He is as notorious today as he was when he was introduced to the reading public in December 1843 – the “pressing, tearing, grasping, scratching, clinging, greedy, old sinner!”. at the heart of A Christmas Carol.
But if Ebenezer Scrooge is a feat of literary imagination, it’s less well known that the character had a real-life inspiration. John Elwes was a man so tight-fisted that he made Charles Dickens’ creation look somewhat amateurish. Eighteenth-century landowner, real estate developer and sometime Member of Parliament, Elwes was famous himself, an exceptional miser whose frugality made him a figure of national fascination and ridicule.
For example, Elwes chose not to polish his shoes in case it would wear them out faster. He hated buying food so much that he once took a half-eaten moorhen from a rat that had pulled it out of a pond. And he lived in ragged clothes, including an old wig he found in a hedge.
He went to bed at dusk, considered candles an extravagance, and if anyone brave enough to visit him would have to share a fire from a single stick, sometimes contenting himself with a glass of wine between two.
British MP John Elwes was a truly miserly man who proved to be the inspiration for the iconic character at the heart of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Few would dine with him, as he bought a carcass and “ate it to the last stage of putrefaction, flesh spilling on his plate,” according to one guest. After supper he snuck over to the stables to remove the hay the groom had left for visiting horses to save for his own. Traveling to Westminster from his Berkshire constituency, he refused to stand up for a carriage, preferring to ride a shaggy pony.
To save on horseshoes, he stuck to soft verges rather than the road, packed a boiled egg in his pocket to ensure he didn’t have to buy a meal at a tavern, and slept under hedges.
Paying for rides on the private turnpikes – the toll roads of the day (so called because of the turnstile that allowed access) – was out of the question for Elwes. Some took pity on him and threw a coin or two in his direction, mistaking him for a poor man. Like Scrooge, Elwes was very wealthy but not too proud to keep the pennies thrown his way.
He was so mean that once, when he injured both his legs and fell over in the dark, he allowed a pharmacist to only treat one. He spotted an opportunity and wisely bet that the untreated leg would heal faster than the treated one. He turned out to be right. The untreated one reportedly healed a fortnight faster and Elwes recovered his fee from the pharmacist – at the cost of considerable agony, it was said.
When he died in 1789, John Elwes was now worth £36.5 million. He owned a picturesque country estate with an imposing manor house in the village of Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk; a 100-home London property empire; and had several bulging bank accounts.
Elwes’ father was a wealthy brewer, the son of a London MP. What, then, could explain his thrift? One answer is that it ran in the family, as both his mother, granddaughter of a Suffolk baronet, and her mother, sister of the Earl of Bristol, had been famous penny pinchers. His uncle Sir Hervey Elwes was also a well-known miser.
But if Ebenezer Scrooge is a feat of literary imagination, it’s less well known that the character had a real-life inspiration
In any case, John Elwes took obsessive meanness to such heights that it captured the imagination of Dickens, Britain’s master storyteller, half a century after his death.
The contrast between Elwe’s vast fortune and his frugality was a source of fascination for Dickens, and we see the same contradiction in the life of Scrooge. He, too, is portrayed as a banker of considerable funds who chooses to live in starving, frozen misery.
There seems little doubt that Dickens relied on Elwes to inform A Christmas Carol.
The author even included him in the plot of a later novel, mentioning him by name in Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865.
On January 18th of the same year the author had written from his home, Gads Hill Place near Rochester, Kent, requesting delivery of a book – Merryweather’s Lives And Anecdotes Of Misers – which contained a fruity chapter on Elwes.
“If you can get Merryweather or anything else that will give me the reference remedy I want, buy it for me and please send down a messenger,” he wrote. ‘I’ll be saved a lot of hassle and delay if I can get what I want here tomorrow.’
Dickens got the book and never parted with it. It was in his library when he died.
