29 LONELINESS, THE LOVE LETTER AND THE PERFORMANCE OF ROMANCE DURING WARTIME SEPARATION, 1939–1945 Emma Carson

In a letter to his wife Marjorie on 7 August 1944, Lance Corporal George Seagrove described his ‘special brand’ of loneliness, after being separated from her since January 1942: For me there has been a change in scenery occasionally and sometimes a little excitement but always present is that feeling of emptiness inside me. It’s as though part of me is missing—a vital part. And yet that doesn’t explain it adequately . . . Tonight there is a sort of shivering in the left side of my chest—you know that kind of feeling you get when you’re anxious to get somewhere and precious minutes are speeding away. If only you could wish yourself to where you want to go, how convenient it would be. However you are helpless to do anything about it and you just sit down and stand up and walk around to try to ease your anxiousness.1 Crucially, George described that his particular ‘brand’ of loneliness was characterized by a sense of emptiness in his longing to be back with Marjorie, a helplessness to control and properly articulate his circumstances and emotions, and a recognition of the overbearing nature of the time and distance that divided them. As with other historical events that caused mass displacement and separation over vast geographical distances, the Second World War fostered situational loneliness in large groups of people. For servicemen and their families in particular, this loneliness became embodied in ‘clusters’ of other emotions including fear, longing, love, grief and nostalgia.2 Lars Svendsen distinguishes between ‘chronic loneliness’, which is a ‘constant pain on account of having insuffcient ties to others’, and ‘situational loneliness’, which is caused by life changes such as the death of a loved one, the end of a signifcant relationship or long-term separation from someone cherished.3 Through the analysis of over 850 letters that were written between 22 couples, this chapter explores how Australian servicemen and the women they loved experienced, articulated and combatted loneliness as a result of separation during the Second World War. Loneliness is an emotion that continues to be overlooked in historical studies, including those on modern war. Much research has already been conducted on the role of letters between European and New Zealand servicemen and their loved ones either during the First or the Second 434

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World War and how men ultimately prioritized their connections to home over those with their peers or nation.4 In particular, Michael Roper’s book The Secret Battle demonstrates that the primary way British soldiers coped with their service during the First World War was by sustaining emotional connections with their families through letter writing and joining the ‘spheres’ of soldier and civilian life.5 Carol Acton similarly argues through her analysis of letters that servicemen relied on intimate partners at home for their psychological well-being much more than they depended upon the comradeship of their peers.6 One of the few studies on Australian experiences of war and emotion is Bart Ziino’s chapter ‘ “Always Thinking in the Other Part of the Globe”’, where he provides excellent insight on how servicemen endured the distance from loved ones in their letters during the First World War.7 While these comprehensive studies focus on the importance of family connections, the role of letter-writing and the experiences of separation in war, most only allude to how couples felt and fought loneliness during this period. More research should consider the connections between loneliness and romantic aspirations, as this will help historians to understand the emotional and social impact of how people experience love, idealise it and feel its loss.8 Furthermore, how the physical and emotional distance between loved ones was experienced and articulated while they were separated and its relationship with loneliness requires more scholarly attention. There is also a general gap in the literature of close analyses of war letters that were written by women and Australian servicemen to suggest what may have made their experiences of war, separation and loneliness unique. Romantic love and its relationship with loneliness is another dimension that this chapter explores. Over the mid-20th century, romantic love was increasingly valued over all other factors in a marital relationship as it offered ‘a dynamic emotional connection where the personal transformation was a shared project achieved through togetherness.’9 Katie Barclay argues that while couples experience other emotions as part of their relationships, including joy, pain and anger,‘love was the framework that gave their romantic relationship meaning and context. Love was the lens through and against which other emotional experiences and expectations were interpreted.’10 Intimate relationships provided a buffer against loneliness, but the idealisation of the partner could also produce the opposite effect. Fay Bound Alberti asserts that romantic love in the 20th century is ‘physically and emotionally intense, highly idealized, and threatening to the stability of the individual self; yet the obliteration of the self into another person is all that is desired’.11 This creates a sense of ‘lack’ for individuals who are estranged from their lovers.12 The letters written between servicemen and their partners demonstrate that love indeed was the ‘lens’ through which they discussed and performed their relationships, often across continents. For women especially, who primarily identifed as wives and fancées through their letters rather than with their careers—if they were employed—or hobbies, the centrality of love in their lives was arguably even more palpable. Historically, letters were an important means of bridging the distance between those who were separated, which makes them a rich source for historians researching emotions.13 During wartime in particular, letter-writing achieved a heightened sense of emotional importance due to its role in maintaining contact between large swathes of the population—often for years at a time— and enabling them to exchange news, share dreams, create intimacy and evoke emotions, such as happiness and hope.14 As such, these items are ‘emotional objects’ and ‘were embedded within networks of affective exchange and thus came to capture or signify that emotional relationship for the owner.’15 By overwhelming the senses and mind, loneliness could alter the material culture of one’s environment and ascribe new, signifcant meanings to otherwise mundane objects.16 The testimonies of life during separation and tender declarations of affection, while they are insightful, are potentially misleading to those who do not analyse letters as a performance. Historians recognise that letters are not necessarily direct or unmediated refections of a person’s 435

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thoughts or feelings but instead demonstrate how emotions were articulated and how interpersonal relationships were ‘negotiated’ by mail.17 Susan Matt reiterates the importance of acknowledging that frst-hand accounts of emotions and attitudes refect cultural values, conventions and individual choices, which are conscious or unconscious ‘efforts at self-fashioning.’18 While many of the letters recorded the pain of separation with eloquent accuracy, the emotions that were described and the actual lived experiences of said emotions could be quite different. Some couples, encouraged by popular culture, advice literature, their peers or their partners’ writing, may have been led to believe that they should write about loneliness and longing, even if they did not necessarily feel these things. For many letter recipients, the writers’ tender emotional outbursts, outlining their struggles with desire during separation, perhaps offered a new and more sentimental side of the person. Long-term separation created a potent sense of physical and emotional distance for couples, which increased the longer they were apart and intensifed loneliness. Exchanging material objects, especially letters, was an integral part of maintaining emotional and physical connections to loved ones during the war, despite great temporal and geographical divides. Letters enabled couples to replicate real conversations, update one another on their lives, share vivid fantasies and perform romance. While loneliness was typically perceived to negatively infuence couples and increase feelings of sadness and longing, correspondents also emphasized how temporarily choosing solitude enabled them to feel close to their loved ones. As will be discussed later in this chapter, some couples believed that separation and loneliness transformed their relationships for the better.

Articulating Loneliness in the Letter Loneliness was an almost constant theme in letters between separated partners during the Second World War. Svendsen argues that longing is ‘a necessary component of loneliness’ that distinguishes the subjective desire to overcome vast physical or mental distances between individuals from the objective state of being alone.19 As will be discussed in this section, correspondents described their longing and physically represented it through allusions to the lonely body. They imagined intimacy as ‘closeness’ within a shared space, either literal or metaphorical, whereas loneliness was associated with being physically and emotionally distant from one another. Loneliness was also manifested by the time that continued to drag as couples remained apart. As with George Seagrove, cited at the beginning of this chapter, many correspondents recorded their own ‘brands’ of loneliness and described how it made them feel. In particular, writers evoked the idea that loneliness caused them mental depression and physical pain. For example, Dorothy Williams wrote to her fancé Sergeant Malcolm Keshan in March 1941 about her loneliness: I have the miseries well and truly tonight though, Mac. Remember, how I used to sit down + write you pages on how lovely the night was . . . The nights are still lovely, but somehow I’m all wrong—out of touch with it, or something. I’m getting stale I think—lacking the vital spark that gives things ‘oomph’.20 Corporal Thomas ‘Tom’ Neeman outlined to Barbara his own experience of loneliness and emphasized that it was often diffcult for him to put his feelings into words. He noted that when he ‘visualised’ himself together with Barbara, they were a great distance from where he currently was: ‘There are times Babs when the longing for you becomes almost unbearable . . . for the last hour have been sitting here day-dreaming my thoughts far away with you . . . visualising us together again.’21 Barbara responded that she was glad to know that Tom was missing her as she 436

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was ‘missing [him] horribly too’ and, in another letter, represented the physical pain that loneliness brought her when she lamented ‘I’m just aching for the sight of you.’22 Carolyn James notes that early modern correspondents often used metaphors of the body, especially the heart, to express love, anxiety and other emotions—a tradition that continued in letters written during the 20th century.23 When Royal Australian Air Force Offcer Robert ‘Bob’ Cowper was reported missing in action after he got lost fying over the sea in January 1943, the loneliness experienced by his Irish fancée, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Corporal Katharine McCall’s (Figure 29.1), was exacerbated by the prospect that he might die. Once Bob was found, Katharine wrote to him recounting the agonising wait for news: ‘you had me really worried for a whole fortnight. . . . Don’t you ever do anything like that again darling, and for a whole fortnight I was the most miserable person in the world’.24 In another letter, Katharine hyperbolically implied that the stress of not knowing Bob’s fate made her age faster, declaring that when he returned he would ‘see the grey hairs that have appeared during the past fortnight worrying about you.’25 By suggesting that her anxiety made her get grey hairs, Katharine also exaggerated the passage of time while waiting for news, a common theme in the letters of other partnerships.

Figure 29.1 Corporal Katharine McCall and Offcer Robert Cowper on their wedding day, 1943. Source: Australians at War Film Archive, 1562.

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Correspondents acknowledged the vast passage of time that kept them apart from their loved ones and lamented of how long it felt since they were last together. Staff Sergeant William ‘Bill’ Wiseman wrote about the juxtaposition between the literal 12 months he was away from his wife, Florence, and how it felt like they had been apart for ‘twelve years’, continuing, ‘in fact twelve hours are too long I would give the world to be holding you in my arms.’26 George Seagrove also noted the literal time he spent away from Marjorie (down to the minutes) and contrasted it with how long it felt since he had last seen her: ‘It’s now 37 weeks 3 days 22 hours and 20 minutes since we said goodbye that Sunday night and it seems like years.’27 Like the time that grew steadily between them, distance was used as a marker to demonstrate how these couples were physically lonely. Emotion plays a crucial role in producing space and determining the meaning of distance for individuals, and whether it is bearable or insufferable.28 Captain William Lambert wrote of how he longed for Doreen after he frst left Australia in 1940, alluding to the increasing distance between them as his ship sailed on:‘I wish you were along with me honey. . . . Seems hard to realise that one is so far away, and getting further every hour.’29 In a postcard to his wife, Norma ‘Sherrie’ Bissaker, and his son, Terence, Lieutenant Frank Bissaker (Figure 29.2) also acknowledged the vast distance between them but assured that this would not

Figure 29.2 Lieutenant Frank Sherral Bissaker and Norma Sherrie Bissell,and their wedding party,undated. Source: Australian War Memorial, P0834.001.

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stop him from feeling connected to them on Christmas Day:‘Even though we are 11,000 miles apart my thoughts will be with you, as always’.30 Likening the experience of loneliness on the home front to the sacrifces made on the battlefront, Frank praised Norma and Terence for their bravery and wrote ‘I am very, very proud of my 2 soldiers Sgt Sherrie and Corporal Terence + I want you to have faith in our early reunion + to soldier on just a little longer.’31 Receiving most letters months after they were written meant that the intersection between distance and time further amplifed loneliness for these couples. Diana Barnes suggests that the transportation and delivery of letters represents an example of their ‘emotional biography’ and can impact on their recipients.32 Correspondents regularly acknowledged how the wait for the delivery of their letters meant that their conversations were stunted. For example, after learning in August 1942 that Florence’s sister Alice had died in July, Bill felt uncomfortable sending a cable to express his condolences, as ‘by the time it reached home you will all have almost gotten over the shock . . . so I thought it’s better to send my deepest sympathy to you and the family quietly by letter.’33 Receiving letters months after they were posted meant that it was impossible for writers to provide immediate support, advice and sympathy, even if mail was delivered at a regular pace, which contributed to stress and longing. Postal delays, which were relatively frequent during this period and could last for months at a time, also exacerbated feelings of longing and nourished a sense of disconnect between separated couples. For women in particular, not receiving regular letters could heighten their anxiety, as it may indicate that their partners had been harmed. Couples sometimes outlined their frustration at delays by mentioning that it made them feel neglected or forgotten by their loved ones. For example, William Lambert lamented of how he missed Doreen’s letters:‘Here I am again, still awaiting a letter from you—now three mails since your last so shake a leg my dear. I’m feeling neglected—I know didn’t mean it—they’ve probably been held up somewhere.’34 After not hearing from Malcolm Keshan since the start of February, Dorothy Williams wrote to him in March 1941: Hullo there! How are you, stranger? . . . I’m feeling very neglected about it too. I wonder what can be holding them up Mac. The only thing I can do now is re-read some of your other ones I have stored away, although that’s not to be compared with receiving a fresh one from you.35 In early 1945, Robert Graham implored his fancée, Jane Melrose, to write more regularly to him, as it improved his morale and reduced his loneliness. He also used the metaphor of distance in describing how receiving Jane’s letters improved his mood: I received your ever welcomed and much needed letter yesterday and it made me feel a lot better + miles happier too. Jane whatever you do please write as often as you can . . . I feel so depressed when mail comes in and I don’t get any from you. It doesn’t matter who I get mail from I’m still not happy unless I recognise your hand writing on the envelope.36 Delays froze conversations, which made it more diffcult for correspondents to write and worsened loneliness, as they had nothing to respond to. Bill noted, for example, how he stopped writing one letter to Florence for four days to see if he received any mail to answer, but as he did not get any continued ‘I will just have to struggle along the best way I can’.37 He continued at the end of his letter:‘Well darling I can’t think of anything else to say just now, I will go crazy if

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I don’t get some mail soon.’38 In February 1943, Bob Cowper outlined the diffculties of writing when he was having a one-way conversation with Katharine: ‘It’s awful writing these letters to you without having any letters from you so that I can’t answer any questions or anything. As soon as I receive your mail dear I’ll write you a huge letter.’39 Katharine wrote in response over a month later to Bob’s complaints about postal delays, to assure him that she was writing consistently and to validate his writer’s block: ‘I can picture you stuck in the middle of a sentence for about a fortnight!’40 These couples demonstrated through their letters that their loneliness was situational, by emphasizing that it was a result of the literal and perceived passage of time and great distances that made them feel disconnected, staggered the fow of conversations and increased their longing for a space where they were together.

Coping with Loneliness To help quell the overbearing loneliness that strained the lives of these couples, they implemented strategies, including the exchange of letters and indulging in vivid fantasies. Receiving their partners’ letters was a crucial way for correspondents to combat loneliness and create an intimate space, as they provided powerful symbolism of devotion and remembrance, acted as a ‘relic’ of the absent lover and offered physical comfort in absence.41 Writers eagerly recorded when they received each other’s letters and described the comfort it provided. For example, Mabel Allen wrote that she was ‘pleased’ to receive her husband Tom’s letters as they told her ‘how you are progressing + best of all to know that you are still thinking of me . . . I’m thrilled to fnd your letters waiting for me when I arrive at the shop in the morning’.42 Frank Bissaker gushed in one letter from September 1942 about the restorative nature of Norma’s letters:Your letters are very very welcome + your declarations of love + tenderness are a home for your lonely soldier boy’.43 In an earlier letter, Frank described how he frequently reread all the letters Norma sent as ‘they helped brighten me . . . because you are so optimistic.44 To visually simulate the joy that his wife Frances’ letters brought to him, William Dodsworth enclosed two photographs in a letter from 1941—in the frst snap titled ‘Before’, William posed in sombre refection, whereas in the second one titled ‘After’, he grinned while holding one of Frances’ letters (fgures 29.3, 29.4 and 29.5).45 Helen Williams praised her husband Harry for his ‘marvellous’ letters and continued,‘I want you to know I do appreciate all your kindnesses. You have written every day and phoned every second day. It’s been great hearing your voice. Could bear [sic] as though you were beside me tonight.’46 Harry was also pleased to receive what he called ‘the best letter you have ever sent me’ and wrote on about its merits:‘Full of all the news about yourself and Price [their son] and the neighbours and talking to me just as if I was with you’.47 Both Helen and Harry suggested that maintaining regular communication and providing detailed descriptions of their lives while apart helped to increase their sense of presence and made it feel as if they were actually together. After signifcant delays in correspondence, receiving new letters had a particularly therapeutic effect on their recipients. In his letter from 12 October 1943, the contrast between George Seagrove’s angst at not receiving any mail in the morning and his elation after receiving four letters from Marjorie in the afternoon was stark. Earlier, he wrote of his lack of mail and the tense atmosphere in the camp: No mail today—that’s the chief complaint around the camp. We are in the middle of the jungle and the base post offce doesn’t seem to give a damn when we get our mail. To make matters worse the gramophone spring is broken and the radio doesn’t work. (I’m full of moans today aren’t I?).48 440

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Figure 29.3 and Figure 29.4 William Dodsworth before and after he received Frances’ letter, 1941. Source: Private collection.

Later in the day, when he fnished the letter, George started, What a change! What a change! Darling I [have] just been for the mail and there were four for me from you. I’ve read through them and I’m happy to know you’re well . . . Love and kisses of the extra special brand.49 Bill Wiseman likewise noted the collective cycle of anxiety, frustration and catharsis that occurred where he was stationed, as letters were held up for months at a time and then arrived in large quantities: about two months with no mail,and then we get mail nearly every day for about a week . . . it seems a long time sometimes, we all start grizzling and growling about the bloody boats and the bloody Yanks but as soon as we have had a letter we brighten up again.50 441

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Figure 29.5 William Dodsworth and Frances Tregoining on their wedding day, 16 January 1941. Source: Private collection.

