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

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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

Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

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 rev