for it. The structures of commerce and politics were still vulnerable to the seductive appeal of escape from the demands and disciplines of collective discourse. ‘The result of all is,’ Evelyn’s essay concluded, ‘Solitude produces ignorance, renders us barbarous, feeds revenge, disposes to envy, creates Witches, dispeoples the World, renders it a desart, and would soon dissolve it.’24
Amongst his contemporaries, Zimmermann was unusual in seeking to explore the range of circumstances that might cause an individual to retreat from the domestic and public structures of eighteenth-century life. His wide reading in several European languages and his professional engagement with illness and personal breakdown caused him to take seriously the possibilities of withdrawal. At its most benign, solitude was ‘a tendency to self-collection and freedom’.25 There was a tradition of seeking a retreat in order to think or engage in creative work. ‘I may not deny,’ admitted Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, ‘but that there is some profitable Meditation, Contemplation, and kinde of Solitarinesse to be embraced, which the Fathers so highly commend. … [which] Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella, and other so much magnify in their bookes.’26 During the eighteenth century, the attraction of such an avoidance of company was becoming more apparent. It was partly that the sheer noise and intensity of living in the bustling urban centres made ever more attractive the search for the peace and quiet in which thoughts might be collected. Some kind of time alone was required to write, or to plan new ventures. A place always had to be found, argued Zimmermann, for ‘an enterprising and ardent mind’ to retire ‘from the uninteresting distractions of company, to digest and mature in solitude’, that he might better formulate his ‘adventurous and capacious projects’.27 It was not a rejection of intercourse, but rather an escape from its more trivial and distracting aspects in order that more profound or ambitious interventions might be made in the intellectual or commercial life of the community.
Towards the end of the century, the implications of ‘self-collection’ were taking on a more focussed meaning, particularly in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker were posthumously published in 1782, just as Zimmermann was preparing to write his treatise. As The Gentleman’s Review irreverently put it, ‘Philosophers have just found out that the best way to bring a man to an acquaintance with himself, or, in short, to his senses, is to sequester himself into solitude.’28 The search for a narrative identity, discoverable only through solitary self-analysis, opened a path towards a new genre of literary autobiography.29 Rousseau explained the project of the Solitary Walker: ‘It is in this state of mind that I resume the painstaking and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions. I am devoting my last days to studying myself and to preparing the account of myself which I shall soon have to render.’30 Zimmermann was ambivalent about Rousseau’s rejection of company in his search for self-knowledge. He was sympathetic to the personal sufferings that had forced the philosopher into retirement. His critics, he argued, were ‘allowing nothing for the attack of human injustice and cruelty; nothing for the torments of penury; nothing for the ravages of sickness; the bloom and vigour of his genius is forgotten’.31 But he had little confidence that the true self was only discoverable in the absence of society, and was convinced that the project to which Rousseau was committed in the closing years of his life could only lead to personal ruin: ‘Every physician, however, who studies the history of Rousseau, will plainly perceive that the seeds of dejection, sadness and hypochondriacism, were sown in his frame of mind and temper.’32
Once he had negotiated the kind of withdrawal with which any writer was familiar, Zimmermann’s catalogue of solitude became increasingly negative. At best he had an understanding of the circumstances that could cause a rejection of society, at worst he was wholly critical of both motive and outcome. He lived a life, like Montaigne before him, where the deaths of partners, children, and friends were a constant threat to the maintenance of any intimate relations.33 According to Samuel-Auguste Tissot, a fellow Swiss doctor and lifelong friend, his first wife suffered ‘a nervous disorder, which added infinitely to Zimmermann’s sorrows, [and] made him wish more earnestly for retirement’.34 He was later widowed and lost his daughter from his first marriage. Whilst he could scarcely commend the state, he was well aware of the presence of what in our own time would be termed bereavement: ‘Solitude is often terrible to the mourner, whose happiness is buried in an untimely grave; who would give all the joys of earth, for one accent of the beloved voice, whose tuneful vibrations must never more fill his ear and heart with rapture; and who, when alone, languishes with the remembrance of his irreparable loss.’35 Those connected with the sufferer could do what they could to ease them back to society; Zimmermann himself later remarried, and, claimed Tissot, ‘the happiness of this union was never disturbed for a moment’.36
There were other kinds of misfortune which, as in the case of Rousseau, might propel the individual into retirement. ‘A wounded spirit,’ Zimmermann wrote, ‘seeks shelter in the lenient repose of privacy, from the shocks of rivalry, the intrusion of misguided friendship, and malicious assaults of secret or avowed enmity.’37 Such people, too, deserved sympathy, though not imitation. Beyond those forced into retreat through no fault of their own, there were the many individuals who were thrust into it by misconduct or inadvisably chose the condition. The most amorphous group were those who had failed to meet the ethical standards or behavioural demands of eighteenth-century society. It took a certain level of self-belief to participate in domestic, commercial, or political networks. Once this was lost by defeat or moral shortcoming, withdrawal was the looming prospect:
Shame or remorse, a poignant sense of past follies, the regret of disappointed hope, or the lassitude of sickness, may so wound or enervate the soul, that it shall shrink from the sight and touch of its equals, and retire to bleed and languish, unmolested, except by its internal cares, in the coverts of solitude. In these instances, the disposition to retreat is not an active impulse of the mind to self-collection; but a fearful and pusillanimous aversion from the shocks and the attrition of society.38
In contrast to the elite souls who chose a temporary retreat the better to engage with the highest endeavours of their time, these were outcasts, driven from company by a sense of their own demerits.
The category of exile overlapped with the pathological condition of melancholy. In eighteenth-century intellectual culture, there were no hard boundaries between the sciences, literature, and philosophy. Zimmermann’s excursions into poetry, political commentary, and guides to living were bound up with his principal occupational identity as a doctor. His first publication was a treatise on ‘Irritability’, referring not to short temper but to the functioning of the nerves of the heart. He brought to solitude his experience as a leading medical authority, and his discussion of melancholy was later cited by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, the mid-nineteenth-authority on mental illness, as a key contribution to the topic.39 Melancholy had been a nosological term for two millennia, encompassing sadness, fear, and depression.40 During Zimmermann’s working life, the psychological causes were increasingly foregrounded over the physiological, which traditionally had been located in an excess of black bile.41 A related category was that of hypochondria, or hypochondriasis, from which Tissot claimed Zimmermann himself intermittently suffered. This lacked the modern association of imaginary illness but referred instead to a collection of symptoms for which there were no evident physical causes.42 The conditions were at the centre of a growing interest in the capacity of states of mind to generate bodily malfunctions. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton observed that ‘the Minde most effectually workes upon the Body, producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations, as Melancholy, Despaire, cruell diseases, and sometimes death it selfe’.43 His speculation received increasing medical support. As Thomas Trotter excitedly wrote in 1812, ‘at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we do not hesitate to affirm, that nervous disorders have now taken the place of fevers, and may be justly reckoned two thirds of the whole, with which civilized society is afflicted’.44