Hence, receiving mail and the returned tender contact with their partners also acted as an antidote to the loneliness of men who were separated from home. Fantasies were an equally important way for couples to combat loneliness. Acton suggests that despite the presence of external readers, including censors and family members, letter writers and their intended reader developed expressions of intimacy that were ‘beyond language’ and constructed private imagined spaces that readers relied on prior knowledge to enter.51 By imagining bright futures in blissful love, a pleasant present that transcended time and distance or reconstructed memories from their past, correspondents could temporarily enter shared spaces where they felt closer. In September 1942, Bill wrote in elaborate detail about the day he would see Florence and their family again, which he suggested would represent a new beginning to the relationship that was on hold while they were apart: I will come home to you and the babies, that day will be the greatest day of our lives, we will make up then for the time we have been apart with interest, if I should be away for twenty years dearest I would never forget you or cease loving you.52 George used the metaphor of time and a return to youthful exuberance as a source of consolation for whenever Marjorie felt blue: think about the good times we had together and how much lovelier it will be when we begin to live them all over again. We’ll be like a couple of kids on their honeymoon— better than that as a matter of fact.53 442

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Partners also used their letters to briefy bridge the distance between one another by imagining they were together ‘in spirit’. By arranging specifc times to be ‘together’, this made it easier to synchronize their separate lives and lessen loneliness.54 For example, William Lambert suggested to Doreen in October 1940 that they should celebrate the frst wedding anniversary they were apart by having a dinner at the same time: he suggested she could have a dinner at 6:00 p.m. and he would have one at ‘the corresponding time’.55 Similarly, Private Albert Gerrard asked his fancée, Margaret James, to ‘save’ the Destiny waltz for him at the next dance she attended and to let him know the date, so he could be with her ‘in spirit’ at 9:30 p.m. when it was usually performed.56 Elaborate roleplay scenarios were often constructed by writers through their letters where they were together for a short time. For example, after Dorothy Williams told Malcolm Keshan that she listened to the radio show ‘Rebecca’, he responded, pretending that he was with her: I did enjoy the ham sandwiches, even though they were a little burnt. Funny but I couldn’t concentrate on the show at all not with you sitting along side of me and the lights turned low . . . you should have know[n] better than to think I would.57 Dorothy responded, playfully continuing the fantasy:‘[I]f the sandwiches were burned it was your fault, cause you were supposed to be watching the toast. I’ll say you were a handful. You wouldn’t concentrate on the play, not you’.58 George and Marjorie Seagrove similarly created a detailed fantasy where they spent the entire day together to celebrate Marjorie’s upcoming birthday: Let’s try to imagine what we would do if there weren’t thousands of miles separating us . . . You think I’ve forgotten its [sic] your birthday and I know what you’re thinking so I call you over and take you in my arms and give you a luscious big kiss . . . we have a big day ahead of us and you are going to decide the programme for the day. ‘How about a day on the water in our shorts, with a picnic basket and a couple of bottles of the good old liquid refreshment’ you say . . . The weather is perfect and we are having the time of our lives . . . Dinner at the Wentworth at seven, after a few snifters in the lounge to whet the appetite. We just have time to grab a taxi to the theatre on time. After the show—well you know what happens at the end of a perfect day . . . Your birthday is over sweetheart, how did you enjoy yourself?59 After Marjorie received this letter, she sent a response and added some ‘fnishing touches’, presumably of a sexual nature, that George got a ‘great kick out of ’.60 He wrote,‘That’s what I call a perfect day. You’ll have to arrange another time like that—it’s your turn to do the planning’.61 Nostalgia was another form of fantasy that reduced loneliness. While drawing on fond memories is often characterized by grieving for a lost past, it can regulate loneliness by strengthening perceptions of social connectedness, rekindling meaningful relationships and bringing to life important fgures from one’s past, which ultimately promotes higher levels of happiness than sadness.62 For couples whose separation was temporary and situational, rather than permanent, reliving memories helped to soothe loneliness and sustain their relationships. Nostalgia did not achieve this simply by escaping the present to a reconstructed past in which couples were always happy and in love. By reviving positive memories from before the war, nostalgia especially helped separated couples to project to a great future together, where loneliness was no longer experienced. It effectively fed into the romantic trope that lovers could never be lonely when they were together.63 443

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Couples often described in their letters how frequently they recalled the pleasant times they spent in one another’s company. For example, Albert demonstrated how he longed to be with Margaret again and suggested that it was diffcult not to be reminded of nostalgic memories: everything seemed to be determined to bring you to my mind, all the chaps I happened to pass seemed to be humming or whistling that song you used to sing as we were walking home, you know the one I mean,‘dreaming of a quiet Xmas, just like the ones we used to know’. Gosh sweet-heart how that song reminded me of those walks.64 Katharine McCall outlined the power of her nostalgic memories in recreating Bob’s presence: ‘But memories live a long time, and the many wonderful days we have had shall be with me until you come back again’.65 In her letter on 15 March 1943, Katharine detailed her time in Dublin with Bob and another occasion, when they bought her engagement ring in Belfast: My darling, a whole year ago today we were in Dublin—remember, and shall never forget the grand time we had together . . . It is nearly eight months now darling since we were in that jewellers in Belfast together choosing my lovely ring . . . and has never been off my fnger since the day you put it there.66 After reading this letter, Bob responded,‘Will I ever forget. It’s one of the thousands of memories I keep with me just to keep me from going mad when I’m away from you darling.’67 Thomas Allen similarly recalled his and Mabel’s one-year anniversary in March 1945 and wrote, ‘I can remember how you held my hand during the ceremony and the open windows with trees outside.’68 By using tactile imagery, including the sensation of Mabel’s hand holding his and a breeze through the window, Thomas essentially transported himself back into the physical experience of the memory and made it more immersive for Mabel. Engaging in these strategies demonstrated that couples were determined to fght their loneliness and create a sense of proximity, despite the tyranny of time and distance. Evoking intimacy and performing love in this way also helped couples to identify the strengths of their relationships.

Aloneness and the ‘Transformative’ Aspects of Separation Loneliness had the capacity to cause great mental suffering among those who were separated during wartime. Yet it was not always an inherently negative experience. Keith Snell emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between ‘loneliness’ and ‘aloneness’ when researching the past, as the latter is an ‘objective state’ of being by oneself, which could evoke a variety of both positive and negative emotions, whereas the former is a ‘subjective state of feeling lonely’.69 Bound Alberti also asserts that choice is important when understanding loneliness since, especially when it is chosen, loneliness or solitude can be empowering, emotionally healing and a muse for creativity. This means that studying loneliness presents further challenges to scholars, who must recognise the differences in people, times and cultures to determine whether loneliness is enriching or impoverishing.70 Most of the servicemen and women who wrote to one another in my research came from working-class backgrounds, and some were economically disadvantaged. In the context of a global war as well, even the moments where their solitude was chosen were in the foreground of a more profound and long-lasting experience of situational loneliness. Nonetheless, there were moments where, rather than relishing the company of their friends, colleagues, relatives or comrades, correspondents emphasized how they preferred to be alone instead because it provided more opportunities to write to their loved ones, which helped to temporarily reduce 444

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longing for them. As such, paradoxically, it was by being alone and away from other important connections that it became easier for these couples to manifest intimate connections with their partners and increase their sense of closeness. Reciprocity was key in the material exchange for military couples, which meant that the act of writing was often as thrilling as receiving letters and as effective at curbing loneliness. Bound Alberti asserts that,in their role at reducing loneliness,writing letters reinforced connection through ‘a physical act’ and provided affrmation that the relationship still existed and was signifcant.71 The restorative impact of writing letters was evident in the fact that correspondents prioritized it over spending time with other people who were physically in their proximity. Albert Gerrard was especially enthusiastic to describe his desire to write to Margaret James instead of engaging in recreational activities. For example, on 30 March 1943, he wrote a diatribe about this preference: Feel like writing a nice letter sweetheart, expressing the tender and loving thoughts I have for you. The prevailing conditions don’t assist much tho, for I went down to the recreation hut + its crowded and busy as a beehive. Now I am stretched out on my bunk, the hurricane lamp fickering, a darn cool wind blowing, and a fne spray of rain occasionally blowing in, all that however does not dampen my bright thoughts, inspired by memories of you.72 Albert initially fnished the letter, as the ‘boys’ had returned to his tent for tea, but shortly after continued, writing, Changed my mind, Margo darling . . . the chaps have wondered off + yours truly doesn’t really feel like saying ‘Bon Soir’ yet . . . I’ll just scribble down my thoughts, for I’m so happy + contented writing tonight, feel very close to you.73 In a fnal conclusion to his letter, Albert wrote, [W]ish I could describe the pleasure that just scribbling away those lines have given me. Its [sic] so real that I’m sure I’ll reach out + try to take you in my arms. Am sure to dream of you at the very least.74 Bill Wiseman also suggested in July 1943 that, on his end, writing was almost compulsive and noted the mutually therapeutic effect of his letter exchange with Florence (Figure 29.6): I know how much you look forward to letters from me darling, so I always do my best to keep my mail up to you, another thing that makes me write darling is love, I just can’t help it, the lads reckon I will be writing in my sleep soon, I only wish I could.75 After George Seagrove was hospitalized for over a month in 1944 due to experiencing serious infammation in his hands, he found much consolation in writing to Marjorie. In the frst letter, he wrote while being treated, George described the diffculties of writing in a hospital bed with a ‘well-bandaged thumb’, ointment constantly seeping through the bandages, and supporting his body weight ‘on a hinged elbow’: Still I hate to think of you being without a letter for any length of time and nothing will deter me from at least scribbling you a note as long as my pen can make the curves and straights and dots.76 445

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Figure 29.6 Staff Sergeant William Wiseman, Florence Wiseman, and their son Bill. Source: Private collection.

On 19 April, he wrote more about the mundanity of being stuck in a ‘horizontal position’ for 19 days and the relief that communicating with and thinking about Marjorie brought: I’m up in the clouds today because there were two letters from you . . . A thousand memories have been lived in again in the months we’ve been apart. And while I’ve been passing the hours away in this hospital you’ve been closer to me than ever.77 Although George did not choose to be isolated from most of his peers in a hospital for over a month, he utilized the opportunity of being so disconnected from them to create a stronger connection with Marjorie than he had previously maintained with their letters. Katharine McCall and Bob Cowper also wrote to one another often of the moments where they chose loneliness to refect on their relationship. After church one Sunday in 1943, Katharine wrote in the hours just before she went on duty at the airbase that she ‘like[d] to write [Bob] 446

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a few lines whenever I am thinking of you sweetheart as somehow or other helps quite a lot. I wonder what you are doing now. Probably lying in the sun or having a bath.’78 Bob echoed Katharine’s sentiments: Heavens! I fnd that I want to write to you all the time sweetheart . . . I guess I must love you an awful lot darling that’s what is wrong with me, and when I’m writing to you I always feel so much nearer.79 By choosing to be isolated from their peers or utilizing moments where they were apart from others to write letters and refect more on their relationships, these couples demonstrated how prioritizing ‘aloneness’ from others helped generate a powerful sense of proximity with the people they were separated from. While most aspects of the loneliness that separation brought during wartime were not chosen, couples also wrote that the time apart made them and their relationships stronger. Sarah Pinto notes that romantic love is often associated with ‘transformation’ at the personal level, where an individual could be profoundly altered by the experience.80 Svendsen also asserts, ‘Separation increases the joy we take in those we care about . . . Loneliness creates a space in which we can refect on our relationship to others, and feel how much we actually need them.’81 In their letters, some couples mentioned the transformative power of loneliness on their relationships and, in particular, how it made them appreciate and love one another more than before the war. For example, Albert Gerrard asserted to Margaret James in 1943 that he believed separation ultimately made them both more mature and better suited for married life: In one way darling, three years have not been wasted, I think we’ve both learned a lot. I have anyway, patience, perseverence [sic], and over + above all else, what a loyal little darling you are. It has also knocked a lot of conceit [sic] + selfshness out of me.82 Harry Williams also recognised that, through the tension and frustration that letter-writing had caused for him and Helen, their relationship became more resilient and he believed ‘we are getting even closer together and that we will be able to talk much more freely without worrying about offending each other.’83 Presumably, in response to some anxieties, Norma Bissaker expressed about Frank changing because of his war service, he emphasized in multiple letters that the only way they had changed since separation was to love each other more than previously.84 For example, he wrote on 12 September 1942:‘WE have NOT changed, except to grow a little older . . . I’ll soon prove that to you, my precious darling I love you more than ever’.85 George Seagrove expressed in great detail the ways that loneliness and longing ameliorated his intimate relationship with Marjorie. For example, he wrote in 1944 that he was ‘glad’ they had both experienced ‘the heartaches’ during this period as it ‘is a proof of ties which couldn’t be broken.’86 George also claimed in an earlier letter that he believed the war and separation provided a divine lesson about appreciating his relationship with Marjorie more, which ultimately strengthened his love for her: I think my love grows greater every day I’m away from you . . . Our lives are developing and we are now sharing the experience of years. Lovers in the true sense of the word. Two hearts blended into perfect harmony . . . [God] will bring us together again to carry out our job as planned. I’m beginning to think that all this must be for a purpose. Perhaps, everybody’s been so wrong that we’ve got to be taught what is right again. A fresh start in life may well be the best thing that could happen to us.87 447

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These examples demonstrate that loneliness was not only an emotion that brought great pain and longing, but also enabled separated couples to romanticise the importance of their relationships in the context of their sacrifce and in a time of terrible uncertainty. By experiencing the pain that distance and time imposed, couples realized that their relationships were important and, as time went on, found that their fondness only grew.

Conclusion This chapter contributes to understandings of modern war and emotion by demonstrating that situational loneliness was a predominant experience for spouses who were displaced from one another due to military service in the Second World War. Furthermore, it highlights the affective implications of separation on couples whose relationships were characterized by modern notions of romantic love and the belief that they required each other for emotional fulflment. War letters conveyed how time, space and distance suddenly became great adversaries to the happiness of correspondents, especially through often-extensive delays between posting and receiving mail. In their ability to help writers describe their frustrations and longing for a return to their pre-war relationships, letters became a vital tool to construct intimacy. By exchanging these emotional objects and sharing detailed fantasies that synchronized their lives, writers showed that they were not passive victims of the loneliness that plagued them but were determined to transcend distance and time to provide mutual comfort. Moved by the desire for a sense of proximity, couples found that seeking aloneness from their families and peers made it easier for them to write letters, create fantasies and conjure each other’s presences. This research shows that loneliness was not purely agonising for these couples but could also be transformative. Through their heartache, frustration and uncertainty, spouses realised that, despite the signifcant challenges that separation brought, their love for one another was undeniable and incredibly resilient.

Notes 1 Letter from George Seagrove to Marjorie Seagrove, 7 Aug. 1944, Seagrove Papers, Australian War Memorial [henceforth AWM], PR05483. 2 See Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6 for more information about emotional ‘clusters’ and the diffculties of defning ‘loneliness’ as an emotion. 3 Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, trans. Kerri Pierce (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 28. 4 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 7; Jenny Hartley,‘ “Letters Are Everything These Days”: Mothers and Letters in the Second World War’, in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945, ed. Rebecca Earle (Winchester: Ashgate, 1999), 183–95; Hester Vaizey,‘Husbands and Wives: An Evaluation of the Emotional Impact of World War Two in Germany’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 389–411; Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Winchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46; Kate Hunter, ‘More Than an Archive of War: Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Solider to the Woman He Loved, 1915–19’, Gender and History 25, no. 2 (2013): 339–54; Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France During World War I’, The American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1338–61; Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Martyn Lyons, ‘A New History From Below? The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe’, History Australia 7, no. 3 (2010), 59.1–59.9; Martyn Lyons, ‘French Soldiers and Their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practices in the First World War’, French History 17, no. 1 (2003): 79–95; Clare Makepeace, Captives of War: British Prisoners of War in Europe in the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Bart Ziino, ‘ “Always Thinking in the Other Part of the Globe”: Australians and the Meanings of Wartime Correspondence’, in Proximity and Distance: Space, Time and World War I, ed. Romain Fathi and Emily Robertson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020), 149–64.

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Loneliness, the Love Letter and the Performance of Romance 5 Roper, Battle, 7. 6 Carol Acton, ‘ “The Delightful Sense of Personal Contact that Your Letter Aroused”: Letters and Intimate Lives in the First World War’, in Landscapes and Voices of the Great War, ed. Angela Smith and Krista Cowman (London: Routledge, 2017), 86. 7 Ziino,‘Always Thinking in the Other Part of the Globe’, 149–64. Joy Damousi also examines the role of emotion and war in the Australian context, through the memories and bereavement of widows who lost their soldier husbands during or following the World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. See Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 42. 8 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 81–2. 9 Clare Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7. 10 Katie Barclay,‘Doing the Paperwork: The Emotional World of Wedding Certifcates’, Cultural and Social History 16 (2019): 5. 11 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 61. 12 Ibid. 13 Maintaining intimate connections was not just important for couples who were romantically and sexually invested in one another. As Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta demonstrate in this volume, platonic friendships relied on the exchange of correspondence to mediate distance and maintain their bonds while they were apart. 14 For in-depth research on the role of letters in maintaining relationships and fghting loneliness during war and separation in the 19th century, see Elaine Chalus, ‘ “My Dearest Tussy”: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Freemantle Papers, 1800–14)’, in A New Naval History, ed. Quintin Colville and James Davey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 47–69. For other studies on letter-writing and emotions among military and naval families pre-WWI, see Eva Wyss, ‘From the Bridal Letter to Online Flirting: Changes in Text Type from the 19th Century to the Internet Era’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9, no. 2 (2008): 225–54; Timothy Roberts, ed., “This Infernal War”: The Civil War Letter of William and Jane Standard (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2018); Donald Elder, ed., Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003); Christopher Hager, I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Ruth Carter, ed., For Honor, Glory & Union: The Mexican & Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haynes Lytle (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Bridget María Chesterton, ‘Composing Gender and Class: Paraguayan Letter Writers during the Chaco War, 1932–1935’, Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 3 (2014): 59–80; Sante Lesti, ‘One Writer, Many Writings: The War Diary and Letters of Guerro Botteri’, Revue des études slaves 88, no. 4 (2017): 683–97. 15 Barclay,‘Paperwork’, 1. 16 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 51. 17 Carolyn James,‘Letters’, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2016), 121. 18 Susan Matt,‘Recovering the Invisible: Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions’, in Doing Emotions History, ed. Susan Matt and Peter Stearns (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2014), 44. 19 Svendsen, Philosophy, 16. 20 Letter from Dorothy Williams to Malcolm Keshan, 17 Mar. 1941, Keshan Papers, AWM, PR06082. 21 Letter from Thomas Neeman to Barbara Neeman, n.d. 1942, Neeman Papers, AWM, PR01034. 22 Letters from Barbara to Thomas, 30 Aug. 1942, 14 October 1943. 23 James,‘Letters’, 122. 24 Letter from Katharine McCall to Robert Cowper, 20 Feb. 1943, Cowper Papers, AWM, PR03428. 25 Ibid., 25 Feb. 1943. 26 Letter from William Wiseman to Florence Wiseman, n.d. Nov. 1942, private collection in possession of the author. 27 Letter from George to Marjorie, 26 Aug. 1943. 28 Katie Barclay,‘Space and Place’, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2016), 22. 29 Letter from William Lambert to Doreen Lambert, 24 Oct. 1940, private collection in possession of the family.

