13-06-2025
‘What does loneliness sound like?'
In 2019, Fay Bound Alberti, a professor of modern history at King's College London, posted the question on X: 'What does loneliness sound like?' The answers were evocative.
'The wind whistling in my chimney.'
'Laughter… in other places.'
'A clicking radiator as it goes on and off.'
It is 'a sense of lack [that] can make the belly feel so empty', as she puts it in her book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (2019).
In the book, Alberti, 53, dissects this 'emotion cluster' to reveal its component parts: anger, resentment, sorrow, jealousy, self-pity, shame.
Weaving together fragments of popular culture (Wuthering Heights, Twilight, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the writings of Virginia Woolf) and explorations of identity, belonging and creativity, she traces the history of this modern condition.
Alberti has conducted research at the intersection of history, health, medicine and emotions for 25 years. Her previous books include Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (2010) and This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (2016).
In an increasingly fragmented world of wars, intensifying scarcities and escalating divides, she worries that the loneliness problem will only intensify, she says.
Excerpts from an interview.
What led you to this subject?
As a historian of emotion, medicine and the body, I am really interested by how we tend to view emotions as natural phenomena. When I believe they are a product of culture as much as anything else.
I experienced loneliness as a child, growing up impoverished and unhappy, on an isolated Welsh hilltop. I became curious then about what the good parts and bad parts of that loneliness were. So, for me, this book is almost like coming home.
You write that until the 19th century, loneliness had a meaning closer to solitude…
Yes… when William Wordsworth, in 1807, wrote that he 'wandered lonely as a cloud', he just meant that he was alone.
It is only since the late-1800s that we start to see the word used to indicate an emotional lack. I believe this has roots in this period of intense industrialisation, urbanisation and a breakdown of traditional communities, in the cities of the Western world.
Alternative ways of understanding one's place in the world emerged. There was a shift away from a sense of purpose and meaning tied to the idea of God, and towards individualism and consumer capitalism.
Wealth became easier for the average person to accumulate, and this got tangled up with our ideas of self-worth and the worth of others — in ways it had not done before, in the general populace. Globalisation has since spread these ideas around the world.
Is there a way out? Are there initiatives you have uncovered in your research that seem to be working?
There have been attempts in Sweden to get students to live with elderly people in low-cost accommodation. This has been shown to reduce loneliness. Such an effort could work well in countries with particularly large aging populations, such as South Korea and the UK.
There is also the Men's Shed movement in Australia, which aims to address loneliness in men who have retired or face unemployment. They get together for community-based workshops to develop new skills.
This stems from the idea that men don't like talking about their feelings. If you put men alongside each other to do something like woodwork, they are more likely to seek connection, find a sense of companionship, and feel a sense of accomplishment too.
What I like about this initiative is that it also expands the focus from purely psychological or emotional interventions to activities that engage the body as well. And that's important, because loneliness affects both the body and the mind.
