Solitude [ Feelings & Emotions ]
… in writings from the long-eighteenth century. There was no vocabulary for loneliness in this period, but solitude was a state often associated with melancholy and thus frequently employed in a negative sense. A range of eighteenth-century … Latin solitudo was most often employed in a negative sense. It denoted a place or condition and thus a physical state of isolation that stood at odds with the ideal of civilisation that brought with it the benefits of mutual support … barely distinguishable in meaning from ‘solitary’. 2 People were alone, but this was a physical rather than emotional state. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) emphasised the physical dimensions of solitude: living a ‘lonely life’, being …
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