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Emma Carson 30 Christmas Postcard from Frank Bissaker to Norma Bissaker, 4 Oct. 1942, Bissaker Papers, AWM, PR04208. 31 Christmas Postcard from Frank to Norma, 4 Oct. 1942. 32 Diana Barnes,‘Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters’, in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 124–5. 33 Letter from William to Florence, 14 Aug. 1942. 34 Letter from William to Doreen, 16 Apr. 1941. 35 Letter from Dorothy to Malcolm, 12 Mar. 1941. 36 Letter from Robert Graham to Jane Melrose, 12 Feb. 1945, Graham Papers, AWM, PR05486. 37 Letter from William to Florence, n.d. Nov. 1942. 38 Ibid. 39 Letter from Robert to Katharine, 20 Feb. 1943. 40 Letter from Katharine to Robert, 24 Mar. 1943. 41 Katie Barclay,‘Gossip, Intimacy, and the Early Modern Scottish Household’, in Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe, ed. Heather Kerr and Claire Walker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 195. 42 Letter from Mabel Allen to Thomas Allen, 12 Jan. 1943, Allen Papers, AWM, PR00364. 43 Letter from Frank to Norma, 18 Sept. 1942. 44 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1941. 45 Letter from William Dodsworth to Frances Dodsworth, n.d. 1941, private collection in possession of the family. 46 Letter from Helen Williams to Harry Williams, n.d.,‘Thursday’, Williams Papers, AWM, PR04411. 47 Letter from Harry to Helen, 14 Nov. 1944. 48 Letter from George to Marjorie, 12 Oct. 1943. 49 Ibid. 50 Letter from William to Florence, 8 Oct. 1942. 51 Carol Acton,‘ “You Yourself Are Here Now Looking Over My Shoulder as I Write”: Emotional Dialogue and the Construction of a Shared Intimate Space in First World War Letters’, L’Atelier 8, no. 1 (2016): 201–2. 52 Letter from William to Florence, 8 Sept. 1942. 53 Letter from George to Marjorie, 24 Aug. 1943. 54 Marjo Kaartinen and Miira Vuoksenranta’s chapter in this volume similarly explores how close friends who were separated by life circumstances imagined different ways to transcend the physical distance between them. 55 Letter from William to Doreen, 31 Oct. 1940. 56 Letter from Albert Gerrard to Margaret James, 21 Mar. 1943, Gerrard Papers, AWM, PR03111. 57 Letter from Malcolm to Dorothy, 16 Mar. 1941. 58 Letter from Dorothy to Malcolm, 7 Apr. 1941. 59 Letter from George to Marjorie, 14 Nov. 1943. 60 Ibid., 28 Nov. 1943. 61 Ibid. 62 Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides and Filippo Cordaro,‘Self-Regulatory Interplay between Negative and Positive Emotions: The Case of Loneliness and Nostalgia’, in Emotional Regulation and Well-Being, ed. Ivan Nyklíček, Ad Vingerhoets and Marcel Zeelenberg (New York: Springer, 2011), 68–70; Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 85. 63 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 62. 64 Letter from Albert to Margaret, 30 Apr. 1943. 65 Letter from Katharine to Robert, 3 Mar. 1943. 66 Ibid., 15 Mar. 1943. 67 Letter from Robert to Katharine, n.d. 1943. 68 Letter from Thomas to Mabel, 30 Mar. 1945. 69 Keith Snell,‘Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living’, Open Psychology Journal 8 (2015): 63. 70 Bound Alberti, Loneliness, 204. 71 Ibid., 48. 72 Letter from Albert to Margaret, 30 Mar. 1943.

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Loneliness, the Love Letter and the Performance of Romance 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ibid. Ibid. Letter from William to Florence, 4 June 1943. Letter from George to Marjorie, 1 Apr. 1944. Ibid., 19 Apr. 1944. Letter from Katharine to Robert, 23 May 1943. Letter from Robert to Katharine, 13 Mar. 1943. Sarah Pinto,‘Researching Romantic Love’, Rethinking History 21, no. 4 (2017): 577. Svendsen, Philosophy, 30. Letter from Albert to Margaret, 23 Feb. 1943. Letter from Harry to Helen, 14 Nov. 1944. Letters from Frank to Norma, 12, 15 Sept. 1942; 8, 9 Oct. 1942. Ibid., 12 Sept. 1942. Letter from George to Marjorie, 26 Aug. 1944. Ibid., 22 Apr. 1942.

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30 VOICES FROM LOST HOMELANDS* Loss, Longing and Loneliness Deborah Simonton Countless tears and immeasurable anguish during all those years. And always that one question: why all this brutality, and who has been given the right to infict it? Despair and loneliness. Helgi-Alice Päts1

‘One night I had a bad dream, and when I woke, I said to my sister, “they are going to arrest me in the next few days”’.2 Thus, Milja Tamm, a young Estonian teacher, was arrested and deported on 19 February 1946. Already her fancé had been deported, her brother-in-law arrested and disappeared and, later, her sister and baby nephew were deported. Hers is one narrative about the diffculties and confusions faced by people in the Baltic states during the Second World War, when they were occupied three times—by the Soviet Union, Germany and the Soviet Union again. Sometimes their ‘crime’ was to have survived. People manage loss differently and experience grief and loneliness in various ways. For some expressing emotions is one stage in recovery, but it is also a key facet in remembering—and remembering so as not to forget the causes of that loss. One collection of Estonian women’s life stories captures that essence in its title, She Who Remembers Survives.3 Covering broadly the years of the Second World War and Soviet deportations in the 1940s and 1950s, this chapter contextualizes the life stories of three Estonian women who were deported and examines how they conveyed their sense of loss of family, boyfriends, country and a remembered past. In doing so, it refects on issues thrown up by life-writing including not only the need to articulate and remember feelings, but also self-representation in a post-war world. The chapter examines the impact of trauma and memory in the lives of three women and explores how issues of culture and language infected their articulation and remembrance of loneliness. Loneliness operates on multiple levels and is infected by culture and expectations. It is subjective and thus varies by how people ‘feel’ loneliness. It is not about being alone but is a state of mind that can be drawn from a variety of situations and articulated in diverse ways.4 This chapter argues that while loneliness underpins all three life stories, it is expressed as loss or longing, while loneliness is almost absent. Their losses included family, friends, home but also, and importantly, loss of self and loss of homeland. In Estonia, homeland is especially poignant given the recent histories of the country and

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the values imposed by the values embedded in Estonian culture. and the longing for a lost past is palpable in these accounts. The chapter begins by discussing issues of emotion, loneliness, trauma and memory. It then examines the geopolitical situation of Estonia and the deportations. The next section then examines the three life stories in detail, exploring their narrative and emotional responses. The fnal section draws out the relationship between culture, loss, longing, nostalgia and loneliness.

Life-Writing, Memory and Trauma The chapter focuses on three women who were deported, all born just at the end of the First World War and as Estonia declared independence: Helgi-Alice Päts (1917–1988) daughter-in-law of a long-standing, controversial, right-wing Estonian politician, Konstantin Päts, Estonian President when the war broke out; Milja Tamm née Post (1917–2014), the young schoolteacher who opened this chapter; and Minna Tshudesnova, (1918–2012?) a farm girl who married a Communist schoolmaster and later a Russian national.5 They represent three different experiences, one of a woman who was part of a well-known political family, one a schoolteacher, both deported to the Soviet Union, and one who was deported by the Germans to Poland. These three life stories come from Carrying Linda’s Stones, An Anthology of Estonian Women’s Life Stories edited by Suzanne Stiver Lie, Lynda Malik, Ilvi Jõe-Cannon and Rutt Hinrikus. The title references the mother of the hero of the Estonian foundation epic, the Kalevipoeg, and refers to the burdens women carry in support of their nation. The theme of nation and homeland also permeate the life stories in this chapter. All three autobiographies were previously published in Estonian and read by my colleague Tiina Jääger and her daughters, Liis and Kadri, who contributed their commentary to this chapter. The editors of Carrying Linda’s Stones gave priority to narratives which represented a family’s life, ‘illustrating not only the forcible disruption and separation of families, but also the emergence of new networks of solidarity under survival conditions.’6 This selection criteria thus had an impact on the kinds of emotions articulated in these stories. The subtext of the collections was that memory was a device to remind us of what happened, or to explain what happened, to these women and women like them. They were published in Estonia with its layers of complex political history and the potential for blame and guilt. Importantly, the authors knew they would become public, and that they were writing for a public audience. The tone of all three is one of survival and strength under a variety of horrifc situations. How we capture the sense of loneliness matters. As historians of emotions have long agonized over, the recognition and interpretation of emotions is highly subjective and numerous variables shape how we ‘see’ them.7 This includes what form they take. For example, obviously if we are dealing with a written memoir, like these life stories, we cannot see the gestures and facial expressions that accompany the thoughts and memories. Grasping loneliness in the stories which follow is slippery for several reasons then. Partly it is about how emotions are articulated and how we as readers perceive them. This refects what we are told, how we are told it and how it is translated for us. Even decisions by the editors of Carrying Linda’s Stones prioritized survival and strategies of solidarity, which implies the obverse of loneliness. The loneliness that infuses these stories is often not stated, and the use of the Estonian words for loneliness is almost non-existent in the texts. In Estonian there are two words or expressions translated as loneliness, although their sense is different. Üksindus can mean solitude, as in ‘she spent a few days in complete solitude’, but it also conveys a feeling: she felt a terrible loneliness/had pain and loneliness in her soul.

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In contrast Üksildus conveys a lack of spiritual intimacy: the feeling of loneliness grabbed the soul/Being away from home created a feeling of loneliness. In this context, loneliness is often used as compound word together with feeling: Üksildustunne or feeling loneliness and combined with the verb tundma üksildust it means to feel loneliness.8 Nevertheless the authors tended not to comment overtly on loneliness and feelings of loneliness. Instead, their references are oblique. As Tinna said, ‘the “tricky” part is, that they explain, but never say it directly. This is loneliness (üksildus) that I can hear behind the words.’ Loneliness is not readily extracted from feelings like loss and longing which contribute to how these women refected on their removal from family, friends and country. This distance, upheaval of the deportation and sudden loss of everything around them constitutes Lars Svendsen’s situational loneliness.9 As Svendsen argues:‘Longing is a necessary component of loneliness’, implying a desire to ‘overcome the physical or mental distance between yourself and someone you care about.’10 It can readily be applied also to a place, or something like home and nation. Distance matters; it makes contact diffcult and not knowing what is happening at home and to family, friends or even your country can be a component of loneliness. It is not necessary to be alone to be lonely; these women were seldom alone or in a solitary situation. Robert Weiss’ six categories of ‘relational provisions’ argue for the importance of relationships on emotional health and that ‘the absence of attachment results in the loneliness of emotional isolation and the absence of social integration in the loneliness of social isolation.’11 Thus even in the company of others, a deep sense of loneliness can pervade their beings, as they feel the loss of attachment, nurturance and the longing for family and friends. Voices of the past come to us through a variety of biographical materials: letters, diaries, and autobiographies. ‘Life stories’ are a specifc form of life-writing, either written or told by the subjects themselves. Unlike biographies, which were seen as useful for the ‘facts’ they presented about the past, we read life stories for ‘the beliefs, ideas and subjectivity of their authors, and for the insight they offer into how people saw and understood themselves and their worlds’.12 Life-writing has burgeoned in areas that have suffered severe trauma, including displacement, war and violent oppression. Emphasis on suffering and bearing witness are key features of this subset of life-writing, and theorists suggest that a new culture of confession has emerged.13 This is echoed in the stories of these Estonian women. Yet several questions arise that are pertinent to how we read the stories and to how the authors share their emotional states. We need to consider how writers recall, select, shape and present their lives. Knowing why the stories were written is important. In these cases, they were part of a movement to recall and register the effects of the deportation. This only adds to the questions about the role of the political context, both during the deportations and at the point of writing. We must try to understand the rhetoric of self-representation and interrogate issues of truth and fctionalizing. Performing the act of authoring the story is central to creation of personal identity. Barbara Caine argues that it is the job of the historian ‘to explore and understand the stories and the ways in which individuals represented or performed their lives because it is those performances that stand as their public record’.14 How do they wish to present themselves; what has the author chosen to tell us, and why? Thus, we consider the act of selfrepresentation and the problem of truth and fctionalizing. In theory, we know the audience they were written for, but in practice remaining family and friends had a vested interest in the stories told. All three women left children behind and they have set up family history sites. The reasons for producing these autobiographies varied considerably. Sometimes it was for the beneft of children and grandchildren and the writers are therefore speaking to them, or for

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them to hear. Helgi-Alice Päts’ son was not only alive but very much in the public eye at the time his mother was writing, for example. Sometimes they speak out as a denial of victimhood, as a way of losing some of their sense of passivity of victimhood; by defning themselves they set aside the story inficted on them years ago. All three women emphasize incidents of rebellion and determination to stay alive as ways of taking agency in the midst of their terror. There can be a therapeutic value of the act of telling. In some cases, by performing their predicament, victims move towards transcending it.15 This motive is echoed in Milja’s continuance of her story to include her rehabilitation. As historians, we do not know if these accounts were cathartic or not. And in the fragility of Estonia’s political history, we also ask what they chose not to tell us. For example, in choosing what period to speak about, these stories bear some relation to slave narratives in that they often start,‘I was born’.16 They also may be performative in the way that slave narratives were in that their ‘existence testifed to the humanity of their authors. Their words helped emancipate them.’17 There are also issues of provenance that fgure here. The stories were submitted to competitions and found their way into a museum. They appeared some years later in this collection, which leads us to ask what happened to the texts in-between, what editing and self-editing has taken place. A native Estonian, Rutt Hinrikus, one of the initiators of the archive and its longtime director, selected the entries based on her detailed knowledge of the stories, aiming for ‘generational spread, geographical location, social class, political orientation, public prominence, and post war residence’.18 However, she also abridged some of them. Notably, they were not translated by the same person either, although the editors were meticulous in a multiple checking process of translation to ensure that the original tone was retained. Translation is a specifc issue here, and we will see that the same story is told with different infection and vigour by two different translators. This makes uncovering emotional registers even more diffcult. The stories were published some 40 years after the events they relate. Memory plays a role in reminiscences and is sometimes reliable and sometimes not with distance from both time and place. Similarly, trauma as a concept infuses these stories and raises questions about the character of memory and whether, and how, traumatic episodes were remembered. Freud suggested trauma could only be partially remembered and memory tended to return constantly and fragmentedly. Laine Loo, a doctor who escaped from Tartu to Sweden as the Soviet front came nearer in 1944, says, I grew up in a completely different world than the one which surrounds us today. I would like to preserve some of those memories. Understandably, what a person remembers depends mostly on the emotional content of the events, hence my memories are not objective. Everything has gone through a selective sieve.19 Literary theorists point to this instability of autobiography and to the elements of fction which are part of it. Historians fnd this trickier, but still argue that autobiography gives shape and context to historical events and insight into how people thought about it.20 We may not accept their absolute veracity, but they are a form of testimony that can serve to illustrate the experiences of a whole group. Life stories of traumas also act on other levels. One is the way they feed collective memory, and indeed elicit an empathetic response from those who may not have experienced the trauma themselves. They may also sometimes help set up a form of memorialization that displays more anger, hatred and feelings of revenge than those displayed by the victim herself.21

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Situating Estonia A key to the Baltic states is that, like Poland, they lie between Germany and what was the Soviet Union.22 Between 1918 and 1920 Estonia established the Republic of Estonia and won a war of independence against the USSR, pushing the Soviets out of the country and gaining a full peace treaty. As international tensions escalated in the 1930s, the republic became embroiled in the machinations of Germany and the USSR resulting in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939. A secret protocol stated, in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of infuence of Germany and the USSR.23 Faced with Soviet military build-up, the Estonian government, led by Päts, agreed to allow the USSR to build military bases and post 25,000 troops in Estonia for the duration of the European war. During 1940, as Hitler ‘repatriated’ German nationals from Estonia, Estonia deposited gold reserves abroad, suggesting they understood what was to happen. On 14 June 1940, German troops entered Paris; on 16 June the USSR sent Estonia an ultimatum to establish a ‘cooperative’ government; on 17 June, a further 90,000 troops entered Estonia; and on 19 June, the Soviet Union incorporated Estonia. On 22 June 1941, Germany violated its pact with the USSR and declared war against the Soviet Union, crossing the Estonian border on 7 July. Thus, within the space of just over two years, Estonia was occupied twice by different forces and would be occupied again in 1944 when the Soviet Union reconquered Estonia, driving the Germans out. This was relevant to the deportations because any suggestion that a person or family was disloyal to the occupying Soviets was a fundamental reason for deportation, and fghting with the Germans, whether conscripted or not, applied. A common detention was frst to arrest and send victims to prison, Pagari or Patarei, both in Tallinn, which were used mainly for pretrial detention, while Pagari was the main site for interrogations. Then they were deported, usually frst to hard labour in the east, and then as exiles until their sentence was complete. Figure 30.1 shows the key sites of deportation for the women in this chapter. Over 21,000 people fed from Estonia to Germany between 1939 and 1941 with the Soviet invasion. Furthermore, by summer 1941 most of the elite, about 9,400 people, including Päts, had been arrested and deported to Soviet prison camps, and/or killed, and about 17,000 additional people had been exiled. Some 33,000 were also conscripted into the Soviet army. Under the German occupation, by early 1942 all the thousand Jews still in Estonia were exterminated and a further 6,000 Estonian citizens were executed. Others were deported to Poland, including Tshudesnova. In February 1944, the Soviets broke the Leningrad blockade and, though stalled, the Soviet attack started on 17 September; the German army retreated quickly and, despite an organized resistance, the Soviets reconquered Estonia by 24 November 1944. At the post-war conferences, the Soviet Union successfully persuaded the Western allies to leave the Baltic countries to them. Members of the resistance movement were arrested and sent to prison camps, as were Estonians who had served in the German or Finnish armies, including Tamm. A second main wave of deportations took place in 1949 and continued throughout the Stalinist era, including Päts a second time. During the war, out of a population of just over 1,000,000, Estonia lost over 200,000 people: executed, killed in action, imprisoned, deported, mobilized, forcefully evacuated and fed.

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Figure 30.1 Map showing key deportation sites for Helgi-Alice, Milja and Minna. © David Hastie

The Voices Helgi-Alice Päts’ (Figure 30.2) story was published the year she died, in 1988, and before independence, at a time when national feeling and the pressure for independence was building. It was printed in Vikerkaar (Rainbow) a journal established by the Soviets as part of perestroika, an attempt at openness and reform, which became a well-read voice for Estonians, with 36,000 copies published in 1988. Her story is different from the others in that she was one of the best educated of the biographers; she was politically aware, articulate and refective in ways that the others tend not to be. She was also the daughter-in-law of the president of Estonia, Konstantin Päts, and as he was a widower, she managed his household at Kloostrimetsa farm, north-east of Tallinn (Figure 30.3). As a result of their political profle, she and much of the family were ‘detained’ by the Russians in 1940, taken east with them and kept under house arrest in Ufa, Bashkortistan (Figure 30.1). When the Soviets joined the war in June 1941, deportations began and Konstantin Päts (KP— her abbreviation) was interrogated more often: ‘a feeling of horror seized us’. She suggests that their status was the main reason for detention:‘They had comprehensive plans for liquidating our family’.24 She was certain it had been long planned—a view supported by historical documents. Leaving for another interrogation four days after the invasion, he said, ‘We’ll see what happens child’. ‘Those’, she writes,‘were KPs last words to me. . . . And so they went, my husband and KP,

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Figure 30.2 Helgi-Alice Pats (left) with husband Viktor, son Matti, Konstantin Päts, his son Leo and his sister-in-law Johanna Peedi, 1934. Source: With permission of the Estonian National Archives, EFA.24.0.138145, Fond: Päts, Konstatin—Eesti Vabariigi president (AIS).

