Place Name
Built in 1959 on the site of a former Victorian or possibly Georgian property of the same name with the adjoining Orchard House replacing Hermitage Cottage, where the novelist Matthew Gregory Lewis, the popular Gothic novelist, which included The Monk published in 1796, which gave the author his nickname. He also wrote “sensational melodramas for the stage” such as Timur the Tartar. Lewis, who was also a MP who kept some 250 slaves on two Jamaican estates, lived there from 1801 until his death in 1819. Louis F Peck writing in A Life of Matthew G Lewis explains: “Known as Hermitage Cottage, it was on what was then Goodenough’s Lane on a small common, near the church. There is no trace of it today; the spot where it stood is near the head of what is now Nassau Street. His [Lewis] only objection to the cottage was that he had to share it with the owners, who also reserved part of the garden for themselves. He leased five rooms but needed a sixth because his books crowded him. Though for some time he looked upon these quarters as temporary, he retained them until his death and furnished them, the biography tells us, ‘in a manner in every way indicative of its sensitive occupant’. Besides too many books it contained a profusion of pictures, mirrors, seals, statues, a piano, numerous pets, and an ‘unusual quantity of exquisitely furnished bijouterie.’ In the flower gardens were statues of Cupid and Fortune… Lewis had a customary walk on the edge of the common, where he could be seen going back and forth for a couple of ours at a time.”
