Featured Article Summary #88

Nathaniel Bentley (c. 1735–1809), nicknamed “Dirty Dick,” was an English merchant known for looking extremely dirty and unwashed. He came from a well-off family, was well educated, spoke several languages, and dressed in a stylish way earlier in life, earning him the title “the beau of Leadenhall Street.” Later, in his late thirties, he became very stingy and stopped washing himself and cleaning his shop, which then became infamous and was called “the dirty warehouse.” People came to see the mess, even though Bentley remained polite and well-mannered, and rumors claimed he had not washed since his fiancée died on their wedding eve and that a wedding room was left to rot. After he moved out in 1804, his shop’s contents were sold, and some were used to decorate a pub that still operates today as “Dirty Dicks.” Bentley died in 1809 of a fever, and his story—especially the idea of a sealed-up room—may have influenced Charles Dickens’s era and the “locked room” element in Great Expectations. Nathaniel Bentley was born around 1735 in London, the son of a successful hardware shopkeeper, Thomas Bentley. He had a good education, learned several languages, and traveled Europe; as a young man he was known for his fashionable manners and dress, later gaining access to high society in Paris, including attending the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775. After inheriting his father’s fortune in 1760, Bentley’s appearance and habits changed in his late thirties—he became increasingly dirty and careless, running a filthy shop known as “the dirty warehouse,” though he stayed polite to visitors. His lease ended in 1804, and after moving he eventually became a tramp, begging across Britain before dying of fever in Haddington in 1809. After Bentley’s remaining goods were sold, a publican in Bishopsgate used them to decorate and rename his pub “Dirty Dicks,” including mummified animals that had been found in the warehouse. An archaeologist questioned whether some items were genuine, and although some decoration was removed in the 1980s, mummified cats were still displayed until at least 2008; the pub is owned by Young’s brewery. Later, an article in Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens) described Bentley’s warehouse in a poem, and some scholars suggest Dickens may have drawn on Bentley for Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, linking the decayed, cobweb-covered wedding-feast setting.