The Hermit Who Kept Office Hours

James Lucas was the second son of a Liverpool West India merchant, educated at Clapham, briefly trained in medicine, and heir to a comfortable Hertfordshire estate at Redcoats Green. When his mother died in October 1849, he declined to bury her for about thirteen weeks, telling the vicar each visit that tomorrow would do, until the clergy came and removed her themselves.

Then he moved into the kitchen and stayed there for twenty-five years.

He slept on a heaped bed of soot on the floor. He wore a single filthy blanket fastened with a meat skewer, and let his hair grow to his waist. He suspected the eggs of being poisoned and formally accused his supplier of poisoning the old hen. He refused to recognise Queen Victoria's stamped paper, leaving over a thousand pounds of his own money uncashed in the Bank of England. He hired two armed watchmen and installed them in a hut across from his window-grille.

And through the bars of that grille, blackened and blanketed, he received callers. Tramps. Dukes. Lord Lytton, John Forster, Sir Arthur Helps. Charles Dickens came to gawk and left with a character. The Great Northern Railway laid on weekend excursion trains.

On his last Good Friday alive, two hundred children queued at the window. He handed out sweets, coppers, and small glasses of gin-and-water.