Figure 30.3 Map of Republic of Estonia. © David Hastie.

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and they never returned.’25 At the outset of her account, her tone is solicitous of her father-in-law and says little about herself. She contrasts his stoicism and disbelief that this could be happening with the others’ response: ‘All of us were crying except KP’. He answered that he had already shed all his tears for the Estonian nation.26 Her ‘feeling of horror’ and crying at this loss are the frst indications of the despair that underpins much of her narrative. When she was arrested, she refused to leave her young sons but was tricked into doing so:‘My return was fve years later when my younger son was no longer alive.’ He had died of starvation in a Soviet orphanage.27 This subdued response clearly covers a deeply felt sense of loss that she cannot express. She spent six months in solitary confnement, and her emotions burst through in her description of this period: with only hunger, cold and lice for companions. Countless tears and heartache during all those years! . . . in the midst of despair and loneliness [üksindus], a uniformed man stepped into my cell . . . I had been sentenced to be imprisoned [for fve years] . . . for being a ‘socially dangerous element’.28 This use of üksindus conveys the sense of a terrible loneliness, like a pain in her soul. She ended in a prison camp, Turinsk, about 250 kms north-east of Sverdlovsk. In time she discovered that her sons were in two different orphanages and was able to correspond with the elder, Matti. She managed to get work in the hospital rather than forest work. In 1945 an amnesty was announced, but as she waited to leave and fnd her remaining son, she was told it did not apply to her, presumably because of the family’s political past: ‘Unimaginable cruelty! Such power must give enjoyment to many.’ She had served fve years punishment:‘punishment! For what? What had I done and to whom?’29 Her anger and frustration clearly echo her desolation, and her sense of loss and longing underpins her words throughout her narrative. She was released a year later in June 1946. While walking to Turinsk to get a train to Ufa, she recalled, refecting,‘Dear mother and father, here walks your daughter, totally humiliated and punished by Soviet power, and without her husband, younger son, home and homeland. Why?’30 The bleakness of her comments strikes us as she tries to put things back together. She evokes the losses she feels and her longing for husband, son and homeland. Finding temporary refuge on a foor while she waited for paperwork for her son, she remembered praying,‘I prayed for my dead son and said the Lord’s prayer.’ Having telegraphed her family about her return to Tallinn, she notes simply,‘Nobody met us at the station.’31 Her tone of emptiness represents the isolation and aloneness she feels. Her sense of vulnerability and of feeling abandoned permeates her words. Back in Tallinn, she earned her nursing diploma in 1949, while reteaching her son Estonian, which he had completely lost. ‘How I wish that I could end my story here and say that brutality and war had ended, but for me it was not yet over.’32 She was regularly interrogated:‘Days and weeks passed . . . And always the question remained with me: why don’t they leave me alone?’ She was summoned again on Women’s Day 1950, and instead of going directly from work, she stopped at home, blessed her son and put a toothbrush soap and towel in her bag. Again, she was pressured to ‘work with’ the NKVD, refused and was immediately arrested. She was sentenced to ten years and sent to Patarei prison in Tallinn, then to Lasnamäe (ironically close to her former home at Kloostrimetsa), before being sent to Bakanski sovkhoz (state farm) in Kustanayskaya oblast (region) (Figure 30.1). When Stalin died, her sentence was reduced to fve years, so two years remained to serve. Even then, she was interrogated again. Her story ends with ‘fear had seized me once again . . . may these passages serve to remind us that home and homeland are our source of strength during these stormy times and the suffering caused by darkness.’33 Her principal response throughout the text is one of anger, especially at 459

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the cruelty and brutality she experienced, and with her powerlessness. This is notable because it does not surface to the same level in the other stories. Since survival is also about not losing one’s self and one’s self-esteem, her anger at being deported not once but twice is part of her response to this loss and her way of staving it off, of protecting who she was. While the emptiness of loss, longing and loneliness permeate her whole narrative, she is the only one of the three women who uses the word loneliness. Like many authors of memoirs, Milja Tamm (Figure 30.4) starts her story with her birth and describes a happy childhood on the Island of Hiiumaa (Figure 30.3). Unlike Helgi-Alice, she brackets her deportation with lengthy descriptions of her life before and after, ending in 1989 when she was ‘rehabilitated’. This fuller story speaks to the importance of the normalcy she perceived as preceding her deportation and the ‘return’ to a new normalcy just before independence, thus contextualizing the deportation as extraordinary. When away at school she had been required to record daily life to overcome bad habits. She had also constantly struggled with homesickness. Although she thought this gave her experience of writing and refecting on her activities, her narrative describes what happened and what she did, with very little refection except on choices she made that she regretted.34 In 1942, when she lost touch with a close friend, she only notes, ‘That was to be her last letter to me. She disappeared from my life.’ And of the family of a close friend,‘Unfortunately I have no idea what fate lay in store for that family. I hope they managed to escape before Estonia was occupied.’35 When her brother-in-law returned from

Figure 30.4 Milja Post Tamm. Source: Used by permission of her daughter, Ulvi Tamm.

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escaping from the German army and was then arrested by the Soviets for having served in the Home Guard, she records,‘He was deported to the Norilsk lead mine labor camp. He died there in 1953. His son has no memory of his father, only photos.’36 Despite expressing the state of loss, she rarely comments on how she felt about it. Like Helgi-Alice, the blandness of her words cover deeper emotions that she cannot or will not express. A bright pupil, she left the island and went to Tallinn, graduating with distinction and becoming a peripatetic primary school teacher on Hiiumaa, returning home on Saturdays on bicycle or skis. She then became Head at Puski Primary school, replacing a deported headmaster. Her constable fancé, Villem, was also sent to the gulag, as the Soviets retreated. She had seen him last in Kärdla in 1940:‘That was the last time we saw each other.’ He had managed to throw a letter, in English, out the train window, that she still had:‘I waited for him. I had no idea I would have to wait 10+5 years!’ When she visited his mother in 1943, after receiving her teaching diploma, ‘[we] wept together as we poured over photographs’.37 This loss again is expressed in a matter-offact tone which hardly reveals what she felt; only the exclamation mark and describing weeping over photos opens a door into her feelings. She was confronted by Soviet soldiers who chopped down the doors of Pusksi school in October 1941, demanding she and the pupils ‘evacuate’ with them. I found myself in physical combat with the soldiers. Luckily, Villem had taught me a few police moves and I defended myself furiously. I managed to jump on my bike, and fed home through the forest, which I knew to be mined.38 With the arrival of the Germans, she continued teaching and was encouraged to pursue a teaching degree. Moving to Kärdla School, she went to a doctor with bad headaches and was diagnosed with an overactive thyroid, so she became a proofreader so she could juggle work with treatment. She details the political context of the newspaper offce, including its Soviet ‘spy’. Increasingly called for interrogation, she fnally left the job. This is when she had the bad dream mentioned at the start of this chapter. Arrested that day, in 1946, her ‘offenses’ included not being shot by the Germans while teaching school, working during the German occupation and writing poems with Estonian nationalist sentiments.39 Like Helgi-Alice, she was frst put into solitary confnement, then sent to Patarei Prison: I lost all track of time especially in solitary confnement. I was searched. They cut the buttons off my coat, blouse and suit jacket, pulled the elastic out of my underpants and removed the zipper from my skirt. I regretted that I had not worn a dress!40 Having previously suffered a nervous breakdown, she feared the nightmare of a recurrence and ‘decided to eat everything they gave me and to survive. I was too young to give up.’41 The preservation of self became paramount. After being sent to the notorious Pagari prison, she was sentenced to ten years forced labour and fve years of exile, considered a ‘light’ sentence. While awaiting transport, she encountered a former school friend and shows one of her few bursts of emotion, revealing the restraint that infuses her account: ‘What a chance meeting! We hugged, kissed and wept. . . . We had so much to talk about. Her cheerfulness helped me to regain some of my own lust for life.’42 Sent to Lasnamäe then on to the Komiss Ivdellig death camp (Figure 30.1), despite her health issues, she was declared ft to work and set to hard labour. Women in these situations, like Milja, often commented on their loss of femininity, of how what was demanded of them clashed with what was usual for Estonian women. While many were rural women and worked hard, her comments on the lack of humanity speak to this loss: 461

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I was to become a human ‘tractor’, and was assigned to a timber felling squad. The winters were especially harsh. No one had suitable clothing and we were constantly freezing. We made shoes from birch bark and used the same to insulate our clothing and to pad our wool socks. When we returned to barracks at night, the frst thing we did was thaw out our feet. . . . In the morning, guards collected the corpses of those who had died in the night. Their bodies were thrown into a large pit . . . until there was enough for a truckload. They were then taken and buried in mass graves in the wood.43 Note the baldness of the tone and the short simple sentences. Tiina Jääger called it ‘one of the scariest descriptions’. Furthermore, Milja commented on fears engendered by the loss of menstruation: One truly remarkable phenomenon common to all Estonian women during imprisonment was the fact that we ceased menstruating . . . while happy to be relieved of the annoyance, we also wondered if we had been rendered sterile . . . we still hoped one day to resume normal lives and . . . to have children.44 This echoes loss of femininity and self, and it references longing for normalcy. When she was assigned lighter duties due to her health,‘My greatest pleasure was to be able to tear the number labels from my clothes and to feel like a human being again.’45 In these ways, the experience of isolation and loneliness overlapped with these other experiences of fear and destruction of self. Lack of outside contact was a fact of life, and one destined to enhance their sense of isolation and loneliness:‘We had no contact with home. I received my frst letter from my parents at Christmas 1947. My sister Linda sent me a parcel. I was overjoyed but aware that it had been a sacrifce for them.’ The guards stripped her of the goodies, but she cynically said ‘to whom could I complain?’ and was obviously annoyed when they returned nothing to her.46 As Tiina emphasized, the ignorance of what was happening to family and friends was a key feature of the loneliness these women experienced. Knowing that things were well could help alleviate it. As Helgi-Alice also explained, ‘Let these lines in this booklet be a reminder that the life force of all of us comes from home and homeland on our journeys through today’s storms and nightmares.’47 Milja received only one letter from Villem because they were always moved:‘But I hung on to the words, “You are the only one for me!” It gave me hope that we would meet again one day’. Home, family and homeland were essential anchors to stave off hopelessness, longing and loneliness.48 The remainder of her exile continued with lighter duties, and more freedoms like walking around the camp, going swimming and sharing a room in a house outside the zone with four others. She also earned money through supplying handicrafts to offcers’ wives using scraps and camel hair. Pressured to spy, she refused, but heard nothing more about it. Following the riots in the labour camps in 1954, described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a tribunal in 1955 brought release for many and abolition of the period of exile on their sentences. She was one of the lucky ones. However, she delayed her return two years to earn some money before presenting herself to her family:‘I did not want the Communists to have the pleasure of seeing me arrive in Estonia in rags.’ Again, she claimed her sense of self. Her family reunion was the most poignant of her commentaries on feelings of loss and loneliness: Yet, when we fnally met, it was as though all three of us had become paralyzed, irreparably injured and broken by all that had befallen us. The sadness of the years apart and the joyful reunion were too overwhelming, and would not ft together in the same heart or the same tears.49 462

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To complete the story, she and Villem found each other, married, had two girls and were together until his death in 1973. In November 1989, she was called to Pagari prison yet again: ‘I panicked, fearing the worst and arrived with the greatest trepidation. I was surprised by the friendliness with which I was greeted.’50 In fact, she had been called because of an article she had written mentioning that she had applied for rehabilitation a year previously. Thus, she was rehabilitated, and Villem posthumously, and she received compensation for herself, her two girls and Villem. Like Milja, Minna Tshudesnova’s (Figure 30.5) account begins with her birth in November 1918 and has a long nostalgic prelude to her deportation, describing farm life, her discovery of love, her early married years and her departure for Tallin, where her husband was increasingly involved in communist matters. The tone is nostalgic, excited and romantic. As there are two English versions of this story, this chapter quotes from Carrying Linda’s Stones. Signifcantly, as she had married a Russian communist who came to her village as the schoolmaster, she suffered more at the hands of the Germans than the other autobiographers. The declaration of war, she says, That word hit my brain like a fash of lightning. . . . We clung to each other, and all of the world’s pain sank upon our shoulders . . . I could feel only one thing: he was going to war. He was going away. We would be separated.51

Figure 30.5 Minna Tshudesnova (right) at the launch of Carrying Linda’s Stones, 2006, at the Occupation Museum. Source: Photo by Kalev Lilleorg, with permission from Ohtuleht Kirjastus (Ohtuleht Publishers).

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Articulating the loss and loneliness that this presaged, emotionality colours her account throughout. She was young, aged only 20, and with a small daughter. When her husband left, they agreed it was safer that she did not know where. ‘I shall return’, he said. She commented, ‘I never saw him again.’52 This exact statement echoes through all the stories. She heard a few days later that he had been arrested:‘I wept and screamed, the greatest cry of my life, and my greatest screaming: they held me until no more voice came out.’ Curious people asked her mother: ‘Does she cry? No, I never cried. I did not want to lose my health. I was sure that one day he would return and then I would need my health and beauty.’53 In this she invokes a deep sense of loss and dread. She was soon arrested and sent to Tartu prison, where political prisoners were incarcerated with ‘thieves, speculators and petty offenders’. During the fve months there, she was required to make handicrafts; she was then sent to Patarei prison and set to cleaning offces. She was there a year: as the front approached they [the Germans] started to execute prisoners at night. They did not have time to do away with all of us. Some were shipped to Germany to wait their turn at the gas chambers and cremation ovens. I was one of them.54 Again the terse tone reappears. Sent to Stutthof (now Sztutowo) in Polish territory (Figure 30.1), she was housed in the Jewish sector of the camp and describes the brutal wakening each day, smacked regularly with an unavoidable knout, then climbing back into bed, four to a bunk: ‘Of course the Aryan god had not designed an oven for us “russische Schwiene” (Russian pigs).’55 Clearly she was not alone—sharing a bunk and working with others—but the tone nevertheless conveys a sense of aloneness, almost of holding oneself in as a bulwark against feeling. Starving, bitingly cold, one day they sat and peeled potatoes in cotton dresses, freezing to the benches, beaten on the hands to hurry. At the end of the day 4 had to share a single loaf of bread—no potatoes for them. Ill with typhoid and other fevers, they were force-marched west as the front came nearer, and it was necessary to empty the camp. However, as they moved further into Poland, she and a few other young women managed to escape and went east looking for the Russians. They ended up in a cellar between the fghting forces. Again, we are aware that she was not alone, but the others are only a collective ‘we’, not individuals with whom she suggests any intimacy or emotional support. We crawled out of the basement at night and, in the ruins, found a frying pan with fat still on it. We scooped it off with our hands and stuffed it in our mouths. Large bloody hog bones also lay around. We picked them up and tore away at the pieces of meat still on them. Explosions occurred around us, but we were seized by a primitive instinct to eat!56 At this point, she comments on their ‘starvation-dimmed memory’ returning, [as if] the past was behind a veil of mist’.57 Thus, she reminds us that emotion and memory might have been shoved to the background in the struggle to survive. They managed to get to the repatriation camp and set to work again, like prisoners. She was rescued by a Russian, Volodya (Valli), who taught her Russian, and as they were hauling the women away from the camp in 1945 at war’s end, he told the superiors, ‘I will take that one with me.’58 She married him in 1946, staying in Poland and Germany even when allowed home. She says she stayed for love. Her return home, in 1948, however, reveals more about her feelings: everyday my longing for home increased. . . . I yearned to be back home and fnally the day arrived when we started the trip . . . I was very excited, to the point of shaking 464

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from anticipation. I stood by an open window and drank in my homeland’s landscape, made possible by the white nights.59 Comparing the two versions, one from Linda’s Stones and one from She Who Remembers, gives a favour of the differences in translation: But my homesickness grew by the day. . . . The month and a half were over, and we began the journey to Estonia which I had anxiously awaited. . . . I was tense like a guitar string. I was shaking. These were the white nights before midsummer’s eve. Through the train window I drank in the landscape of my native country. I laughed. I cried.60 This suggests a more subdued emotional register in Carrying Linda’s Stones, which affects how we understand these stories. Her anticipation, however, indicates how deeply she felt her longing—and the reference to ‘white nights’ summons the Nordic identifcation with their homeland and what it represents. Her daughter had been left behind when she was arrested and her description of their frst encounter demonstrates some of the trepidation between them; it took a year for the daughter to call her mother—‘Then my joy was boundless’—her only emotive comment and yet it contrasts to the despair of surviving and holding on to her identity in captivity.61 Her story continued with the death of her husband from cancer in 1972 and the deaths of both sons as young adults, one in a road accident and the other assassinated over an accounting swindle. Reminiscing and grateful for her two surviving daughters, she concludes, I still have two daughters and the birth of seven grandchildren has given me great happiness. I get strength from them. My circle of friends has become smaller and I miss their company. But one must pick oneself up and move on. Otherwise, the night will surely take you away.62 A sentiment that fts all three women’s stories.

