Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the best known and best loved Christmas
stories of all time.
The redemptive story of Ebenezer Scrooge learning to not be a grinch is a classic.
But where did the character come from?
Here's the man who was the inspiration behind Ebenezer Scrooge.
While there are many different men that modern fans claim to be the inspiration for Scrooge,
the most likely candidate is an 18th-century British politician named John Elwes, who was
notorious for his penny pinching.
Supporting the idea that Elwes was the model for Dickens' most famous miser is the fact
that we know for sure that Dickens knew of Elwes, despite the latter dying years before
Dickens was born: Dickens mentions Elwes and his parsimonious habits in his letters, and
references him by name in his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend.
John Elwes was born John Meggot in 1714 and inherited his first fortune.
worth about $10 million today, at just 4 years of age following the passing of his father,
a brewer.
He doubled down on that fabulous wealth after spending his life imitating and sucking up
to his uncle, Sir Hervey Elwes, a wealthy member of Parliament and himself an infamous
miser.
Meggot changed his name to Elwes to curry his uncle's favor, and he found himself the
recipient of an estate worth roughly $23 million today.
But if, as they say, a penny saved is a penny earned, John Elwes was more like a billionaire.
The young John Elwes learned much of his miserly mindset from his uncle, with whom he would
sit around complaining about the way other people wasted money while sharing a single
glass of wine between them.
Elwes took these lessons to heart and took thrift to a comical extreme.
Dickens wrote of Scrooge:
"Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it."
Elwes thought the same.
He would always go to bed as soon as the sun set so he wouldn't have to pay for candles.
He ate roadkill, and would consume moldy and rotting food rather than let it go to waste.
He wore ragged clothes, including a wig he found in a bush.
His look was so disheveled that strangers often assumed he was a beggar and would drop
pennies in his hand.
Elwes would walk in the rain rather than paying for a coach, and then he would sit around
in his wet clothes rather than waste fuel building a fire to dry them.
His roof leaked and his lavish home fell to ruin around him.
He got mad at birds who stole hay from his fields to build their nests.
These all sound like jokes, but this is just how he lived.
Elwes once badly cut both of his legs while walking home in the dark.
Given his distrust of doctors, he would only let the apothecary treat one leg, and made
a wager.
If his untreated leg healed faster than the treated leg, the apothecary would forfeit
his fee.
As it happens, the untreated leg healed two weeks faster, and presumably Elwes was as
smug about it as you could imagine.
"There is no such thing as rich enough.
Only poor enough."
Like his grandfather and uncle before him, Elwes ran for Parliament and served three
terms.
He was technically a member of the Whig party, but he would - surprise - vote for whichever
party's policies seemed most frugal.
Other members of Parliament joked that they would have called him a turncoat, but they
knew for a fact that he only owned one coat.
After a total of 12 years in Parliament, he decided to retire rather than continuing to
waste money running for public office.
Considering his election expenses were a staggering 18 pence - next to nothing - it's no surprise
he'd want to relieve himself of that burden.
If you look at Elwes' life more closely, however, the Scrooge comparisons start to fall away,
especially once you get past the extreme personal frugality.
When it came to other people, Elwes could be rather lavish with his money.
When his friends were in dire financial straits, he would be generous almost to a fault.
One story says he once lent a friend £7,000 unprompted so the friend could bet on a horse
race.
Elwes himself showed up at the racetrack with nothing to eat for the whole day but a two-month-old
pancake he found in his coat pocket that he swore was "as good as new."
Elwes also spent a lot of money in investments, some bad, many good.
Most notably, he was a patron of architect Robert Adam, and as such financed a lot of
London's West End architecture, including Portman Square and parts of Oxford Circus,
Piccadilly, Baker Street, and Marylebone.
So if you've ever enjoyed any of those places, you can thank the generosity of England's
most famous real-life miser.
There are those who argue that John Elwes is not the inspiration, or, at least, not
the only inspiration, for Scrooge.
Those people will point toward Jemmy Wood, the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank and possibly
Britain's first millionaire, known in his lifetime as "the Gloucester Miser."
He, like Elwes, was definitely known to Dickens, as the author also mentions him in Our Mutual
Friend.
Additionally, there is a character called "Dismal Jemmy" in The Pickwick Papers, and
a court case in Bleak House is believed to have been inspired by legal battles over Wood's
will that ran so long they ended up consuming most of his estate.
Famous tales of Wood's parsimony include visiting the docks to fill his pockets with coal that
fell off boats being unloaded there, and that he walked everywhere instead of ever taking
a carriage.
Like Elwes, he would wear the same clothes for years until they became ragged.
One story says a fellow traveler refused to believe that the ragged Wood had any money
in the bank, so Wood bet him he could withdraw £100,000 when they got to the city.
When Wood was able to procure the money, the incredulous traveler was forced to hand over
his £5.
Yet another story of Dickens' inspiration for Scrooge comes from a legend so widespread
that even the BBC reported it as a possibility.
The story goes that Dickens was walking through a graveyard in Edinburgh and came across a
tombstone that belonged to "Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie."
