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Daniel Dancer (1716–1794) was a notorious English miser whose life was documented soon after his death and continued in print over the following century. ==A strange and unaccountable life== The miser Daniel Dancer was born at Pinner, then a rural area in the county of Middlesex, in 1716. His grandfather and father were both noted in their time as misers, and are only less known to fame because their accumulation of wealth was not so great. The elder Dancer died in 1736, and Daniel, as the eldest of his four children, succeeded to his estate, which consisted of eighty acres of rich meadow land and an adjoining farm. Hitherto Dancer had given no manifestation of his miserly instincts, but now, in company with his only sister, who shared his tastes and lived with him as his housekeeper, he commenced a life of the utmost seclusion and most rigid parsimony. His lands were allowed to lie fallow so that the expense of cultivation might be avoided. He took only one meal a day, consisting invariably of a little baked meat and a hard-boiled dumpling, a sufficient quantity of which to last the week was prepared every Saturday night. His clothing consisted mainly of hay bands, which were swathed round his feet for boots and round his body for a coat, but it was his habit to purchase one new shirt every year. And after his sister's death in 1766, he used a fraction of her bequest to buy a second-hand pair of black stockings to put himself in decent mourning. The miser's only dealing with others arose from the sale of his hay. He was seldom seen, except when he was out gathering logs of wood from the common, or old iron, or sheep's dung under the hedges. To prevent theft, he fastened his door up and got into his house through the upper window, to ascend which he made use of a ladder and drew it up after him. The sole person who could be said to be at all intimately acquainted with the Dancers was a Lady Tempest, the widow of Sir Henry Tempest, a Yorkshire baronet. To this lady Dancer's sister had intended to leave her own private property, but she died before she could sign her will. There then arose a lawsuit among her three brothers as to the distribution of her money, the result of which was that Daniel was awarded two-thirds of the sum on the ground of his having kept her for thirty years. To fill his sister's place Dancer engaged a servant named Griffiths, whose manner of living was as penurious as his own. The two lived together in Dancer's tumble-down house till the master's death, which took place 30 Sept. 1794. In his last moments he was tended by Lady Tempest, who had shown uniform kindness to the old man, and who was rewarded by being made his sole legatee.〔The account is drawn from two works now in the public domain: Alsager Richard Vian's article on Daniel Dancer in the ''Dictionary of National Biography'', 1885-1900, Volume 14; and John Platts' article on him in ''The book of curiosities; or, Wonders of the great world'', 1822.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Daniel Dancer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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