Reading Loss, Longing and Loneliness History comes alive through the accounts of real people and their experiences; it is never simply a subject to be studied; it is a shared story that must be passed on from generation to generation. Minna starts by saying ‘I do not know how life stories are written’ and thus reminds us that the stories are personal, and the style, language and content are for the writers to shape and determine.63 They can say as little or as much as they want. As survival was often the justifcation for the stories, it is not surprising that some of the deeper emotions and thought are subdued. Self-preservation and privacy must have been a feature of their restraint, a common characteristic of trauma narratives. A pragmatic and sometimes stark tone colours the stories. The language is often unemotional, constructed around a narrative of what they did and who they saw and with little attempt at engagement. The discussion of the most horrifc experiences is often articulated in a laconic or matter-of-fact tone. The stories carry emotion, but for the most part, the emotional register is restrained:‘I never saw him again’. There is an emptiness, a hollowness, to their voices as they tell their stories, a hollowness that appears as indifference but is actually establishing distance, reclaiming themselves from the traumatic experiences, obviating their lives as victims, becoming human again. Emotional restraint was one way of surviving. Getting on with things and even avoiding feeling was a deliberate strategy. But cultural differences are also important. The stories carry 465

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Figure 30.6 The launch of Carrying Linda’s Stones, 2006. Minna on left and Suzanne Stiver Lie on the right, with other contributors to the collection. Source: Photo by Kalev Lilleorg, with permission from Ohtuleht Kirjastus (Ohtuleht Publishers).

emotion and are sometimes harrowing for it, expressing, anger, anguish, misunderstanding and perplexity (why?) and hoping that it will all end soon as an incentive to survive. In conversation with Tiina, Kadri and Liis, it was apparent that in Estonian culture people were socialized to hide their emotions. As Tiina said,‘In our cultural space, our feelings are not expressed verbally, especially by previous generations. If I read these texts, I feel loneliness and longing, anxiety and worry between the lines.’ This was also the response of Professor Marjo Kaartinen, a Finnish cultural historian, who said she could feel loneliness behind the words.64 By beginning well before the war itself, often in childhood, and capturing an Estonia of youth and good, if often hard, times, these accounts are nostalgic in that they are marked by a sense of loss, a poignancy which can lead people to idealize the world left behind. Nostalgia can be deployed in ways that depart entirely from reality, in that some elements of the former world are mourned, despite the fact that they were never there in the frst place.65 However, this allows them to depict an image of what Estonia meant to them. As an anonymous author wrote,‘Those were beautiful times—the former life in the country. But beauty fades fast. The war destroyed homes, women were widowed and children left without a father. . . . All of Estonia wept.’66 Loss is not always expressed and often appears between the lines as longing—for home, for a lost past, for a lost idea.

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These stories help shape an idea of what a newly re-independent Estonia was trying to recover: ‘Some worlds cannot be restored, but even the belief that they can be revived almost always involves a mixture of memory and history which distorts the past.’67 Recounting their experiences allows the women to tell the story of their loss and therefore keep it alive. Kadri underpinned this idea, saying, ‘There is no loneliness because Estonian people always have their so-called roots with them. There is a home somewhere and it provides support, soul power and strength. It doesn’t matter how diffcult the current situation is.’68 The attachment to Estonia was one strategy to keep going, to avoid thinking about loss and loneliness. Home, homeland and nation were their cultural underpinnings. Not knowing what was happening to loved ones, not knowing what was happening to home, was a source of not only deep loss but contributed to a sense of existential loneliness. Minna references this vacuum once she gained some freedom in her camp: ‘I began to get a clearer picture of what was going on in the outside world. The prisoners were kept in complete ignorance.’69 She and others were most emotional when they received letters or presents from home and, like other letter writers in this volume, felt bereft without them—although making barely any comment. An exception is from Heli, in She Who Remembers Survives. When her father was taken, she only commented,‘We had no idea this was our very last conversation’, but when she was separated from a new-found companion on the journey, her losses were intensifed, and she writes, I realized I had lost my country, my father, the people close to me, and also the newfound Kalev. Until that point it had only been a journey . . . It had been easy to keep up my courage and optimism in the company of other young people. Now despair swallowed me up, tears started to fow from my eyes.70 Svendsen indicates that situational loneliness is usually due to a life upheaval, associated with a sense of loss, and both he and Weiss suggest that this form of loneliness can be partly overcome by building relationships with others. Yet people can fnd a place in a group or community and still feel lonely and can also feel social loneliness even with a close attachment to someone.71 Rarely do we see who Minna, Milja or Helgi-Alice are with. Personal relationships in the camps are seldom mentioned. In the conclusion to the volume, Stiver Lie and Linda Malik refect on the character of female support and, using material not in the stories presented, acknowledge that relationships with other women helped them to survive, even to the extent of playing question and answer games to alleviate boredom.72 They clearly are not alone, but the stories do not open this wider world of relationships to us, nor do we see that these alleviate the isolation, loss and longing they feel. The stories refect on layers of loss, longing and loneliness. In addition to longing for home and family, loss of their humanity went particularly deep, as did a loss of femininity. Writing about Latvian women deportees, Mara Lazda argues that ‘Siberian exile confronted women on an intimate level and thus challenged their identities as women.’73 The loss of self-esteem created by a lack of privacy and control over their appearance and bodies went deep. Several stories relate how they had to expose their bodily functions to others, with little or no opportunity for privacy of any sort. As Milja commented ‘There were no toilets so we just “sat” there in the truest sense of the word’ and ‘Twice a day I was taken with men to outside latrines—rows of holes in the ground. For such a situation there was no time for embarrassment.’74 They were also longing for traces of humanity in midst of horror. That these women showed resilience and tenacity goes without saying. And they did survive: all three lived long lives. They were undoubtedly lonely, if only obliquely articulated. They also passed their memories and

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Figure 30.7 Portrait of Helgi Päts in her youth, n.d., Source: With permission of the Estonian National Archives, ERA.1278.1.443, Fond: Päts, Konstatin—Eesti Vabariigi president (AIS).

approaches to life on to the next generation. As the grandchildren of Helgi-Alice Päts (Figure 30.7) refected on her infuence, She has helped us make sense of our lives, developed our ability to think and decide. We have learned from her that even in the darkest days, there is always something bright and that you must always hope, even when others around you have already lost hope.75

Notes * This chapter was written with the assistance of Estonian friends and colleagues Tiina Jääger, Kadri Emberg and Liis Jääger. Their insights, help with Estonian versions and tracking down miscellaneous details have been invaluable. I am grateful for their interest and assistance. All references are to a recorded conversation and Tiina’s notes based on Estonian versions. 1 Helgi-Alice Päts, ‘The Reminiscences of Helgi-Alice Päts’, Personal Memories of the Fate of the Family of 1939 Estonian President Päts, The Singing Revolution, accessed 11 Nov. 2021, https://singingrevolution. com/tsr-library-educational-edition. 2 Suzanne Stiver Lie, Lynda Malik, Ilvi Jõe-Cannon, Rutt Hinrikus, eds, Carrying Linda’s Stones: An Anthology of Estonian Women’s Life Stories (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2006), 254.

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Voices From Lost Homelands 3 Tiina Kirss, Ene Kõresaar and Marju Lauristin, eds, She Who Remembers Survives, Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-Soviet Life Stories (Tartu: University Press, 2004). 4 See K.D.M. Snell,‘The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History’, Social History 42, no. 1 (2017): 2–28; Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, trans. Kerri Pierce (London: Reaktion Books, 2017); Chikako Ozawa-de Silva and Michelle Parsons, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness’, Transcultural Psychiatry 57, no. 5 (2020): 613–22. 5 ‘Helgi-Alice Päts Mäletused’, Vikerkaar 11 (Nov. 1988): 78–82; 12 (Dec. 1988): 76–9; Milja Tamm,‘See tuul on hullvinge’, in Me tulime tagasi, ed. Ruut Hinrikus (Tartu: Kirjandusmuuseum, 1999), 214–50. Minna Tshudesnova wrote two versions; this one is abridged from Ruut Hinrikus, ed., Eesti rahva Elulood: Sajandi sada elulugu kahes osas, I osa, vol. 1 (Tallinn: Tänapäev, 2000), 159–71. Another English version is in Kirss et al., She Who Remembers Survives, 298–317, and a section appears online, Enno Tammer, ‘Eluhood’ [Biographies], EestiPäevaleht [Estonian Daily], last modifed 31 Dec. 1999, https://epl.delf.ee/ artikkel/50781246/elulood; Another translation of Helgi-Alice Päts is online, see note 1. On Konstantin Päts, see Thomas Lane, Artis Pabriks, Aldis Purs and David J. Smith, The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002), 14–23. The stories were collected in life history competitions sponsored by the Estonian Literary Museum’s Cultural History Archive which houses over 5,000 such stories almost half of which are women’s. 6 Lie et al. Carrying Linda’s Stones, 21. 7 William M. Reddy, ‘Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions’, Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 2 (1999): 256–88 and ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327–35; Barbara H. Rosenwein,‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45; Jan Plamper,‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–65. 8 Thanks to Tiina Jääger for her research and discussion of these terms. 9 Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, 28. 10 Ibid., 14. 11 Robert S. Weiss,‘The Provisions of Social Relationships’, in Doing Unto Others: Joining, Molding, Conforming, Helping, Loving, ed. Zinck Rubin (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 25. 12 Barbara Caine, Biography and History, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan International, 2019), 75. 13 Ibid., 77. 14 Ibid., 98, see 94–8 on performativity and biography; see also Hermione Lee,‘transcript’, interviewed by Ramona Koval, Edinburgh International Book Festival, ABC National Radio, 25 Nov. 2005. 15 Jay Winter, ‘The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity’, in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 19. 16 James Olney,‘ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature’, Callaloo 20 (1984): 46–73. 17 Winter,‘Performance of the Past’, 19. 18 ‘Introduction’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 22. 19 Laine Loo,‘An Exiled Physician’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 426. 20 Caine, Biography and History, 78–9. 21 Jane Caplan,‘ “Indelible Memories”: The Tattooed Body as Theatre of Memory’, in Performing the Past, ed. Tilmans et al., 143. 22 This section draws on Lane et al, The Baltic States, 11–14, 23–6, 33–8. 23 Lane et al., Baltic States, 23. 24 Helgi-Alice Päts, ‘Twice Deported: The Story of a President’s Daughter-in Law’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 226. 25 Ibid., 228. 26 Ibid., 223. 27 Ibid., 228. 28 Ibid., 228–9. 29 Ibid., 232. 30 Ibid., 233. 31 Ibid., 235. 32 Ibid., 236. 33 Ibid., 241.

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Deborah Simonton 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Milja Tamm,‘An Evil Wind’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 247–8. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 355, 356. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 250–5. Ibid., 257. Ibid. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 260. ‘Helgi-Alice Päts Mäletused’, 79. Translated Tiina Jääger. Tamm,‘An Evil Wind’, 261. Ibid., 271–2. Ibid., 275. Minna Tshudesnova, ‘Love Rules’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 284, also ‘Minna’s Story’, in She Who Remembers Survives, ed. Kirss et al., 303. Tshudesnova,‘Love Rules’, 285. Ibid., 285, also Tshudesnova,‘Minna’s Story’, 304. Tshudesnova,‘Love Rules’, 287. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 290. Tshudesnova,‘Minna’s Story’, 308; this is not in Carrying Linda’s Stones. Tshudesnova,‘Love Rules’, 291. Ibid., 293–4. Tshudesnova,‘Minna’s Story’, 311. Tshudesnova,‘Love Rules’, 295. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 277. Finnish and Estonian are sister languages, part of the Finno-Ugric group, which includes Hungarian. Winter,‘Performance of the Past’, 20. Anonymous,‘Tiiu’s Story’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 184, 185. Winter,‘Performance of the Past’, 10. Kadri, quoted Tiina Jääger notes. Tamm,‘An Evil Wind’, 268. Rutt Hinrikus,‘Deportation, Siberia, Suffering, Love: The Story of Heli’, in She Who Remembers Survives, ed. Kirss et al., 70. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, 28; Robert S. Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975). Lie et al., Carrying Linda’s Stones, 553. Mara Lazda, ‘Women, Nation, and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941–1957’, Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 3. Tamm,‘An Evil Wind’, 262, and Suzanne Stiver Lie and Lynda Malik,‘Carrying the Stones: Coping with Adversity’, in Carrying Linda’s Stones, ed. Lie et al., 551. ‘Helgi-Alice Päts Mäletused’, 80. Translated Tiina Jääger.

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31 ‘WE ARE STILL ALIVE’ Refugees and Loneliness Joy Damousi

In his poem ‘Refugee Blues’, the British poet W.H. Auden captures the desperate plight of German Jews escaping Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War. Written in New York in 1939, his poem assumes the voice of a Jewish refugee discussing alienation, dispossession and loneliness of having no offcial home and occupying a position of statelessness. Auden describes the condition of the shocking loneliness of homelessness: ‘Once we had a country and we thought it fair / Look in the atlas and you’ll fnd it there / We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now’. There is no place for them, and their marginalization is also embedded in their unconsciousness. Auden writes,‘Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand foors / A thousand windows and a thousand doors / Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours’.1 The most powerful description in the poem is in the way Auden captures that space between life and death: the paradox of statelessness is that without a passport refugees are ‘offcially dead’, when they are still alive. It is not as simple, however, of fnding a ‘home’ for loneliness to be alleviated. One of the key themes that emerges in the writings by refugees in the 20th and 21st centuries is that even when refugees fourish in a new country, a perpetual state of detachment from the host culture generates an alienation that is invariably manifest as loneliness. The social isolation that comes with what Fay Bound Alberti describes as ‘rootless’ is one of the defning features of loneliness of refugees and the stateless. Bound Alberti argues that homesickness is key to the experience of loneliness. She notes that the ‘lack of belonging’ is ‘most profound in those who are homeless and refugees, who have no place to call home’. There is a ‘particular kind of loneliness’, she says, found among what she called the ‘roofess and rootless’, whose refugee status brings ‘feelings of isolation linked to the symbolism of home, food and tokens of domesticity’.2 In considering the ‘rootless’ and refugees, Bound Alberti alerts us to the psychological stress often experienced by refugees, including grief and sadness in a new isolated environment. The association with home and the dislocation from it—being apart from family, home and the sensory familiarity of home—can lead to isolation. Material culture of everyday life, which fosters social connectedness and well-being, is lost and this, too, can create a profound sense of loneliness.3 Nevertheless, this is not a tale of a passive emotional state. Loneliness, however defned, can also lead to a proactive, energized and complex response to the state of rootlessness.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331848-35

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It can inspire action and resilience, as many of the experiences discussed in this chapter demonstrate. All the stories discussed here are a celebration of agency and action, intervention, resilience, survival and rebuilding. Each of the refugee writers acted in discussing and writing about their state—an act of agency and empowerment in itself—and they have brought their experiences to the public sphere, sometimes with a brutal honesty. They also rebuilt their lives after the devastation of war in ways which meant loneliness was not a fxed, immobilizing or paralysing state; however, the cultural and psychological detachment that comes with a form of rootlessness cannot be easily extinguished, as each of the writers painfully demonstrates. In what follows the place of loneliness is discussed in the writings by refugees across the 20th and 21st centuries. In doing so, the aim is to capture the complexity and multi-layered perspective of loneliness in the experience of refugees and chart this over time, cognisant of the signifcance of context, time and place. The self-representation in these texts is diverse, as the authors choose very different ways to capture loneliness in their stories of the refugee experience. Alienation and the sense of the ‘other’ especially defnes these experiences. This discussion is necessarily restricted by the sources: the chapter relies on published texts and what is available in English. This restricts the discussion and perspective to educated, articulate and well-known writers. But with those selected here, we can begin the discussion of how refugees throughout history have articulated loneliness and how it is manifest. Perhaps because sources are challenging in studying loneliness across time, the study of loneliness and refugees has remained largely the domain of medical and health researchers. This is a rich and insightful body of work which has been vital in identifying the issues of well-being and social integration among recent refugees by health professionals. This research has been essential in informing public policy and highlighting the urgent need for attention to be given to support the mental health of refugees.4 More recently, cultural and philosophical studies of loneliness have explored the category in these terms.5 To historicize the concepts of loneliness and refugees, the chapter contextualizes the texts and the circumstances of displacement that have generated these writings. While there are compelling differences in the circumstances of displacement, the theme of perpetual detachment permeates these refections and writings.

Armenian Genocide, 1915–1923 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen (1945) The Armenian genocide of 1915–1923 resulted in the deportation, death marches and genocide of the Armenian people under the Ottoman Empire. It has been estimated that over a million and a half were murdered, including the deaths of women, children and the elderly, in death marches to the Syrian desert by the Ottoman and Turkish military forces. Sexual violence and abuse, enslavement, starvation and disease also marked the attempted destruction of the Armenian peoples.6 The Islamization of Armenian Christians took place, with an estimated 100,000–200,000 Armenians Islamized, which involved the relinquishing of culture and language.7 The refugees from this genocide dispersed around the globe, with a signifcant number settling in America. Many already had relatives who had escaped previous massacres of Armenian Christians in the early 20th century. Prior to the First World War, there were around 60,000 Armenians in the America—mainly young single men—who settled in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. At the end of the First World War this number rose to 78,000, with another 30,000 arriving between 1920 and 1924.8

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Leon Surmelian (1905–1995) was one of these refugees. Born in 1905 in Trabzon (Trebizond in English), he settled in America in 1922 as a young man, aged 17. In 1915, during the genocide, Surmelian lost both his parents. Together with his three siblings, he was adopted by a family friend, a Greek doctor. He then travelled to Constantinople where he lived in an orphanage and attended school. In 1922, he was assisted by the Armenian Union of Agriculture to travel to America to undertake further study, arriving at Kansas State University to undertake his undergraduate studies. There he rose to become a prominent writer, academic and scholar in America and internationally. His works include Apples of Immortality: Folktales of Armenia (1958), The Daredevils of Sassoun (1964) and, in nonfction, Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness, as well as the autobiography I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen (1945).9 Before leaving for America, he attempted to ‘Americanize’ himself. I wore a new suit, the cheapest I could fnd . . . Unfortunately it was not cut in the smart American style, and I suspect it was made of an army blanket, but my new shoes were brown Oxfords, with pointed toe-ends like the Americans wore . . . I shaved myself for the frst time with an American safety razor, brushed my teeth with an American toothpaste, having already begun to Americanise myself.10 But the process of Americanization proved to be more complicated. Writing 23 years after his arrival in America, Surmelian is direct about the crushing loneliness he felt as an Armenian refugee in a new land. ‘I became desperately lonely’, he writes, despite arriving to study and making immediate connections within the university community: ‘Not so much because I was cut off from my people and friends, but because I did not meet a genuinely intellectual American student, one who wanted to devote himself to the welfare of his country or humanity and was interested in more than getting ‘credits’ for a degree’. He felt loneliness in not connecting with his young fellow students,‘culturally and spiritually they were far behind my companions in the old world’.11 But he felt the pangs of loneliness acutely and missed the contact with his friends and family: Sundays were the hardest. On Sundays I could have battered my head against the walls of my room, gone mad with loneliness . . . Anything from Europe . . . caused an acute nostalgia. I counted the days and the hours when I should receive a letter from Europe.12 Both he and his siblings had been disillusioned with their respective countries, and this dislocation further sharpened his sense of isolation: I sighed to myself when I saw American children playing before their homes and witnessed scenes of happy family life behind lighted windows at night, as I walked alone through the streets, sick with loneliness and memories . . . All that winter I could neither laugh nor smile . . . What I sought in America was here, somewhere—I would fnd it.13 His profound sense of dislocation is felt most acutely when small, domestic events or scenes reminded him of his past life. He recalls one night walking alone when he was stopped by the sound of a young woman playing the piano,‘hesitantly, by a young woman practicing her lesson,

