Oddlet: James Lucas · 1 min read
Sep 23, 2026
The Hermit Who Kept Office Hours
What kind of hermit hires two armed guards, then hands out gin to two hundred children through the bars of his window?
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.
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- Wikipedia — James Lucas (hermit) — General biographical overview: dates (1813 – 21 April 1874), location (Elmwood House, Redcoats Green, Great Wymondley), diet, physical description, kitchen conditions, visitors including Darwin and Dickens, armed watchmen, seventeen cartloads of ashes removed after death.
- Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900) — Lucas, James — Authoritative Victorian biographical entry covering parentage (father a West India merchant with Chauncey, Lucas, & Lang; mother's maiden name Beesly), father's death 1830, mother's death 24 Oct 1849, discovery in apoplectic fit 15 April 1874, burial 21 April 1874 at Hackney beside his mother, Dickens's 'Mr. Mopes' portrayal in All the Year Round Christmas 1861, and the failed lunacy inquisition.
- Popular Science Monthly, Jan 1875 — 'The Hermit of Red-Coat's Green' — Dr. Daniel Hack Tuke's clinical eyewitness case study: mother's body kept until January 1850, the £1,000 uncashed in the Bank of England, the two hundred Good Friday children, the rejected 'poisoned' loaves, refusal of anything bearing Queen Victoria's stamp.
- Charles Dickens et al., 'Tom Tiddler's Ground' (1861, Project Gutenberg) — The original 1861 Christmas number of All the Year Round in which Dickens portrayed Lucas as 'Mr. Mopes' — source of the 'sooty object in the blanket and skewer', the 'Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtors' Prison in the worst time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble Savage' description, and the 'Nuisance' verdict.
Hilda Schmidt
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English in Heaven
In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained that Houdini's dead Jewish mother must have learned English in heaven.
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