Frederick the Great. The book was not universally welcomed. ‘An essay on solitude, in 380 pages,’ grumbled the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘seems to require confinement in a solitary cell to read it.’1 But there were plenty of purchasers prepared to undertake the challenge. It was an immediate publishing success, generating further editions and competing translations annually during the 1790s, and a scattering of reprints in the first third of the following century.2 ‘Zimmerman on Solitude’, widely available on second-hand bookstalls, became part of the literary furniture of the modernizing society.3
The topic was inherently controversial. ‘Various are the opinions concerning Solitude,’ observed the Critical Review in its response to the publication. ‘By some it is considered as the parent of all human excellence and felicity; by others, as the depraver of the faculties, and the source of disquietude: and those who can endure it have been stated to be either above or below the standard of humanity.’4 Early English versions of Zimmermann’s book, which omitted much of the criticism of solitude, led to a popular misconception that it was a mere celebration of retirement.5 However Zimmermann’s powerfully argued treatise was a much more complex document. Throughout the book he addressed the task of balancing ‘all the comforts and blessings of Society’ with ‘all the advantages of Seclusion’.6 Neither way of living was sufficient in itself, or invulnerable to destruction by its opposite. ‘When we scrutinise its calamitous operation in the cloister and the desert,’ Zimmermann wrote, ‘we shall revolt with horror from the lamentable and hateful spectacle; and acknowledge ourselves fully persuaded, that, if the proper condition of man does not consist in a promiscuous and dissipated commerce with the world, still less does he fulfil the duties of his station, by a savage and stubborn renunciation of their society.’7
The proper condition of man, and woman, is the subject of this history. It seeks to understand how people over the last two centuries have conducted themselves in the absence of company. Zimmermann’s treatise was a way station in a debate about social engagement and disengagement that stretches back to classical times and has acquired new urgency in our own era.8 Current anxieties about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ and the fate of interpersonal relations in the digital culture are reformulations of dilemmas that have surfaced in prose and verse for more than two millennia. In selecting the topic of his magnum opus, itself an expanded version of a shorter study of 1755–6, Zimmermann made no claim to originality. He was engaging with a range of authorities, particularly Petrarch’s The Life of Solitude, written between 1346 and 1356, and published as a book just over a century later.9 Petrarch was conducting a discussion with early and pre-Christian authorities, and Zimmermann in turn was seeking to re-focus rather than invent the subject. He was a Swiss German with a French-speaking mother, widely read in English as well as his native languages, and conversant with the numerous eighteenth-century treatments of the topic in novels and poetry.10 His book was rapidly translated because both its subject matter and its evidential frame of reference were familiar to any educated European of the period. It stood in the mainstream of one of the longest debates in Western culture and at the same time constituted a critical reaction to a period of unprecedented change. Zimmermann was deeply immersed in the urban bourgeois society that was beginning to recognize itself as an historical force, and in his old age witnessed the French Revolution taking place on the other side of his native Jura.
The point of departure and return in Solitude Considered was what Zimmermann termed ‘social and liberal intercourse’.11 Despite a personal predilection for withdrawal, he was sympathetic to the Enlightenment endorsement of social exchange as the engine of cultural and mental progress. As one of Europe’s leading medical practitioners, he was professionally committed to physical engagement with his patients. Theoretical explanations, learned and advanced in the closet, were not sufficient. Effective treatment of sickness required direct observation and accumulated practical experience.12 Zimmermann’s emphasis on social contact constituted a description of his own methods and achievement:
The best and sagest moralists have ever sought to mix with mankind; to review every class of life; to study the virtues, and detect the vices, by which each are peculiarly marked. It has been by founding their disquisitions and essays on men and manners, upon actual observation, that they have owed much of the success, with which their virtuous efforts have been crowned.13
Two successful marriages and increasing worldly fame underpinned his broader analysis. ‘Affectionate intercourse,’ he wrote at the beginning of Solitude Considered, ‘is an inexhaustible fund of delight and happiness. In the expression of our feelings, in the communication of our opinions, in the reciprocal interchange of ideas and sentiments, there lies a treasure of enjoyment, for which the solitary hermit, and even the surly misanthrope, continually sighs.’14 Zimmermann shared with the intellectuals with whom he worked and corresponded across Europe the Enlightenment belief that human nature was essentially social, and that all other modes of living were either a deviation or a temporary respite from the pursuit of personal contentment and collective advancement.15 ‘Solitude must render the heart callous,’ he observed in his collected Aphorisms. ‘What has it whilst alone to pity, or to cherish? It makes no provision but for itself; there its care begins, there it terminates. Humanity is unknown to the Solitaire. Without it, and all the dear cares that it includes, of what worth is existence?’16 Diderot’s Encyclopédie debated the subject. Respect should be paid to the Carthusians, but their way of life belonged to much earlier centuries of church persecution. Times had changed. ‘In our tranquil era,’ the Encyclopédie argued, ‘a truly robust virtue is one that walks firmly through obstacles, and not one that flees them. … A solitary is, in regard to rest of mankind, like an inanimate being; his prayers and his contemplative life, which no one sees, have no influence on society which has more need of examples of virtue before its eyes than in the forests.’17
Duty and self-interest conspired to relegate solitude to the margins of useful living. Zimmermann’s contemporary Christian Garve, an influential propagandist of the German Enlightenment, summarized the approach: ‘Overall, and in the nature of things, society seems to be made for times of health, vivacity, and amusement; solitude, by contrast, seems to be the natural haven of the infirm, the grieved, and the stricken.’18 There were classical precedents for this emphasis, but the more recent authorities with whom Zimmermann was debating had taken an alternative view. Petrarch was in flight from the corruption and distraction of urban commerce: ‘And so, to dismiss the matter once for all,’ he concluded, ‘in my opinion practically every busy man is unhappy.’19 In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne, in his ‘Essay on Solitude’, set out an essentially secular argument for withdrawal from the press of business. He presented a set of prescriptions for solitary self-sufficiency: ‘Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone – and of doing so in contentment.’20 His notion of retirement was not an intermission from public life but a permanent cessation.
By the later seventeenth century, the increasing prosperity and influence of the commercial classes were reflected in a new emphasis in the long-standing debate over the competing virtues of contemplation and action. John Evelyn, who in his private life found time for meditative retreat, adopted the case for sociable endeavour in both business and religion in response to a provocative essay by the Scottish lawyer George Mackenzie.21 In Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude, he argued against extreme forms of spiritual and secular withdrawal. ‘Certainly,’ he wrote, ‘those who either know the value of themselves, or their imployments, may find useful entertainments, without retiring into Wildernesses, immuring themselves, renouncing the World, and deserting publick affairs.’22 The free exchange of ideas was the driver of both personal and collective wealth. ‘For, believe it Sir,’ he insisted, ‘the Wisest men are not made in Chambers and Closets crowded with shelves; but by habitudes and active