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I thought—as girls in our street in Trebizond used to do’. He was immediately transported to home and craved a connection through a love of music: Those familiar repetitious notes were infnitely sweet and perfect to me. When the piano stopped, the magic was gone. I blessed its player in my heart, and lingered before that house, hoping the young girl I imagined would come out, and I would see her and thank her. I had the feeling she would recognise me, would remember we had played hopscotch and skipped rope together—in a dream world long ago. Yes, we knew each other very well, though we had never met, and she was American and I Armenian. I walked onto my room for another solitary night.14 The most powerful writing by Surmelian about loneliness comes towards the end of the memoir. It is set on New Year’s Eve when Surmelian refects on his previous life and with it the deep isolation that he feels beneath the superfcial façade of assimilation. He is an American citizen, but he can never forget his previous life. What can he do on New Year’s Eve when past memories are still with him; they still defne who he is and so he can never forget them. He reassures his reader he feels honoured to be an American citizen and would fght for America ‘any time’. But despite his apparent assimilation into America, and its culture and politics—‘I voted for President Roosevelt and l repeat, I’ll fght for America anytime’—the haunting memories of the past remain, and he remembers them alone. The alienation and detachment permeate the narrative; he is a lonely drunk on New Year’s Eve. How can New Year’s Eve be a possible cause for celebration when the past reminds him of what he has lost? What can you do in free and happy America when your playmates and schoolmates, the kinds you grew up with, your companions in grief and joy, in hunger and misery, fellow dreamers during your dream age, are gone, lost? . . . When the pretty girls you loved in kindergarten and grade school are dead and their bones lie unburied, or they are in captivity, forgotten by their own nation?15 He attempts to forget his past, the past New Year’s Eve of long ago, but it impossible. I’m an American citizen, sincerely attached to the Constitution . . . but I ask you, how can a guy forget his childhood? There are millions like me, tonight, in free, happy America, haunted by their early years, which are always, everywhere, the happiest. The world is full of sorrow and memories, of stories that cannot be told, of poignant images that have no stories. He remembered one mournful New Year’s Eve thinking if ever he would have a ‘real meal’: ‘It seemed as if that day would never come. We had forgotten how it felt not to be hungry—what white bread tasted like.’16 The image of his dead mother—a victim of the Armenian genocide haunts him:‘It would be quite impossible for me to speak of my mother. When I caught a hazy glimpse of her tonight, I drank four martinis one after the other’.17 The theme of acceptance and yet detachment and a deep isolation within American culture makes this writing haunting and compelling. It shares these themes with another short but powerful and enduring piece which explores similar aspects of loneliness, the classic essay on refugees and statelessness, We Refugees, by the distinguished philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

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Second World War (1939–1945) Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ (1943) The Second World War and its aftermath created the largest refugee crisis the world had seen to that time. The devastation of fve years of confict created over 60 million refugees throughout Europe. If this includes those outside of Europe, the fgures rise closer to 150 million. The war created vast numbers of displaced persons, with over a million from Central/Eastern Europe in West Germany in 1945. These displaced persons lived in a suspended state, belonging to no country, only to the internment camps where they were held until they were repatriated and then given an identity.18 Europe was the centre of the devastation and havoc brought about by the war which resulted in expulsions, deportations and displacement and statelessness across the continent.19 The internationally renowned philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a German Jew, was one of those refugees who assumed several national identities because of her refugee status. Born in Liden, from 1906 until 1937 Arendt held German citizenship, from 1937 to 1950 she was offcially stateless and, fnally, in 1951 she was ‘American’ until her death in 1975. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fed Germany and arrived in Paris. In 1940, Germany invaded France. She eventually escaped to the United States in 1941, settling in New York, where she remained.20 For 18 years, Arendt was stateless, which meant she had no political rights, but while she was in Paris, she was politically active, organizing assistance for Jewish refugees to fee to Palestine. These ‘stateless years’,Young-Bruehl notes, set the foundations for her political theory.21 Arendt’s powerful refection on the status of a refugee and the emotions it engenders is captured in her searing, harrowing essay on negotiating refugee status, ‘We Refugees’. In the shedding of her identity to assimilate, she writes of the alienation of this act. Loneliness casts a long shadow. She is alone, belittled and humiliated as she is forced to relinquish her identity, culture, and the very core of her sense of self. To prevent loneliness and isolation, the way to develop new networks, having left community and family, is to create a new life by assimilating. Reinventing herself is her only choice, but it comes at a high cost. She captures this dilemma from a position of statelessness and the loneliness of shedding her culture, self and language.22 Arendt reminds us of what the refugee is forced to relinquish, the bedrock of stability and security: We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confdence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.23 In order to survive, the refugee is forced to relinquish all identity—suppress, repress and deny any previous life. This suppression creates a detachment and isolation, a loneliness:‘We were told to forget; and we forget quicker than anybody ever could imagine.’ This process of relinquishing a self is so complete that refugees are hardly ever remember their original language. But like Surmelian, Arendt describes how the memories of the past are haunting, cannot be forgotten and are often relegated to dreams. ‘I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams’, she refects. ‘But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.’24

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The superfcial optimism and cheerfulness expressed by those who are refugees in a foreign land simply masks the underlying depression and aloneness:‘There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.’25 The optimism expressed by the refugee is the ‘vain attempt to keep head above water’. But behind this ‘front of cheerfulness, they constantly struggle with despair of themselves’.26 ‘If we are saved’, Arendt writes,‘we feel humiliated’, and ‘if we are helped we feel degraded.’27 This humiliation and degradation refugees are forced to accept, as role-playing masks the trauma, the dislocated and detached way of being: ‘The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we like to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles.’28 The plight of refugees was to constantly change and shift one’s identity:‘Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can fnd out who we actually are.’29 The confusion of identity refected a permanent detachment from society: Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political, and legal status is completely confused. Lacking the courage to fght for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. The confusion is which we live is partly our own work.30 Thomas Dunn is correct in arguing there is profound loneliness in this essay. The perpetual state of detachment, alienation and disengagement that Arendt describes refects the lingering presence of loneliness.31 The precariousness of the life of the refugees Arendt describes, Dunn refers to as loneliness, as does ‘being detached from others [which] remains a constant’.32 Both Surmelian and Arendt write about the loneliness of the refugee through this detachment from the social world around them, despite or perhaps paradoxically because of efforts to assimilate within a new homeland. The refugee, they suggest, is in a permanent state of loneliness and isolation. Others write of the refugee experience of loneliness in different ways through different genres. In the next example, the discussion moves to the post-war era and from a focus on individuals to family. Loneliness is articulated here through nostalgia and grief in a distant land and how this amplifes loneliness in a refugee family.

Vietnam War (1944–1975) Kao Kalia Yang, The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2008) The Vietnam War (1945–1975) was a confict which led to three million people feeing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and 800,000 escaping by boat. The Hmong peoples were directly involved in the confict. The US trained and recruited Hmong peoples to fght against the North Vietnamese when they invaded Laos during the Vietnam War. This was a guerrilla army which was composed mainly of Hmong men and boys. This was termed the Secret Army, which was organized in divisions and regiments which assisted the United States. After the takeover by the North Vietnamese, Hmong refugees were forced to fee. They sought refuge in Thailand, where many lived in crowded and cramped conditions for several years. Refugees began settling in the United States from the mid-1970s, often dispersed across the country, which challenged their familial structure and created further diffculties in their adjustments.33 Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir, The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, traces her family’s resettlement in the US. Although she arrived with her parents and sister—so with support— she, her parents and her grandmother felt deeply nostalgic, at times in grief and lonely.34 One of themes in her memoir is that of invisibility. ‘My mother and father told us not to look at 476

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the Americans’, she writes. ‘If we saw them, they would see us. For the frst year and a half, we wanted to be invisible. Everywhere we went beyond [their home] we were looked at, and we felt exposed . . . On the streets, sometimes people yelled for us to go home. Next to waves of hello, we received the middle fnger.’35 Given this experience, the networks established by Hmong families were a source of knowledge and support in surviving in a new culture. These familial structures provided advice, pragmatic assistance, and a sense of community. Loneliness was diffused at least temporarily within these contexts where families provided an exchange of information and understanding of how refugees could survive. These conversations evolved around how they could seize back control of their lives. In one description, Kalia Yang paraphrased such a discussion: Which program was the best one to help a man fnd a job, the Lao Family Organization, formed by General Vang Pao, or the Hmong American Partnership, led by Hmong men who were on their way to being established already? Go to Hmong American Partnership, because they are less political than Lao Family. The key to survival was to ‘focus on the things we can control: ourselves’. But these networks and the pragmatism that drove them, hid an emptiness, as her family missed Laos, and their past lives. The ‘vision of America’ her parents promoted aimed to uplift her and her sister. Instead, it further revealed the cracks and gaps in their existence. ‘Their smiles and laughter were for us,to cover up the nothing in our lives.’36 The adjustment to America was challenging,especially when they were reminded of another life. With the passage of time, this sense of nostalgia did not abate, and in fact, it felt even more pronounced. Her parents ‘missed the weather of Laos, where it was like spring all the time and the rivers teemed with fsh’. She missed Thailand, where the family had spent time in camps. America presented new possibilities and so the family would be united—it ‘was supposed to be for all of us.’ Instead, it simply pronounced the loss of what they had:‘we were lonely, lost, and struggling every day at a life that constantly looked to the future for happiness’.37 Despite the harshness of where they had come from—refugee camps in Thailand—managing their situation in America was diffcult for her growing up. The stories she was told and heard made her grateful for escaping war, but she felt a pronounced sadness which exacerbated her loneliness. While she appreciated the sacrifces her parents had made and the conditions were hard in refugee camps,she found it diffcult to reconcile the narrative of the rhetoric of the opportunities in America and what it offered the newly arrived refugee. She noted how ‘hardness in life began in America’. The narrative was ‘We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said’, but in her observation, Watching them [her parents] struggle belied this fact. We are so fortunate to be young, new lives opening before us, they believed. And yet the life in school that opened before me made me feel old in a world that was struggling to be young. A silence grew inside of me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America.38 This sadness would at times overwhelm her. Kao Kalia Yang writes how her parents worked hard at assimilating,‘the long hours they spent trying to be American enough to get into the system so that they could feed us and our dreams’. But her grandmother did not do so: My grandma did not try to be American. She spoke only Hmong. She told stories from long ago. Most importantly, her scent and her clothes remained the same: full of herbs and full of colors, and my childish love for her bloomed into a fowering admiration.39 477

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Her grandmother remained defant in retaining her Hmong heritage and culture. In 1989, the families expanded, with newly arrived babies in many of the families they knew, including her own. It was ‘a big year for babies in my family. All my aunts and uncles except for one pair had a baby that year’.40 The family narratives these children would inherit would be different and take new forms. Generational change was taking place before her, and she acutely felt the burden on her and her generation to create a better world. But this, too, came with some lament of how memories of the past would be retained in the family. ‘All these new children would know was America’, observed Kalia Yang. Unlike her generation of refugees,‘they would have no refugee camps in Thailand to compare life here with’. They would inherit stories, and so the tragedy of war and the diffculties they experienced would be understood only through ‘fltered memories’. The responsibility and even duty lay on the shoulders of her and her family to ensure the world the next generation inherited was not marked by the dislocation and alienation that they had experienced as refugees:‘It was our duty . . . to make sure that these young Americans had a better world than we’d ever known. It was a big obligation, and I took it seriously.’41 While the arrival of children was cause for celebration, the identifcation of them as Americans and the ways they were named raised again a sense of increasing alienation, especially for her grandmother. This was particularly evident in the naming of children which was Americanized. When her sister, Sheelue was born, her grandmother held her and commented:‘Her name means love in Hmong’. Kalia Yang observes, I don’t know if Grandma resented all these names given to new babies without her—in Laos and Thailand, she had given out the names of her grandchildren. In America, some of the names were American, like Tommy, the name of a cousin Sheelue’s age. Her grandmother ‘couldn’t even say them, so she had to make Hmong versions’.42 The coming of the next generation brings a sense of renewal, of moving forward to the future. But it is also mixed with a sadness of another life now in the past. There is a melancholy in Kalia Yang’s writing, of the continued haunting of war, of the loss of loved ones, and of constant adjustments that were at times humiliating and overwhelming. Her parents would have nightmares; they ‘cried out in their sleep’. They would discuss their dreams, which were invariably about war: ‘the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts’. In their dreams, they remembered those ‘who had loved them back in their old lives’. They endured ‘stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night’. And yet the adults would continue to stress ‘how lucky we are to be in America’. Kalia Yang was not convinced.43 This detachment is further pronounced when a close family member died overseas, and the loss of place and home was further exacerbated. When her grandmother in Laos died, these feelings surged to the fore. She described receiving the news of the death of her grandmother: On the day that my grandma in Laos died, my mother was not home. The phone rang and Dawb ran into the kitchen to pick it up . . . She came close to me. I raised my eyebrow. ‘What?’ She whispered in English:‘The grandma in Laos is dead’. . . . it occurred to me that I did not know how to feel. The death was far away, in another country. But soon guilt would overcome her mother, for the choices she had been forced to make. Her mother had left her mother behind, to create a new life in America—a choice she was forced to make between her mother and her father and her children. These were devasting decisions. ‘Why does love in a war always mean choosing? Her mother or my father? The country that gave birth to her or the one that would give birth to me?’ 478

‘We Are Still Alive’

These choices came with great sadness, encapsulating the challenges of the refugee experience in this separation that her mother was attempting to protect her from. She observed, I had a glimpse of the world she was working hard to protect me from, to keep me young in, this education and pursuit of a life she never had a chance at. I had the freedom to stand strong in the wake of love and to perhaps choose my own mother— instead of a man.44 The death of her grandmother was a profound loss for her mother. It redefned her relationship with Laos, which was now severed forever.45 A connection to a world was lost with her grandmother’s death—the end of her connection to Laos and all that it represented became another source of deep, traumatic mourning. Her mother would comment,‘There is nothing left for me in Laos now’. This was a powerful observation, a signifcant marker in time.46 These themes of separation and detachment from Laos, cultural adjustment and a sense of loss precipitated a sense of loneliness. Studies of loneliness remains a key area of scholarly endeavour relating to the Hmong community. In a recent study, Cindy Vang, Pa Thor and Michael Sieng explore the loneliness of older refugee adults, citing factors of ‘betrayal, familial loss, instability, war violence, loss of social status, isolation, diminishing flial piety, language barrier, declining health, and lack of purpose’.47 While some of these experiences are common among the elderly in the community, they argue that older refugee adults also experience the effects of forced displacement and additional social and cultural disruptions.48 The study found that factors which infuenced loneliness included ‘the constant state of instability’ that ‘caused participants to feel lonely as their way of life shifted’.49 The period of displacement, when refugees moved from Laos to Thailand produced immense loneliness as participants endured traumatic events alone or collectively with their families as they fed Laos to Thai refugee camps. Familial loss and instability persisted as infuencing factors during the displacement phase. Loss of status and isolation emerged as two additional salient infuencing factors of loneliness.50 These two factors are central to the loneliness of refugees as the loss of social status was invariably humiliating and degrading. The isolation, too, from community, and emotional disconnection created a very pronounced sense of loneliness.51 ‘Through each of these phases’, the authors observe, the legacy of colonialism, ethnic oppression, patriarchy, racism, classism and ageism intersected to produce traumatic and complex social, cultural and political realities for these Hmong older adults. Hence, an underlying issue of disempowerment was pervasive in their narratives, ‘particularly for older Hmong women’.52 Moving to more contemporary times and to recent conficts, issues of isolation, detachment, dispossession and loss of status are recurring themes when considering how refugees experience loneliness.

Syrian War (2011–) Kassem Eid, Syria My Country: A Syrian Memoir (2018) The Syrian War, which began in 2011, produced the largest number of refugees since the Second World War. The civil war began as part of the Arab Spring protests against the Assad government. By 2015, it was estimated that 10.9 million people, almost half the population, had been displaced. As of 2022, there were 6.2 million internally displaced, 2.5 million of these were 479

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children. This war has generated many refections on war and displacement.53 The memoir by Kassem Eid, the journalist and human rights activist, titled Syria My Country: A Syrian Memoir, draws on personal experience of isolation and displacement to describe his predicament in feeing Syria at the height of the civil war. His sense of loneliness empowered him to become politically active and agitate against the Assad regime. His story is one where he can utilize his education and skills to promote human rights and speak out against repression, violence and dispossession. Eid begins his memoir with the memory of the day that changed his life. A chemical attack on 21 August 2013 on Damascus—two years into the Syrian confict—altered the course of his life forever. His memoir charts that shift, but he also shows remarkable resilience and strength. He lived in Moadamiya, which was destroyed by Assad forces, with infrastructure, schools and hospitals devastated. To gain the world’s attention, he began a hunger strike which he abandoned after day 26.54 On New Year’s Eve 2014, soon after he abandoned his hunger strike, he described his own loneliness. In other years, he would have been celebrating the coming of the new year; on this occasion,‘there were no new year’s parties in Moadamiya—only aimless and painful wanderings amid cold, silent ruins. My entire town was coloured dark shades of death and sadness.’ New Year’s Eve prompted reminders of the death of his brother, Waddah. On this occasion, it was compounded by further loss:‘And on this particular day my feelings felt crushed into a sadness so deep it was almost physically unbearable as I thought of everything I had lost.’55 Eid fed Syria for Lebanon, which was a dislocating, traumatic and deeply sad experience. Leaving one’s country he described as ‘one of the worst emotional experiences anyone can go through’. Although he felt safe, he was also ‘confused, afraid, disappointed’. It was strangers who offered him comfort and assistance when they did not need to do so. He felt a sense of betrayal from others, who he discovered were working for the Assad regime.56 Eid highlights his shame and sense of humiliation at accepting the assistance of strangers, but he was desperate for a sense of community and a connectedness, which strangers often unexpectedly provided for him. ‘In Lebanon’, he wrote, ‘I was stunned by the kindness of people I barely knew.’ He was ‘ashamed’ to receive their assistance, but he accepted it because he ‘craved more than anything the feeling that I had not been abandoned’. The comfort they offered him and provided security and sense a safety. Above all, he did not feel alone or crushing loneliness. Eventually, he arrived in America and began his tour, campaigning American policymakers and politicians to highlight the plight of the Syrian people. But in America, a terrible homesickness set in. He was campaigning, but only to other Syrians, not to Americans. And then he felt an overwhelming guilt. For him, there was a ‘political’ loneliness: Americans were not showing any interest in the Syrian cause. He was deeply disillusioned with the response, having believed that Americans would be more engaged with the issue: I had thought that, since the United States prided itself on its democratic values, the murder of civilians agitating for democracy would make a lot of Americans angry, but I didn’t realise until I reached the US just how ignorant about the world events the average American was.57 Then guilt set in: ‘I found myself constantly comparing my situation to the grim realities inside Moadamiya. I was homesick, and I felt a terrible sense of guilt because here I was, safe, while millions at home were suffering.’58 This emotional state, however, limited what he could do. It made him physically ill. While I was speaking, my head would fll with feeling of guilt, homesickness and shame. I knew that I had to speak out. I knew that if I stopped speaking out I could no longer 480

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justify my new life to myself. But I also knew that the tour was preventing me from healing; every time I stepped up to the lectern, I reopened old wounds.59 He eventually was granted asylum in Germany in 2016.

