Town Mouse
Aren’t you looking forward to being sociable again?
The return to social life makes me think of the opposite – people who sought isolation, like medieval anchorites and anchoresses, the mystic visionaries who spent their entire lives in a hole in a church wall. The cell had a window to the street on one side and a window to the church on the other. Some of these lunatics, such as Julian of Norwich (1343-after 1416), became quite famous.
You can imagine the captions when these lockdown ladies appeared in the Medieval Mail: ‘Anchoress cuts a spiritual figure as she poses in TINY stone cage where she has lived for 35 years.’ ‘Divine: Julian of Norwich nails utility chic in sweeping beige dress, bare feet and cosy wimple.’
In the 18th century, it became fashionable for landed families to employ a hermit and keep him on the premises to gawp at. At Lulworth, Dorset, a supposed holy man lived alone in a hermitage, though he was relatively free compared with the wall-dwellers of the Middle Ages: one story relates that he was sacked when discovered down the pub.
Being paid to do nothing lost its appeal after a while.
Lately, we’ve all had a bit of a taste of the hermit’s life. And most of us have found it to be bloody miserable. Life should be lived, not avoided. Loneliness is a problem, a disease – and it can kill.
In Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, a new book by the foremost scientist on friendship, Robin Dunbar, cites various studies showing that loneliness depresses the immune system. ‘Friends are genuinely good for you,’ he says, ‘even at the physiological level.’
This is obviously true. The other day, a friend called to ask if I wanted to eat a sandwich by the canal for lunch. It was not the most luxurious meal ever eaten but, to us, it was bliss. He said he’d enjoyed aspects of lockdown but had now had enough. We met feeling low and parted feeling massively cheered. I could feel any malignant viruses being repelled from me by powerful bonhomie.
In Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Johnny Town-mouse (1918), Johnny lives in fellowship with a large group of other town mice, while Timmy Willie appears to subsist in rural isolation, like a hermit. He can do what he likes and does not need to wear a smart frock-coat to dinner like his cousin, but isn’t his life a bit bare and empty?
Dickens had a burning hatred of hermits, expressed in his 1861 short story, Tom Tiddler’s Ground. It was based on his real-life encounter with James ‘Mad’ Lucas (1813-1874), a famous Victorian hermit.
Lucas’s family had become rich following the abolition of slavery – slaveowners had been given compensation by the government.
But rather than attempting to do good with this fortune, Lucas locked himself in a single room on his family estate, let his hair grow long, lived in filth alongside rats and generally behaved like something out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
People came to visit Mad Lucas from far and wide, admiring his anchorite sensibilities. Charles Dickens, however, felt his self-isolation, far from being an act of extreme holiness, was in fact a sign of monstrous egotism and vanity. ‘I know you like to be seen,’ he says to Lucas – also known as the Hermit of Redcoats Green – in the story, when the two meet.
Dickens christens him Mr Mopes and continues in similar anti-hermetic vein: ‘It is my intention to sit here through this summer day, until that summer sun sinks low in the west, and tell you what a poor creature you are.’ He calls Mr Mopes weak.
‘I weak, you fool?’ the hermit responds. ‘I who have held to my purpose, and my diet, and my only bed there, all these years?’
The dynamic writer’s objection to Mad Lucas and his way of life is that mankind is made to be sociable and active. Dickens goes on, ‘We must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work, and act and react on one other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner.’
Some of us are feeling a tad apprehensive about arising from our anchorite cells and corners to wash our faces and do our gregarious work. It’s all a bit daunting. Life has been quite easy when we’ve been locked down. There aren’t so many responsibilities – like when you’re in prison.
But what’s the most feared punishment in prison? Solitary confinement. Those who live alone have suffered most under lockdown. All their social-support mechanisms have been cruelly taken away.
Even if we’re a bit nervous, most of us will rush back into the arms of the crowd with great joy – whether we’re town mice or country mice