The inscription underneath read that Scroggie was a "meal man" - that is, he sold corn - but
Dickens misread it as "mean man," and his imagination was sparked by wondering just
how stingy someone would have to be, since "mean" at the time could be interpreted as
cheap, for this to be the way they would be remembered through eternity.
The story then goes on to say that the "real" Scroggie was in fact a jolly bon vivant who
had a reputation as a party animal.
Conveniently, the story goes that the headstone was destroyed when the Edinburgh graveyard
in question was being restored in the 1930s.
So it's impossible to verify how true this story really is.
The Telegraph points out, this popular story is almost certainly a hoax.
The only source for this story is the man who originally told it in 1997, and there
is no corroborating evidence whatsoever.
Besides being thrifty beyond all reason, Scrooge is also cruel to the poor in an extreme degree.
When, at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, he is asked if he might donate to aid the
poor, Scrooge asks angrily,
"Are there no prisons?
The workhouses, they still in operation?
The treadmill?
The poor houses?
Still in full vigor?"
When the collectors respond that not everyone can go to these places, and many would rather
die than go, Scrooge replies,
"If they would rather die, perhaps they had better do so, and decrease the surplus population."
For some critics the phrase "surplus population" is a sure sign that Dickens' portrayal of
Scrooge was a commentary on the still-current debate around the philosophies of political
economist Thomas Malthus.
Malthus argued that economies and populations grow at different rates, and as a result,
poverty is inevitable.
The only solution in Malthusian thought is to limit population growth, which leads to
ideas like eugenics.
Scrooge later feels shame at his earlier Malthusian ideas when the Ghost of Christmas Present
refers to Tiny Tim as "surplus population."
This Ghost, with his cornucopia, a symbol of plenty, stands as a stark repudiation of
Malthusian ideas: There is, he says, enough for everyone.
You just have to share it.
This is a concept Scrooge comes around to after a vision of himself becoming a member
of the surplus population.
While there are certainly compelling arguments to be made that Dickens was inspired to create
Scrooge by real-life misers and cruel philosophers, it can also be argued that Ebenezer Scrooge
was simply the logical culmination of the development of ideas Dickens had already introduced
in some earlier works.
For example, in Martin Chuzzlewit, written in serialized form between 1842 and 1844,
there is a rich old man named Martin Chuzzlewit who is paranoid about his fortune, fearing
that his family has designs on his money.
He adopts an orphan to be his caretaker, with the understanding that he will take care of
her financially as long as she tends to his health.
When old Martin's grandson falls in love with his grandfather's caretaker, the old man is
furious.
And, not to spoil a 170-plus-year-old book, but old Martin is revealed to actually be
good and kind at the end of the book, in a character shift that prefigures Scrooge's
own change of heart.
Likewise, in an earlier Christmas story that appeared in The Pickwick Papers some seven
years before A Christmas Carol called "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,"
a Christmas-hating gravedigger named Gabriel Grub is kidnapped by goblins, not ghosts,
who show him what Christmas is all about.
Dickens was famous for giving his characters colorful, memorable, and descriptive names.
Many of these are meant to reveal something about the character's personality, such as
Wilkins Micawber from David Copperfield, Mr. Sowerberry from Oliver Twist, Canon Crisparkle
from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the ultra-subtle Mr. M'Choakumchild from Hard Times.
"Ebenezer Scrooge" is one such name, where even the sound of it evokes a not particularly
pleasant person.
But might there be a significance behind the name beyond just the sound of it?
"Ebenezer" is a Biblical word, appearing in 1 Samuel 7:12.
There it is a stone set up by the prophet Samuel to commemorate the help that God gave
the Israelites in their victory over the Philistines.
"Ebenezer" is an Anglicization of a Hebrew phrase meaning "stone of help."
Today if the word is used in a non-Scrooge context, it usually means any kind of remembrance
of God's help, as in "Here I raise mine Ebenezer" from the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."
While arguably a stretch, Dickens' Ebenezer definitely receives divine help in overcoming
his worst impulses.
Similarly, "Scrooge" might be a take on the word "scrouge," meaning to squeeze, recalling
Dickens' description of Scrooge:
"He was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,
clutching, covetous old sinner."
Although A Christmas Carol is definitely Dickens' most famous Christmas story - and, indeed,
probably the most famous Christmas story not found in the Bible - it's certainly not his
only one.
He would go on to write several more, occasionally trying to catch that Scrooge lightning in
a bottle again.
In 1844, a year after Carol, came The Chimes, a story in which an elderly messenger is shamed
by goblins for losing faith in the goodness of humanity and their capacity for self-improvement.
1848's The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain is extremely Scrooge-esque, with chemistry
professor Redlaw obsessed with grief and embarrassment from his past and making a deal with a ghost
to forget all of these things.
This doesn't go well for Redlaw, and after his ghostly encounter, like Scrooge, he is
a better, more loving person.
It would be pretty fair to say that from Gabriel Grub to Ebenezer Scrooge to Trotty Veck to
Professor Redlaw, the idea of a cynical or selfish person who is improved by an encounter
with the supernatural is a theme in which Dickens was deeply interested.
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