Conclusion With the onset of the most recent confict at the time of writing—the war in the Ukraine— separation, homelessness, isolation and loneliness continue to be themes that describe and characterize the refugee experience. As the writers discussed in this chapter illustrate, displacement and the loss that comes with it can create the shadow of loneliness even when refugees have established thriving lives in a new country. The state of cultural and even psychological detachment can be an enduring legacy of the experience of the refugee. But equally, resilience prevails as a powerful theme in all these writings. To capture this paradox, the chapter concludes with reference to a poem by the celebrated Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Born in Nairobi in 1988 and raised in London, her poetry about the refugee and immigrant experience of Somali refugees in exile has drawn international acclaim for its moving verse and emotional power. Her debut collection, Blessed the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, was published in March 2022. In ‘My Loneliness is Killing Me’, she describes meeting her uncle at a boarding house while Somali music plays.60 She captures a time past, when her uncle was ‘gorging on belonging’ but is ‘now alone every time’. The advice he gives to her of resilience and survival—‘be stronger than your loneliness’—is a profound and enduring message which has a universal, timeless resonance.61 Overcoming loneliness becomes a source of strength and empowerment in this message, a means not only to face the future but also to shape and, ultimately, to control it.

Notes 1 W.H. Auden, ‘Refugees Blues’, accessed 31 May 2022, https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/ w-h-auden-f5ffe9e1d295. 2 Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 13. 3 Ibid., 172–5. 4 Filiz Solmaz, Hülya Karataş, Hasan Kandemir and Abdullah Solmaz,‘Depression, Loneliness and Factors Infuencing in Syrian Refugee Children’, The International Journal of Clinical Practice 75, no. 5 (2021); Shanthi Johnson et al.,‘Social Isolation and Loneliness among Immigrant and Refugee Seniors in Canada: A Scoping Review’, International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care 15, no. 3 (2019): 177–90; Wen Chen, Shuxian Wu, Li Ling, Andre M.N. Renzaho, ‘Impacts of Social Integration and Loneliness on Mental Health of Humanitarian Migrants in Australia: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Public Health 43, no. 1 (2019): 46–55. 5 Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness; Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 6 See Alexis Demirdjian, ed., The Armenian Genocide Legacy (London: Palgrave, 2016); Rayond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 76–90; Acam Taner, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Bjornlund Matthias,‘ “A Fate Worse Than Dying”: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide’, in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 16–58. 7 Umit Kurt,‘Cultural Erasure: The Absorption and Forced Conversion of Armenian Women and Children, 1915–1916’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 7 (2016): https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.997.

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Joy Damousi 8 ‘How Armenians Came to America’, New England Historical Society, accessed 29 Apr. 2022, www. newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/how-armenians-came-to-america-and-what-theyll-never-forget/. 9 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen (London: Armenian Institute, [1945] 2020): ebook, Chapters 1–23, 134–4889. See also, Barlow Der Mugrdechian, ‘The Theme of Genocide in Armenian Literature’, in Alexis Demirdjian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide Legacy, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 273–86. 10 Surmelian, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen, ebook, 4646/4687. 11 Ibid., 4878/5356. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 4862. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 5106. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3, 97, 95. 19 Ibid., 89–94. 20 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2004), 2: 115–258. 21 Ibid., 113. 22 Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in The Jewish Writings: Hannah Arendt, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 264–74. 23 Ibid., 264–5. 24 Ibid., 266. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 268. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 270. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 271. 31 Dumm, Loneliness, 42–5. 32 Ibid., 44. 33 Cindy Wang, Pa Thor and Michael Sieng, ‘Infuencing Factors of Loneliness among Hmong Older Adults in the Premigration, Displacement, and Postmigration Phases’, Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 3 (2021): 3465–6. 34 Kao Kalia Yang, The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, [2008] 2017). 35 Ibid., 133. 36 Ibid., 137. 37 Ibid., 144. 38 Ibid., 151. 39 Ibid., 157. 40 Ibid., 165. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 174. 43 Ibid., 178. 44 Ibid., 187. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 189. 47 Wang et al.,‘Infuencing Factors of Loneliness’, 3464. 48 Ibid., 3465. 49 Ibid., 3471. 50 Ibid., 3472. 51 Ibid., 3473. 52 Ibid., 3478–9. 53 See Aeham Ahmad’s, The Pianist from Syria: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019); Marwa Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016). 54 Kassem Eid, Syria My Country: A Syrian Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 129–55.

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‘We Are Still Alive’ 55 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., 157. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 185. Ibid. Ibid. Alexis Okeowo, ‘The Writing Life of Warsan Shire: A Young, Prolifc Poet’, New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-writing-life-of-a-young-prolifc-poet-warsanshire; Alexis OKeowo, ‘Warsan Shire’s Portraits of Somalis in Exile’, New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2022, www. newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/warsan-shires-portraits-of-somalis-in-exile. 61 ‘My Loneliness in Killing Me’, in Warsan Shire, Blessed the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (London: Penguin, 2022).

483

INDEX

Abney-Hastings, Barbara 306 Abrams, Lynn 296 Abse, Leo 298 absence 77, 81–2 Acton, Carol 435, 442 Adair, James 305 Adam, Margaret 41–2, 44 Adams, Margaret 155 Against the Law (Wildeblood) 297, 299 AIDS 296 alienation: effects of 283; from home 138; and loneliness 423–8; natal 242–3; as punishment 377–8; of refugees 472; and slavery 239–40 Allen, Jessica 247 Allen, Mabel 440 Allen, Margaret 420 aloneness 444–8 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 26, 218 Anderson, Benedict 262 Anderson, Lars 226 Anderson, Warwick 429 Andersson, Lars 275, 297 anomie 4 Arendt, Hannah 474–6 Armstrong, R., Revd 165 Arnold, Joseph, Dr. 9, 327–9, 334–9 Art of Cookery (Glasse) 185 Asa-Asa, Louis 248–9 Assmann, Jan and Aleida 256 Astley, Thomas 108 Aston, Catherine 200 asylums 387–400 Auden, W. H. 471 Austen, Francis 353 Austen, Jane 185, 215, 353 autobiography 453–5, 465–7

Autobiography of the Working Class, The 268 Automat (Hopper) 1 bachelors 39–40 Bahīnābai 138 Bailey, Joanne 213 Barbour, John 195 Baring, George 275 Barnes, Diana 439 Bayard, Françoise 49 Being Alone in Antiquity (Descharmes) 18 Bell, George 367 Belsey, Hugh 234 Berridge, Virginia 170–1 Bewick, Thomas 213 Biography of Loneliness, A (Bound Albert) 113, 271 Biraha (Das) 141 Bissaker, Frank 438–9, 440, 447 Black Atlantic (Gilroy) 240 Blackburn, Elizabeth 274 Blixen, Karen 423, 426 Blount, Thomas 30 Bohls, Elizabeth A. 243 Book of Margery Kempe, The 17 Booth, William 150 Boothby, Robert 298 Botelho, Lynn 208, 211 Bound Alberti, Fay 3, 4, 75–6, 113, 125, 132, 163, 194, 196, 204, 207, 209, 211, 216, 226, 233, 267, 269, 270, 271, 273, 276, 282, 300, 329, 344–5, 359, 388, 428–9, 435, 445, 471 Bowlby, John 164 Bowman, Ann 209 Bradley, Emily 428 Branham, Mary 336

484

Index Brans, Isabella 210–11 Brazil, Angela 285–6 Brent-Dyer, Elinor 290–1 Bright, Timothie 26 Broken Heart, The (Lynch) 168 Brooke, Humphrey 214 Broomhall, Susan 329 Brown, Addie 81 Browne, W.A.F. 393 Bruce, Dorita Fairlie 286–7 Buchan, William 215, 229 Bulstrode, Richard, Sir 218, 220 Burnett, John 268 Burney, Frances 66 Burton, Mary Xaveria of the Angels 200 Burton, Robert 26, 218 Butler, Samuel 93 Byron, Lord 20, 255 Cacioppo, John T. 1 Cadogan recipe book 180–2 Caine, Barbara 454 Calder, Robert, Sir 353–4 Cannadine, David 166 cannibalism 187–8 Caput Bonae Spei Hodiernum (Kolb) 107–8 Caro, Annibal 103, 106 Carrying Linda’s Stones 453, 463, 465 Carter, Philip 215 Caryll, Benedicta 201–2, 204 Cathcart, Archy 230 Cathcart, Charles Alan 230 Cecil, William 213–14 Chalet School series (Brent-Dyer) 290–1 Charles II, King 202 Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz 62, 64 Charlotte, Queen 5, 61–71 Charter, Kathleen Daly 425 Chase, Josephine 283–5 Chettiar, Terri 151 Cheyne, George 92, 229 Chicago Centre for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience 1 Child Norice 382–3 Child, Frances James 376 Childe Harold (Byron) 255 children 267–76 Chitre, Dilip 141–4 Christ in der Ensamkeit 67 Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, The 26 Clark, Ralph, Lieutenant 9, 327–34, 338–9 Cleland, Robert, Revd 428 Clerk, Susanna 43–5 Clifton, Thomas 17, 163 cloisters 193–204 Cocks, Harry 150

Codrington, Edward, Captain 343, 348, 350, 352–6 Codrington, Jane 348–9 Coke, Mary, Lady 365 Coleborne, Catharine 388 Coles, Elisha 30 Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, A (Ray) 30 Collingwood, Cuthbert, Lord 346–7, 349–50, 353–6 colonialism 244, 328, 418–30 Comfort, Alex 154 communities: affective 329; alternative kinds 248–50; emotional 327–8, 335; formation of 245, 366; homosexual 298, 303–6; importance of 201–3; lack of 207; and old age 212; and poverty relief 208–9; relationships with 3–4; and solitude 111–12 Compendium of Medical Knowledge 103 Confessions of an Old Bachelor 39 Conolly, John 391, 396–7, 398 consumption 225–34 Cooke, Anthony 97 Cooper, Susan 163, 165–8 Corbett, Thomas 305 correspondence: and absence 81–2; and coping with loneliness 440–4; delays of 348; and emotional community 335; emotional language in 329; and expression of loneliness 349–50, 436–40; and friendship 404–14; and isolation 50–4, 64–71, 228–9, 297, 425; and maintaining relationships 351–2; and melancholy 230–1; and old age 211; purpose of 53, 352–3; and separation 77–8, 435–6; and spiritual solitude 201–3; during wartime 434–5 Cosmopolitan 155–6 Costello, Stephen 305 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The (Sidney) 5, 20–1, 28–9 see also Old Arcadia, The (Sidney) COVID-19 164, 169, 226 Cowley, Abraham 111 Cowper, Robert 437, 439–40, 446–7 Cowper, Sarah, Lady 211, 216 Cowper, William 216 Crane, Lionel 301 Crisp, Dorothy 272–4 Crispolti, Cesare 111–12 Critchlow, Dorothy 168 Crone, Phyllis 156 Cronje, Andrea 422 Crosland, T.W.H. 150 Crowston, Clare 58 Crozier, Anna 421, 429 Cruel Mother, The 381–2 culture see society and culture Currie, Adam 418 Currie, Jessie 10, 418–30

485

Index Dalrymple, Christian 41 d’Ancourt, Abbé 212 Dapper, Olfert 107 Darcy, Clare of the Annunciation 199 Dart, Florence 274 Das, Anjali 141 Das, Jibanananda 140–1 Davidoff, Leonore 76, 77, 270 Davin, Anna 273 death 312–14 Defence of Poesy (Sidney) 23 Defoe, Daniel 330, 334 Defoe, William 187 Delany, Mary 214 Deluc, Jean-André 67 deportation 458, 461–2, 464–5 depression 5, 92, 332 see also melancholy Descharmes, Bernadette 18 D’Ewes, Simonds 213 Dhasal, Namdeo 143–4 diaries: as companions 125–7; and domesticity 329–34; as historical documents 361, 413; purpose of 359–60 Diary of a Young Girl, The (Frank) 126 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Johnson) 30 Dimsie Goes to School (Bruce) 286–7 Dissertation on Workers’ Diseases (Ramazzini) 102–3 distance 52, 360, 364–7 Dodsworth, William 440 Domestic Medicine (Buchan) 229 domesticity: and community 329; importance of 76–7; and loneliness 329–34; maintaining 421–3; pleasure in 82–4; separation from 361–2; and sociability 327–8 Douglass, Frederick 246 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Abbé 92–3 Duchtung un Wahrheit (Goethe) 256 Duncon, Eleazar 214 Dunlop, John 359–71 Dupheis, Étienne 49–58 Durà-Vilà, Glòria 195, 204 Durkheim, Emile 151 Dwyer, Erin 246 Eckersley, Peter 164–5 Edwardians (Thompson) 268 Edwards, Elizabeth 413 Eid, Kassem 480–1 Einsamkeit 253, 256, 257–8, 260 Einsamkeit der Weltüberwinder, Die (Obereit) 68 elderly people: homosexual 305–7; isolation of 311–12; and loneliness 219–20; occupations of 213–14; and poverty 208–11; role of 213; and sociability 209–12, 214–18; and solitude 218–19 Ellis, William 393 Emma (Austen) 185, 215

emotions: and class 393–4; cluster of 3, 4, 204, 361; coping with 336–9; expression of 55, 65–6, 70–1, 425; and food 177; interpretation of 453; and language 329; loneliness as feeling 9; management of 214–15, 452; and masculinity 339, 343–4, 361; and modernity 151–3; and morality 48; navigation of 388; and objects 412– 14, 422; and place 374–82; practices 62; restraint 465; and society 4; study of 113–14 English Dictionary, An (Coles) 30 English Malady, The (Cheyne) 92, 229 entrepreneurship 75–85 Essay on the Nature and Cure of Phthisis Pulmonalis, An 225 Estonia 456–7 estrangement see alienation Eternal Now, The (Tillich) 2 Evelyn, John 24, 111 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (Reuben) 155 ‘Evil Men’ (Warth) 298 evolution 132 Falbo, Toni 269 families: care of 318–19; and food 180–1; isolation from 226–7; management of 350; and old age 213; relationships within 121–2; royal 61; size of 267–8, 270, 275–6; and support 477; and work 208–9 Far Off Things (Machen) 270–1 Farandy, Andre 233 Farnese, Alessandro, Cardinal 103 Fergusson, Allan 41 Ferrier, Susan 40, 42 Ficino, Marsilio 102 Fite, Elizabeth de la 67 food 177–89 Forss, Minna 404, 406, 408–9, 410–11 Fox, Henry Hawes 389, 393 Frank, Anne 126 Franklin, Adrian S. 141 Freke, Elizabeth 213 French, Henry 329 Freud, Sigmund 455 Friedrich, Caspar David 256 friendship: and correspondence 404–14; and identity 329; importance of 318–19; lack of 423–8; loss of 123–5; in lunatic asylums 395–7; nature of 66; and professional sociability 335–6; and spiritual solitude 200–1 Frost, Anne 337 Fujiwara san 311 Fuller, Elizabeth 180 Fuller, Margaret 410 funerals 182 Furlong, Andy 314

486

Index Gainsborough, Thomas 234 Galen 26 Gardner, James 349 Garrett, Don 98 Gascoigne, Margaret 200 Gates, Henry Louis 240–1 Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott 67 Gelthoff, Beatrix of St Teresa 199 gender 5, 25–6, 269, 272–3 George III, King 61, 64 Georges, Armand 167 Gerrard, Albert 443, 445, 447 Gilbey, Agnes 273–4 Gilroy, Paul 240 Gītagovinda (Jayadeva) 133–4 Glasse, Hannah 185 globalization 131 Glossographia (Blount) 30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 254, 256 Goldsmith, Sarah 66 Gómez, Alejandro 419 Gordon, Israel 162–3 Gordon, Suzanne 153 Gossop, Mike 156 Göttler, Christine 21 Goy, Mathilde 428 Grace Harlowe’s Sophomore Year of High School (Chase) 283–5 Graham, Mary 7, 225–34 Graham, Robert 439 Graham, Thomas 225–34 Granger, Fanny 422 Grave, Johannes 256 Grenville, Thomas 353 grief: and alienation from family 243; and food 179–83; and ill health 214; and old age 213–14; rituals 178; and solitude 233–4 Grognard, François 51 Gust, Onni 328, 338 Hadlow, Janice 66 Haggis, Jane 420 Halbwachs, Maurice 419 Hall, Catherine 76, 77 Hämäläinen, Helvi 126 Hamilton, Elizabeth 42, 44 Hamilton, R. Vesey, Sir 349 Hamlett, Jane 397 Hansen, Karen V. 81, 427 Hansen, Paul 320 Harnes, Helga 420 Harvey, Karen 82, 330 Haskell, Arnold 270 Haynie, J. Michael 76 Herzberg, Anna 410 Heslop, John 395–6

Hicks, Dorothy of St Francis 200 hikikomori 314–15, 317 Hill of Good-Bye, The (Currie) 418–30 Hill, Samuel 390 Hinrikus, Rutt 455 Hisinger, Augusta 404, 406, 411–12 History of Mary Prince, The (Prince) 238–50 History of the Royal Residences (Pyne) 70 History of the Two Indies, A 109–10 Hjelt, Vera 404, 409–11, 413 Hobbes, Michael 295 Hodgkin, Katharine 201 Holden, Isaac 85 Holden, Katherine 152 Holden, Sarah 77 Holt-Lundstad, Julianna 131 home 70, 138, 302–3, 471 homesickness: and deportation 467; and health 177; and loneliness 10; and nostalgia 64–5, 143; and refugees 471–81; and spiritual solitude 200 homosexuality 7–8, 295–308 Hood, William 397 Horace 111 Hore, Annie 424 Hoste, William, Capt. 346, 350–2, 355 Hottentots 107–9 Houtmam, Cornelius 107 Hovias, Matthias, Archbishop 198 ‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’ (Crane) 301 Howard, Grenville 297 Howard, Mary Rose 202–3 Hughes-Edwards, Mari 195, 203–4 Hume, David 5, 88–99, 106–7, 113 Husberg, Alma 404, 406, 408–11 hysteria 121 Iliad 102 illness: causes of 120, 214, 229; consequences of 120–2; coping with 232; and food 183–7; and isolation 227–9; and liminality 178–9, 185; and loneliness 7, 428–9; and melancholy 229–31; and nostalgia 177; profession-related 102–3; and religion 184; treatment of 225–7, 246; understanding of 92 Illouz, Eva 153–4 In lode della villa e in biasmo della città (Crispolti) 112 In the Wake (Sharpe) 241 Ingman, Naemi 413 Inheritance, The (Ferrier) 40 Innes, Jane 43 isolation: and distance 52, 360; distress of 54; effects of 158; and homosexuality 301–5; and illness 227–9; and language 61; and melancholy 389; professional 56, 58; and religion 193–204; social 62, 312, 314– 15, 471; and treatment of mental illness 391–4 Isted, Anne 181

