Beyond Loneliness to Solitude

As directives to “social distance” and stay at home have reordered the routines of people around the world, the pandemic has made many acutely aware of the absence or presence of solitude in one’s life—in crowded households, its paucity, and in bachelor pads, its excess. In his latest study, A History of Solitude, David Vincent examines the “proper condition of man and woman” in order to address “the question of how to be alone [which] has remained a lightning conductor in the response to modernity.” Thus, his study focuses on the evolving conceptions of solitude that span roughly the last two centuries, starting with the late eighteenth century, which had strong commitments to sociability and initial misgivings about solitude, up through the digitally-inclined modern day, with its so-called “epidemic of loneliness” and embrace of “new spiritualism.”

Though solitude was obviously a concept of interest in preceding centuries, Vincent contends that solitude has a unique relationship to modernity. The conditions of modern life—particularly growing populations, new technologies, consumer markets, crowded urban centers—not only demanded more from the increasingly harried individual and created a need for temporary retreat, but also “reshaped the purpose and practice of solitude.” Eighteenth-century theories mainly figured solitude as the antithesis of sociability, which the Enlightenment upheld as the paragon of the human condition. Withdrawal was seen as an indication of either melancholy, misanthropy, or overzealous religious feeling.

By the end of the century, solitude began to be more widely held in positive association with self-examination. The Romantic Movement avowed solitude as a (typically negative) “critique of whatever was conceived as modernity” and suggested retreats into nature as a panacea. Semantic shifts also attended the development of concepts of solitude. Out of the Romantic poets’ preoccupation with affect came the emergent category of loneliness, a distinctly negative emotion that entered popular discourse around the nineteenth century and over time became increasingly pathologized as a medical condition.      

Self Portrait Gwen John

Vincent’s most important move in tracing the trajectory of solitude, in both its practice and theory, is to move past conceiving of solitude as an activity, “as a simple antonym of physical company,” or the opposite of sociability, which is how contemporary debates of loneliness are often framed. Instead, as Vincent argues, loneliness should be reconceived as “failed solitude,” and the positive functions of solitude should be recognized. “Safe, productive solitude” is “a function of choice,” a sign of independence and good health. Solitude actually helps one better enjoy society by providing time and space to recuperate from the effort of being social. 

In addition to physical solitude, Vincent considers two other “forms of solitude”: “networked solitude” and “abstracted solitude.” The first frames solitude as an intertextual event. One can be physically alone but engaging others vicariously through various media; prime examples are composing a letter or reading. “Abstracted solitude,” the more recently theorized form, is “the capacity to be alone amidst company.” This type of solitude occurs when physical distance from others is an impossibility, and the practitioner retreats mentally by concentrating on the activity rather than the individuals in proximity, such as when daydreaming. As Vincent notes, there are no neat conceptual divisions between the two. Getting lost in a book in a crowded room is an instance in which networked solitude and abstracted solitude overlap. 

Though the monograph is expansively entitled A History of Solitude, Vincent’s focus is more narrowly “a quiet history of British society.” While there are brief comparisons of perspectives outside of Britain—for instance, how the American Southwest was associated with a spirit of independence that rejected prevailing social and political paradigms—the majority of Vincent’s book is devoted to the British context. 

This turns out to be a great strength of the book. Restricted though the geographical scope may be, the expansive chronological range of the book is combined with an inclusive analysis of past and present British inhabitants who engaged in a variety of solitary occupations. Vincent’s commitment to recuperating the perspectives of overlooked classes of people, in particular women and the working poor, is indicative of both his rigorous methodology and personal sensitivity. When expressing his doubts about the current “epidemic” of loneliness in Britain, which he examines as a product of willful statistics and inflamed rhetoric, Vincent is careful to distinguish the barriers to social equity that prevent solitude. He mounts a convincing argument that the “intensifying crisis in the distribution of wealth and the provision of public services” contributes to instances of loneliness amongst the lower classes of capitalist society. 

