Book Review. The Hermit in the Garden by Gordon Campbell

                                The Hermit in the Garden

Professor Gordon Campbell has opened the proverbial can of worms! I do not believe that anyone who reads this book will be able to look at a hermitage again in the same way. I also believe that not many people would have appreciated before that the hermitage they are seeing was probably inhabited by an actual hermit! The story of the hermitage is fascinating; Professor Campbell’s book has been painstakingly and meticulously researched with excellent supportive photographs and illustrations. This is a well written book superbly produced and more than worth the purchase price. There are at times books you have the pleasure of reading on subjects that you may not have considered before that make soulless electronic reading devices rightly redundant.

The chapter on ‘The Hermits’, those mysterious figures, makes compelling reading for a number of reasons. The main one being the lengths the garden owners went to, too procure their own hermit. How bizarre looking with our modern eyes to place an advert for such a position. On one level the aristocracy employing a hermit for entertainment leaves an uncomfortable feeling. Professor Campbell tackles this by linking the eventual demise of the hermit to abolitionism; he states that the hermit came to be ‘regarded as analogous to that of the slave’. There were other reasons for their demise in garden hermitages. As Campbell again states ‘pleasing melancholy’ was falling out of fashion. Gardens or parts of a garden were designed to invoke a feeling of melancholy in the visitor not melancholy as we think today but a desired state of mind. Campbell explains the hermitage by saying, ‘at its core lies a notion of contemplative solitude and pleasurable melancholy, but it was also a fashion’.

The chapters cover all aspects of this subject in detail; particularly interesting is the link with architecture and literature. The origins of the hermitage and its roots in Europe are also discussed and explored. Hadrian’s small house island retreat in Villa Adriana at Tivoli is seen as the catalyst for the hermitage idea. Professor Campbell discusses the different levels of the hermitage including the ones connected to some of the Royal houses of Europe. On one level a hermitage could be no more than a cave or hut but then Marly designed for Louis X1V was a pavilion or small chateau built for Louis and his friends but still with the idea of comparative solitude. Marie-Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon and the Hameau were designed for a degree of solitude but obviously again on a grander scale. 

The garden owner once having employed his hermit would impose certain terms and conditions. Professor Campbell has discovered accounts of some of these terms as at Painshill Park in Surrey, the conditions being set by Charles Hamilton. Professor Campbell writes, ‘the late owner Mr Hamilton advertised for a person who was willing to become the hermit of that retreat, under the following among many other conditions: that he was to dwell in the hermitage for seven years; where he should be provided with a bible, optical glasses, a mat for his bed, and a hassock for his pillow, an hour glass for his timepiece, water for his beverage from the stream that runs at the back of his cot, and food from the house, which was to be brought him daily by a servant, but with whom he has never to exchange one syllable, he was to wear a camblet robe, never to cut his beard or his nails, to tread on sandals, nor ever to stray in the open parts of the ground nor beyond their limits, that if he lived under all these restrictions till the end of his term, he was to receive seven hundred guineas; but on any breach of any one of them, or if he quitted his place any time previous to that term, the whole was to be forfeited, and all his loss of time remediless. One person attempted it, but three week were the utmost extent of his abode’.

For garden historians the extensive bibliography will be useful as will the list of hermitages in Great Britain and Europe. I recommend this book it will complement any study of gardens in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The Hermit in the Garden by Gordon Campbell. Published by Oxford University press.