487

Index Jääger, Tiina 453, 462, 466 Jackson, Gale 249–50 Jacobs, Harriet 246 James, Carolyn 437 James, Daniel 246 James, Margaret 445, 447 Janābai 138–9 Jayadeva 133–7 Jeffery, Jill 165 Johanson, Kristine 202 Johnson, Margaret of St Francis 200, 201 Johnson, Samuel 30, 40 Jordanova, Ludmilla 268 journals see diaries Joy of Sex, The (Comfort) 154

Lefevre, Henri 375 Leiden des jungen Werthers, Die (Goethe) 254 Leong, Elaine 180 Lester, Pauline 287–9 letters see correspondence Levine-Clark, Marjorie 396 Lewis, William 179 Life of Solitude, The (Petrarch) 111 liminality 178–9, 185, 418, 422–3 Liston, Carol 336 literature: and alternative community 248–50; of Black Atlantic 240–1; historical 254; on loneliness 67–8; and lonely places 374–82; Romantic 255–6; schoolgirl fction 280–92; and sex 155; on solitude 109–12, 254–5 see also poetry; reading Lodewijcksz, Willem 107 loneliness: coping with 67–9, 440–4; defnition 2–3, 19–20, 29–30, 48, 62, 93, 207, 388; embodied 428–9; ethical 243; experience of 62; history of 1–2, 6, 11, 163–4, 169–71, 344–5, 370; as moral panic 162; situational 454, 467; vs. social isolation 312; study of 434–5; term 17–22, 25, 27, 194, 267, 269–70, 345, 374 ‘Loneliness and Poetry’ (Ricks) 19–20 Loneliness (Cacioppo and Patrick) 1 loneliness, pathological: in history 260–1; and language 11–12; and melancholy 90–3, 103; and modern culture 131–2; and modernity 167–9; origins of 4; question of 320; term 30; treatment of 5 Lonely Hearts 155, 156–7 Loo, Laine 455 love 122–3, 149–59, 435, 447 Luther, Martin 253 Lynch, David 168 Lyons, Martin 412 Lyons, Martyn 78

Kalstone, David 28 Katsuhiko Fujimori 313 Kennedy, Cynthia M. 243, 244–5 Kennedy, Dane 426, 427, 429 Kerr, Peter 306 Keshan, Malcolm 436, 439, 443 Khoi peoples 107–9 Kiernan, Suzanne 110 Kim, Jieung 316 King, Isabella, Lady 38 Kirkup, James 270 Kitto, Alexandrina 422 Klein, Lawrence 62 Knatchbull, Mary 202 kodokushi 312–14, 317 Kolb, Peter 107–8 König, Karl 270 Kothari, Uma 422–3 Krittibās Ojhā 135 Kronenfeld, Judy Z. 25, 27–8 Krug, Rebecca 17 Kugler, Anne 216 Kurtz, Irma 153, 155, 158 Laing, Olivia 196, 204 Lake, Tony 157–8 Lālon Sāi 136–7 Lambert, William 438, 443 Land That Never Was, The (Simpson) 426 Langhamer, Claire 151, 154 language: control of 247–8; and emotions 4, 9–10; and expression of loneliness 11, 17–18, 118, 207, 453–4; and isolation 61; translations 253, 455 Laslett, Peter 207 Late Homecomer, The (Yang) 476–9 Lawlor, Clark 229 Laybourn, Ann 269 Lazda, Mara 467 Leach, Emma 426–7 leadership 344–6, 348–55 Leavey, Gerard 195, 204

MacFie, Catherine M. E. 394 Machen, Arthur 270–2 Macho, Thomas 258 Mackenzie, George 24, 111–12 Mackenzie, James 214, 215 Mallinson, Anthony 271–2 Malthus, Thomas 209 Mandier, Mlle. 49, 51–8 Manktelow, Emily 420 Marin, Michel-Ange 196, 198 Marishall, Jean 38 Marjorie Dean, College Freshman (Lester) 287–9 Marmor, Judd 300, 301 marriage 149–51, 151, 152, 194 Martineau, Harriet 389–90 masculinity see men and masculinity matchmaking 6, 149–51, 158–9 Matt, Susan 436

488

Index Mauss, Marcel 258 Maxwell, Darcy Brisbane 219 Mayall, David 268 McCall, Katharine 437, 439–40, 444, 446–7 McCormack, Matthew 368 McCormick spice wheel 179 McKibbin, Ross 273 McKittrick, Katherine 244 McNally, Edward 297 Meade, L. T. 280, 282–3 Mears, William 113 Mechelin, Cely 404, 406–11, 413 media 254, 255 Meinander, Mimmi 404, 406, 412 melancholy: and correspondence 230–1; diagnosis of 90, 229; as ‘Disease of the Learned’ 91–3; and distance 364–7; experience of 26; and illness 229–31; as pathological condition 103; and philosophical meditation 98–9; and solitude 27–9, 177; treatment of 389 see also depression Melrose, Jane 439 memory 10, 405–14, 453–5 see also nostalgia men and masculinity: in business 52–5; and emotions 339, 343–4; and experience of loneliness 359–71; identity of 330; and modernity 368–9; responsibilities of 76, 84–5, 316, 332; and solitude 258; tropes of 368 mental health: coping with 88; and embodied loneliness 428–9; treatment of 387–400; understanding of 90–1 Metcalf, Urbane 398 Miles, Sarah 156 Millenium Hall (Scott) 38 Miller, Lesley E. 49 missionaries 418–30 Miyazawa san 318–19 modernity: emotional 151–3; and loneliness 162–71, 359–60; and masculinity 368; and matchmaking 150–1 Moir, Jane 428 Mompesson, William, Revd 187 Monbiot, George 163 Montagu, Elizabeth 62, 63–4 Montaigne, Michel de 258 Montgomerie, Susanna 217 Moodie, John 395, 396 Mooney, Karen 158–9 Moore, Marianne 17 Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment, and All Its Appendages, A (Mackenzie) 111–12 Moralische Vorlesungen (Gellert) 67 morality: in balladry 378–82; and emotions 48; and loneliness 8; and religion 383–4; and treatment of mental illness 389–400 More, Gertrude 199, 200 Morgan, Edwin 308 Morgan, Jane 211

Morgan, Joseph 113 Morrison, Hugh 426 Moses, Samuel 338 Mossner, E.C. 88, 92 Mostyn, Margaret of Jesus 200 Motherwell, William 374, 376 Mulder-Bakker, Anneke 195 Murray, Jane, Duchess of Atholl 230 Murray, John 359 ‘My Loneliness Is Killing Me’ (Shire) 481 Myths We Live By, The (Samuel) 268 Nancy--New Girl (Talbot) 289–90 Nash, Richard ‘Beau’ 215 Nasta, Susheila 243 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo 422 Neeman, Thomas 436–7 Neilson, Julia 270 Nelson, John O. 98 New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, A (Astley) 108 New World of Words, The (Philips) 30 Nikulin, Dmitri 405, 414 Nora, Pierra 405 Nordgren, Jenny 404, 406, 411 Northcote, Stafford 298 nostalgia: expressions of 53; as fantasy 443–4; and health 177; and homesickness 64–5, 143; solace in 362–4; and spiritual solitude 201–2 see also memory Novetzke, Christian 137–8 Nugent, Charlotte 233 Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe 245 Obereit, Jacob Hermann 68 O’Hara, Charles 234 Old Arcadia, The (Sidney) 5, 21–8 see also Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The (Sidney) Old Bachelors 39–40 old maids see spinsters Ollila, Anne 408, 413 ‘On the Tranquility of the Mind’ (Seneca) 24 Orr, Clarissa Campbell 66 Oswald, Henry Robert, Sr. 359–71 Ottaway, Susannah 208, 209 Out of Africa (Blixen) 423, 426 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 268 Oxford English Dictionary 18–21, 28, 93 Ozawa-de Silva, Chikako 169 Paget, Charles 352, 353 Panvinio, Onofrio 103 Parkes, Henry 360 Parr, Thomas 211 Parson, Talcott 183 Parsons, Michelle 169 pathological loneliness see loneliness, pathological

489

Index Patrick, William 1 Päts, Helgi-Alice 453, 455, 457–60, 468 Patten, Margaret 210 Patterson, Orlando 242 Peckham Experiment 165 Pennell, Sara 180 Perceval, John 393 Perrault, Charles 187–8 Petrarch 28, 102, 111 pets 216–18, 320 Philips, Edward 30 Phillip, Arthur 338 Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, A (Radicati) 113 philosophy 93–9, 106–7 photographs 413–14 Pinto, Sarah 447 Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale 214 place 242–5, 374–82 plantations 242–5 Plato 406 poetry: Bengali 133–7; bhakti 132–3, 139; German 255–6; Highland ballads 374–82; Marathi 137– 9; postcolonial 139–45 see also literature Porter, Agnes 36 Potkay, Adam 93 Potter, Donald 156 poverty 208–11 Premo, Terri 213 Prentiss, Karen 132 Primus, Rebecca 81 Prince, Mary 238–50 Pringle, Thomas 239, 240, 246–7, 249 prison sentences 260–2 Proops, Marje 155, 158 Prosser, Gabriel 249 Pulson, Diana 305 Pyne, William 70 Raban, Jonathan 157 racism 337–8, 427–8 Radden, Jennifer 26 Radicati, Alberto, Count 112–13, 114 Rāmāyana 135–6 Ramazzini, Bernardino 102–3 Ray, John 30 reading 211–12, 256–9, 280–1 see also literature Réfexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Dubos) 92–3 ‘Refugee Blues’ (Auden) 471 refugees 471–81 relationships: and correspondence 351–2; and deportation 467; and loneliness 6–7; more-thanhuman 319–20; provisions of 344–5, 352, 454 religion: and ‘civilization’ 107; and domesticity 77; and illness 184; and isolation 193–204; and loneliness 7, 122; and lonely places 374–5; and

morality 383–4; and solitude 67–8, 103–6, 218, 258, 259; as source of comfort 411 Reuben, David 155 Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau) 256 Richards, Annette 255 Richards, Hylda 422 Ricks, Christopher 19–21 Roberts, Elizabeth 273 Roberts, Marie Mulvey 214 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 330, 334 Robinson, Henry Crabb 211 Robinson, Kenneth 299 Robinson, Mary 213 Rodger, N.A.M. 345 Romanticism 255–6 Room of Solitude 103–6 Roper, Mary, Abbess 198 Roper, Michael 435 Rose, Elizabeth 212 Rosen, Matthew 139 Rothery, Mark 329 Rothschild, Emma 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 106–7, 256 Rowbotham, Sheila 169 Royal Navy 345–6 Russel, Rachel, Lady 214 Salih, Sarah 239, 248 Samuel, Raphael 268 Savonarola, Girolamo 196 Scharlieb, Mary 270 Scheer, Monique 62, 65 scholars 102–3 Schwellenberg, Juliana Elizabeth 69 Scott, Sarah 38 Seagrove, George 434, 436, 438, 440–3, 445–7 Secret Battle, The (Roper) 435 Secret (Secretum) (Petrarch) 102 Self Help (Smiles) 75 Seneca 24 sensibility 66–9 separation: causes of 77; experience of 80–1, 404; long-term 436; and love 447; and marriage 80; pain of 397–9; positive aspects of 444–8 Series of Letters, A (Marishall) 38 Seriman, Zaccaria 109–10, 114 sex 154–6 Shackleton, Elizabeth 216 Shaikh, Juned 144 Shapin, Steven 113 Sharpe, Christina 241, 248 Sharpe, Jenny 247, 249 Shaw, Elizabeth 76–85 Shaw, John 5, 76–85 She Who Remembers Survives 452, 465, 467 Shepherd, Dean 76 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 216

490

Index Shire, Warsan 481 shunning 377–8 Sidney, Mary 31 Sidney, Philip, Sir 4–5, 20–1 Sieng, Michael 479 Simmel, Georg 151 Simpson, Alyse 426 Single Blessedness (Adams) 155 singleness 152–9 Singles 154–5, 157, 158 Śkṛikṛṣṇakīrtana 134 Slack, Paul 208 slavery 7, 238–50 Slavery and Social Death (Patterson) 242 Sleeping Beauty 187–8 Sloane, Elizabeth 180 Sloane, Hans, Sir 180–1 Smiles, Samuel 75, 85 Smith, Adam 48, 389 Smith, Delphina of St Joseph 193 Smith, Julia 428 Smith, Leonard 399 Smith, Norman Kemp 98 Sneddon, Sarah J. 286 Snell, Keith 163, 194, 207, 208, 219, 229, 359, 360, 367, 444 sociability: and alcohol 330; benefts of 214–18; challenges of 363; and domesticity 327–8; and economic survival 209; eschewing of 203–4; and exclusion 376–8; and food 177; importance of 97; and leadership 353–4; and lunatic asylums 387–91; and old age 209–12; professional 332, 334–6; and reading 211–12; satisfaction in 367– 70; and solitude 9, 259–62 society and culture: and age 8; atomization of 311; breakdown of 38–9; changes in 404–5; company 41–2; critique of 112–13, 316–18; differences in 465–6; and emotions 4; and experience of loneliness 6; German 253–63; and industrialization 75–6, 85; isolation from 7–8, 150; Japanese 311–21; and knowledge of place 375; loneliness as defning feature 149; and modernity 151; and nobility 61–2; sex in 155–6; and singleness 153; and solitude 256–9; spatial arrangements 377–8; and spinsters 35–6; withdrawal from 314–15; and work 208 solitude: and bachelors 39–40; balance of 7; Christian 103–6; community in 111–12; contented 218–19; as cultural practice 256–9; as cure for loneliness 17–18, 68, 113, 124; defnition 30; and distress 51; effects of 28; expression of 66–9; and grief 233–4; vs. loneliness 423–8; as masculine virtue 258; and melancholy 26–7, 177; and mental health 9; merits of 22–5; militant 112–13; as part of life 320–1; as privilege 393–4; as punishment 7–8; and Romanticism 255–6; and rurality 375; and

sociability 259–62; and spinsters 35, 37–8, 45; spiritual 196–201; stadial history of 106–8; term 21; and travelling 109–10; use of 69–71; and women 48 Solitude Considered with Respect to Its Infuence upon the Mind and the Heart (Mercier) 68 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 462 space 4, 8–9, 29–30 Spaces for Feeling (Broomhall) 329 Speitz, Michele 238 Spink, Bob, Dr 296 spinsters 35–45, 365 Ståhlberg, Beda 120 Starbuck, Nicola 338 Stead, W. T. 149, 155 Stearns, Peter 268, 388 Stewart, Hugh Grainger 397 Stormont, Louisa 230 Strange, Julie-Marie 268 Strauss, E. B. 166 Strickland, Susanna 239, 240 Stuart, James Francis Edward 202 Stuart, Louisa, Lady 42 suicide 165–7 Surmelian, Leon 472–4, 476 Suzuki, Akihito 397 Svendsen, Lars 434, 436, 447, 454, 467 Swan, Annie 150 Sweet Girl Graduate (Meade) 282–3 Syria My Country (Eid) 480–1 Tague, Ingrid 216 Talbot, Ethel 289–90 Tamaki Saito 314–15 Tamlin 374, 378–81 Tamm, Milja 452, 453, 455, 460–3, 467 Taylor, Barbara 17, 106, 113, 163, 334, 387 Teräsvuori, Kirsti 6, 118–27 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith) 48 Theosophy 411 Thimelby, Winefrid 193, 196, 201, 202, 204 Thomas, Margaret Haig 273 Thompson, Leander 199 Thompson, Paul 268 Thomson, Mathew 153 Thor, Pa 479 Tillich, Paul 2 T īrthāvaḷī 137–8 ‘To Thyrza’ (Byron) 20 ‘Together Alone’ (Hobbes) 295 Tosh, John 76, 77–8, 361 Townsend, Peter 152 Traherne, T., Dr. 166 trauma 453–5 travel 78–9, 109–10 Travels of Henry Wanton, The (Serimen) 109–10, 114

491

Index Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume) 88, 93–8 Treatise of Melancholy, A (Bright) 26 Trentham, Mary of St Albert 200 Trivellato, Francesca 53 Trobridge, Joseph, Jr. 209 Tshudesnova, Minna 453, 463–5, 467 tuberculosis see consumption ‘Tukaram in Heaven, Chitre in Hell’ (Chitre) 142 Tuke, Samuel 389 Turner, Nat 249 Über die Einsamkeit (Zimmermann) 67–8, 254–5 Vallgårda, Karen 420 Vang, Cindy 479 Vassall, John 297, 307 Vickery, Amanda 216 Vidyāpati 133–4 Vincent, David 124, 163, 194, 195, 198, 267, 268, 269, 276 violence 138, 244, 337 Voltaire 107 vulnerability 429–30 Wagner-Engelhaaf, Martina 68, 259 Wakefeld, Edward 395 Wakeman, Teresa of the Holy Ghost 199 Ward, Edward ‘Ned’ 215 Warth, Douglas 298, 307 We Refugees (Arendt) 474–6 Webb, Diana 18 Weiss, Robert Stuart 297, 344–5, 352, 454, 467 Wenworth, Isabella, Lady 216–17 White, Richard 199 Whitlock, Gillian 239 Wieland, Christoph Martin 67 Wildeblood, Peter 296–7, 299, 307

Williams, Dorothy 436, 439, 443 Williams, Harry 447 Williams, Helen 440 Wilson, Roger 298 Wirzenius, Charlotte 404, 406–7, 411 Wiseman, William 438, 441–2, 445 witches 36–7 Wolfenden Report 299, 305, 306, 307 Woman’s Own 156 women: in business 49–50, 55–8; in cloisters 193–204; and femininity 461–2; and literature 69; loneliness in 165, 168–9; and marriage 151; responsibilities of 164–5; and sex 155–6; and sociability 9; writings of 419–21, 424, 426 Woolf, Virginia 4 Wordsworth, Dorothy 211 Wordsworth, William 19–20 work 208, 315–18, 332, 334–6 workhouses 209–10 Worsley, Anne of the Ascension 200 Wright, Allan 306 Wroth, Mary, Lady 31 Yallop, Helen 214, 215 Yang, Kao Kalia 476–9 Yip, Hannah 17, 163 Yonge, James 213 yoseba 315–16 Youngest Girl in the Fifth, The (Brazil) 285–6 Yusoff, Kathryn 244 Zeitlin, Jacob 24 Zenker, Marcus 68 Ziino, Bart 435 Zimmermann, Johann Georg 68–9, 254–5, 259–60, 262–3 Zuccari, Taddeo 103, 107, 111

492