At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown. Queen Caroline—she of the Serpentine in Hyde Park—had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit. Somewhat improbably, he went on to become the rector of a church at Byfleet in Surrey. Unfortunately, he appears not to have been happy there—he appears not to have been happy anywhere—and drowned himself in the Thames.