Dirty Dick

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Nathaniel Bentley (c. 1735 – 1809), commonly known as Dirty Dick, was an English merchant who was known for his filthy and unwashed appearance. He came from a moneyed background and received a good education. As a young man, he spoke several languages and dressed in a dandified manner, and was given the nickname "the beau of Leadenhall Street". He met Louis XVI of France and attended his coronation in June 1775; he was a patron of the London pleasure gardens at Ranelagh in Chelsea and Vauxhall in Kennington. In his late thirties, Bentley became parsimonious and stopped washing and cleaning himself and his shop. He picked up the nickname Dirty Dick, and his shop became known as "the dirty warehouse". Both he and his shop became well known and were lampooned in the press. People visited the outlet to see the squalor and noted that Bentley was very polite and had impeccable manners. Rumours circulated that Bentley had not washed since his fiancée had died on their wedding eve and that he had locked the dining room, complete with the wedding feast, and left it to moulder. Bentley moved out of his shop in 1804, and the contents were sold off. One enterprising publican purchased some of the contents, including mummified rats and cats, and used them to decorate his pub, which he renamed Dirty Dicks; as at 2026 the pub is still in operation under that name. Bentley died of a fever in 1809 in Haddington, East Lothian, in Scotland. Bentley's story was known by the writer Charles Dickens, and Bentley's locked dining room may have inspired the locked room of Miss Havisham in the 1861 novel Great Expectations.