A clear mission of the book is to supplement theories of solitude made by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who focused exclusively on well-educated men of means deemed mentally capable of handling solitude with a new emphasis on marginalized groups. As a committed social historian, Vincent avoids relying too heavily on canonical figures to make his points and uses an eclectic array of archival sources, from WWII diaries of women on the home front to Victorian hobby guides, to provide as much evidence as possible of solitary practices in quotidian life—no easy feat since these practices often left little trace.

He turns our attention toward undertheorized and potentially solitary activities and analyzes them with gusto. A whole chapter is devoted to walking, which was “intrinsically neither sociable nor solitary” but “was the simplest means of escaping company,” irrespective of class. Other more commonplace pursuits of leisure belonging to both “upper- and lower-case categories of solitude” are discussed in turn, from angling, stamp collecting, and handicrafts to competitive gardening, texting, and smoking. 

Comparatively weaker is the treatment of how religion and solitude relate. Though the study is not about religion and cannot hope to treat the solitary practices of any faith in its complexities, Vincent does devote an entire chapter to examining “Prayers, Convents, and Prisons.” It has notable issues concerning structure, scope, evidence, and interpretation. Though Catholic monasticism is arguably a touchstone for all the forms of religious solitude under review, discussion of the term appears late in the chapter and lacks the necessary theological context that would benefit the reader’s understanding of how this ascetic vocation develops a particular type of solitude in the union of wills between the religious and God.

While Vincent highlights the etymology of the word “monk,” notes the discrepancies between eremitic and cenobitic monasticism, and lists the components of monastic vows (poverty, chastity, and obedience), he lacks perspective of how the cloistered understood their vocation and dwells more on developing the extreme conceptions of monasticism from those intrigued by its seeming harshness and the myths surrounding it. Even the discussion of Thomas Merton’s difficulties with his Trappist community offers a limited view of the nature of monasticism and likewise presents questionable claims, such as that “The function of prayer was union with God, not the welfare of a fallen society.” On the contrary, the Divine Office recited by most monastic communities explicitly petitions for the salvation of the world. 

Regarding the spirituality of Protestant households in the eighteenth century, he makes hardline assertions about the need for privacy in seeking “solitary communion with God” that link the ability to achieve religious solitude to identification with a certain economic class: “Solitary communion with God required a physical location from which other members of the household could be excluded” and “Prayerful solitude was real labour made possible by increasing prosperity.” Such statements belie his earlier commitments to investigating marginalized figures and attention to the theoretical forms of solitude. Was there a relationship between abstracted solitude and prayer? Even supposing Vincent’s statements accurately reflect the economically prosperous Protestant’s situation, what about the concept of networked solitude and its relation to a communion of believers? What of the solitude that attended periods of spiritual drought, when belief in God’s presence became difficult? Vincent’s discussion of private prayer raises more questions than it answers and likewise points out his inconsistent treatment of the alternative forms of solitude raised in the introduction.

The weaker treatment of religious solitude is rendered more apparent by the creative analytical thinking he exhibits in the last third of the chapter, which deals with the interface between church and state, and the argument which Vincent sustains by examining motives, systems of power, and psychologies. When discussing the failed application of enforced solitude in the penal system for fostering conversions, he produces a rich and varied account of this extreme form of physical solitude built on the perspectives of those directly and indirectly involved in solitary confinement experiments, such as chaplains, guards, prisoners, reformers, and statisticians. By the chapter’s end, readers appreciate how penal solitude could be weaponized as “a device for excluding others from what they are thinking or doing, or is being done to them.” 

Aside from the discussion of religious solitude, Vincent mostly achieves the quiet history of British society that he set out to provide. The prose is straightforward, and Vincent’s analysis of solitary pastimes is keen. A History of Solitude will reward those who long to know more about the particular manifestation of British solitude and evinces the need for studies on solitude in other cultures and ages.

Suzannah Cady is a PhD candidate in English at UCLA. She studies Catholic hagiography produced for English-speaking readers during the 18th century.

The Thinker by Thomas Eakins