In these isolating times, are you enjoying solitude or, very different, are you suffering from loneliness?

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Lonely people feel the need for company, while solitary types seek to escape it. The neatest definition of loneliness, David Vincent writes in his superb new study, is “failed solitude”. Another difference between the two groups is that hermits, anglers, Trappist monks and Romantic poets choose to be alone, whereas nobody chooses to feel abandoned and bereft. Calling yourself “self-partnering”, meaning that you sit in the cinema (should they be open) holding your own hand, may be either a genuine desire for solitude or a way of rationalising the stigma of isolation. The greatest difference of all, however, is that solitude has rarely killed anyone, whereas loneliness can drive you to the grave. As the coronavirus rampages, some of us might now face a choice between physical infection and mental breakdown.

For the 18th-century Enlightenment, being on your own was a deviation from the true nature of humanity, which was sociable to its core. It was with the Romantics that this began to change. Isolation was now what we shared in common. Frankenstein’s monster is one of the first great loners of English literature, spurned and vilified by humanity. Yet though loneliness was a symptom of the modern era, solitude could be a critique of it. It was one of the few ways in which you could get in touch with the transcendent, thus revealing what was lacking in an increasingly materialistic society. When Wordsworth writes that he wandered lonely as a cloud, he may mean simply that he was by himself, or that he lacked companionship, or that being alone allowed him space for self-knowledge and spiritual meditation.