The life and crazy habits of Elwes were also chronicled in a biography by journalist and playwright Edward Topham. This book, a bestseller published around the time of Dickens’ birth in 1812, kept alive the stories that made Elwes a legend in Suffolk and Westminster during his lifetime.
Professor Leon Litvack of Queen’s University, Belfast, is Editor-in-Chief of the Charles Dickens Letters Project, which collects the author’s extensive correspondence. He says the similarities between Scrooge and Elwes are clear.
For example, Elwes’ refusal to consider the weather so that it would not incur a cost is echoed in Scrooge’s insensitivity to heat and cold.
“No heat could warm him, no winter weather could cool him,” says Dickens.
Many Dickens experts believe that the illustrator John Leech based his sketches of Scrooge in the first edition of A Christmas Carol on contemporary portraits and etchings by Elwes. ‘You can see [Elwes] has the exaggerated facial features that we associate with Scrooge, the long nose, the gaunt face, the pointed chin, the famous grimace,” says Prof. Litvack.
Many Dickens experts believe that the illustrator John Leech based his sketches of Scrooge in the first edition of A Christmas Carol on contemporary portraits and etchings by Elwes
“It is believed that Leech used one of them to create his own likeness of Scrooge that these sketches are the incarnation of Elwes.”
Professor Michael Slater, adviser to the Dickens Museum in London and Dickens biographer, agrees.
“Dickens liked eccentrics and colorful characters that found their way into his writing,” he says.
“His great characters – Scrooge, Mr Pickwick, Fagin – they all have traits of people he’s met or heard of in real life. That’s what Dickens did with it in his novels, that’s his genius.
“And we know he was familiar with John Elwes because Elwes would later appear in Our Mutual Friend.”
A Christmas Carol is one of the most dramatized of all Dickens novels, the latest version being the newly published Spirited. With Ryan Reynolds as Clint Briggs, a cynical and amoral New York media communications man, the musical has given the story a Hollywood makeover. Will Ferrell plays the ghost of Christmas Present and Dame Judi Dench has a cameo appearance.
Perhaps the most famous portrayals are by Alastair Sim in the 1951 film Scrooge and Albert Finney in the 1970 musical adaptation of the same name.
The only glaring difference between Elwes and the character he inspired is that he needed no lessons in kindness or compassion. For all his eccentricities, Elwes was known as a decent man, a moral MP, and a loyal and forgiving friend. Edward Topham wrote of him: ‘His public character lives upon him pure and without blemish. In his private life he was mainly an enemy of himself. He lent much to others; he denies himself everything.’
Scrooge must be frightened into generosity by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and to come.
Elwe’s unusual life began with a family tragedy when he was orphaned at the age of five or six. His father died first, followed closely by his mother. From them he inherited the basis of his fortune and then a second, even more substantial sum from his eccentric uncle, Sir Hervey Elwes, a baronet and MP for the market town of Sudbury in Suffolk.
His own stingy nature resulted in his roof leaking, his windows being repaired with paper, him eating poorly, and then being caught and killed mostly game on his own estate. At night he paced to keep warm instead of starting a fire. He taught his nephew all he knew about saving, and when he died unmarried with no heirs in 1763, he left his fortune to Elwes.
Elwes became MP in 1772, by which time he was also a successful real estate developer and responsible for parts of Regency London that still exist today: Marylebone, Portman Place, Oxford Circus and Piccadilly.
He did not maintain his own household in the capital, preferring to settle in one of his many estates that were temporarily vacant. Elwes never married, believing marriage would be too expensive, but he had two sons, George and John, with his housekeeper in Berkshire.
In 1784 he retired from public life to spend more time with his money, but without the distraction of his parliamentary work his obsessive thrift escalated.
It is said that at Stoke-by-Clare he slept with his horses in the stables to save himself having to make a fire in the house.
Elwes died in bed in November 1789, dressed in cloak, hat and shoes, that miser of a man who inspired a story that still enchants the world every Christmas today.