He’s as notorious today as when introduced to the reading public in December 1843 – the ‘squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!’ at the heart of A Carol.
But if Ebenezer Scrooge is a supreme feat of literary imagination, what’s less well-known is that the character had an inspiration in real life. John Elwes was a man so truly miserly he made Charles Dickens’s creation look like something of an amateur. An 18th Century landowner, property developer and sometime Member of Parliament, Elwes was famous in his own right, an extraordinary skinflint whose penny-pinching made him a figure of national fascination and ridicule.
Elwes chose not to clean his shoes in case it wore them out faster, for example. He so hated buying food that he once took a half-eaten moorhen off a rat which had dragged it from a pond. And he lived in ragged clothes including an old wig he found in a hedge.
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