During a visit to Knebworth in 1861, Dickens and Mr. (afterwards Sir) Arthur Helps—sometime Queen’s Secretary—called upon a most extraordinary character, locally known as “Mad Lucas,” who lived in an extremely miserly fashion in the kitchen of his house (Elmwood House, at Redcoats Green, near Stevenage). This strange recluse died of apoplexy in 1874, and was buried in Hackney Churchyard; his house, with its boarded-up windows, shored-up walls, and dilapidated roof, continued to remain an object of interest for many years afterwards, until in 1893 it was razed to the ground and the materials sold by public auction. James Lucas, “the Hertfordshire Hermit,” was really a well-educated and highly intellectual man, who inherited the estate of his father, a prosperous West India merchant, and it is conjectured that his distress at the death of his widowed mother (who lived with him) was primarily the cause of that mental aberration which assumed such an eccentric form; he even refused to bury her corpse, so that the local authorities were compelled to resort to a subterfuge in order to perform themselves the last rites. He objected to furnish his rooms, and, attired simply in a loose blanket fastened with a skewer, preferred to eat and sleep amidst the cinders and rubbish-heaps (a sanctuary for rats) which accumulated in the kitchen. Although his diet consisted of bread and cheese, red herrings, and gin, there were choice wines available for friendly visitors, a special vintage of sherry being reserved for ladies who thus honoured him. The hermit’s penchant for tramps attracted all the vagabonds in the neighbourhood, so that it became necessary for him to protect himself from insult by retaining armed watchmen and barricading the house.
In “Tom Tiddler’s Ground”[100] Dickens has depicted a miserly recluse named Mopes, and it is easy to discern that Lucas sat for the portrait—indeed, it is said that in reading the number he recognised the presentment, and expressed great indignation at what he considered to be a much exaggerated account of himself and his environment. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Mopes, the novelist tells us that he found his strange abode in “a nook in a rustic by-road, down among the pleasant dales and trout-streams of a green English county.” He does not think it necessary for the reader to know what county; suffice it to say that one “may hunt there, shoot there, fish there, traverse long grass-grown Roman roads there, open ancient barrows there, see many a mile of richly-cultivated land there, and hold Arcadian talk with a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, who will tell you (if you want to know) how pastoral housekeeping is done on nine shillings a week.”
Those familiar with this portion of Hertfordshire cannot fail to recognise in these allusions the neighbourhood of Stevenage, and a clue to its identity is afforded by the allusion to “ancient barrows,” for at Stevenage there are some remarkable tumuli known as the “Six Hills,” which are believed to be ancient sepulchral barrows, or repositories of the dead. If further evidence be required, it is forthcoming in the following delightful portrayal of Stevenage itself, as it appeared to Dickens over forty years ago:
“The morning sun was hot and bright upon the village street. The village street was like most other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size, and drowsy in the dullest degree. The quietest little dwellings with the largest of window-shutters (to shut up Nothing as carefully as if it were the Mint or the Bank of England) had called in the Doctor’s house so suddenly that his brass doorplate and three stories stood among them as conspicuous and different as the Doctor himself in his broadcloth among the smock frocks of his patients. The village residences seem to have gone to law with a similar absence of consideration, for a score of weak little lath-and-plaster cabins clung in confusion about the Attorney’s red-brick house, which, with glaring doorsteps and a most terrific scraper, seemed to serve all manner of ejectments upon them. They were as various as labourers—high-shouldered, wry-necked, one-eyed, goggle-eyed, squinting, bow-legged, knock-kneed, rheumatic, crazy; some of the small tradesmen’s houses, such as the crockery shop and the harness-maker’s, had a Cyclops window in the middle of the gable, within an inch or two of its apex, suggesting that some forlorn rural Prentice must wriggle himself into that apartment horizontally, when he retired to rest, after the manner of the worm. So bountiful in its abundance was the surrounding country, and so lean and scant the village, that one might have thought the village had sown and planted everything it once possessed to convert the same into crops. This would account for the bareness of the little shops, the bareness of the few boards and trestles designed for market purposes in a corner of the street, the bareness of the obsolete inn and inn yard, with the ominous inscription, ‘Excise Office,’ not yet faded out from the gateway, as indicating the very last thing that poverty could get rid of....” The village alehouse, mentioned in the first chapter of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” and there called the Peal of Bells, is the White Hart, Stevenage, where Dickens called on his way to see Lucas to inquire of the landlord, old Sam Cooper, the shortest route to the “ruined hermitage of Mr. Mopes the hermit,” some five miles distant. He found Tom Tiddler’s Ground to be “a nook in a rustic by-road, which the genius of Mopes had laid waste as completely as if he had been born an Emperor and a Conqueror. Its centre object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently substantial, all the window-glass of which had been long ago abolished by the surprising genius of Mopes, and all the windows of which were barred across with rough-split logs of trees nailed over them on the outside. A rick-yard, hip high in vegetable rankness and ruin, contained out-buildings, from which the thatch had lightly fluttered away ... and from which the planks and beams had heavily dropped and rotted.” After noting the fragments of mildewed ricks and the slimy pond, the traveller encountered the hermit himself, as well as he could be observed between the window-bars, “lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace,” when presently began the interview with “the sooty object in blanket and skewer,” as related in the narrative with approximate exactitude.
CHAPTER IX.
IN DICKENS LAND.
“Kent, sir! Everybody knows Kent. Apples, cherries, hops, and women.” Thus did Alfred Jingle briefly summarize for the behoof of Tracy Tupman the principal characteristics of the county which, by general consent, is termed “the Garden of England,” a designation richly merited through its sylvan charms and other natural beauties.
This division of south-eastern England is rightly considered as the very heart of Dickens land, for the reason that no other locality (excepting, of course, the great Metropolis) possesses such numerous associations with the novelist and his writings. He himself practically admitted as much when, in 1840, he said: “I have many happy recollections connected with Kent, and am scarcely less interested in it than if I had been a Kentish man bred and born, and had resided in the county all my life.” It was in Kent, too, where he made his last home and where he drew his last breath.
As already narrated in the opening chapter of this volume, some of Dickens’s earliest years were spent at Chatham, and the locality within the radius of a few miles became familiar to him by means of pedestrian excursions with his father; indeed, it was during one of these delightful jaunts that he first saw the house at Gad’s Hill which subsequently became his own property, and the incident is thus faithfully recorded (although thinly disguised) in one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers:
“So smooth was the old highroad, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.
“‘Halloa!’ said I to the very queer small boy. ‘Where do you live?’