2023-12-26 14:03:46
A Christmas Carol is one of the most beloved novels for the holiday season, whether in written form from the pen of Charles Dickens himself or in a film version, it has delighted, terrified and moved people from 1843 onwards when first published.
The book is about the strange and miserly moneylender, Ebenezer Scrooge, whom Dickens describes as “a sphinx, grasping, profiteering, old sinner” who despises his staff and detests Christmas, who after a supernatural visit from the deceased partner of Jacob Marley and from Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, presents an ideological, moral and emotional transformation.
But who was actually the character that inspired Scrooge?
In fact, it is believed by many that the old miser was based on a real person and that was John Elves, a landowner, contractor and Berkshire MP between 1772 and 1784. He was known for his miserliness and his “unbelievable” wealth.
He went to bed as soon as it got dark to save money, considering candles a waste, and if any one dared to visit him, he would have to share the one-wood fire, and sometimes be content with a glass of wine for two.
He ate meat that had expired and was way past his capacity to avoid buying new food. In fact, a guest who shared a meal with him described how he would buy a carcass and eat it “until the last stage of rot, meat walking on his plate”.
He hated buying food so much that he once took a half-eaten black petrite from a rat that had dragged it out of a pond.
After dinner he would sneak into the stables to remove whatever hay the stableman had left for the guests’ horses and save it for his own. Traveling to Westminster from his constituency in Berkshire, he refused to pay for a carriage, preferring to ride a pony.
Sketch from “A Christmas Story” (Source: Pixabay)
He followed soft pavements instead of the road to avoid horseshoes, put a boiled egg in his pocket to ensure he didn’t have to buy a meal at a tavern, and slept under hedges.
He wore rags and was mistaken for a beggar
As the Mirror reports, far from the suits and uniforms worn by today’s MPs, he wore tattered clothes so worn and dirty that some thought he was a beggar and had pennies thrown into his hands as he walked, refusing to pay for any kind of transport. means.
In fact, as reported by the Daily Mail, it is said that once, when he injured both of his legs by falling in the dark, he allowed a pharmacist to treat only one. Seeing the opportunity, he made a smart bet that the unhealed leg would heal faster than the healed leg. Turns out he was right. The untreated leg is said to have healed a fortnight faster and Elves won back his pharmacist’s fee.
Fun fact: the possible inspiration for Ebeneezer Scrooge was a man named John Elwes, a miser who refused to buy new clothes or even repair his own mansion. However, in contrast to Scrooge, he never chased up unpaid loans and was known to be generous to his friends. pic.twitter.com/l6GOGdJ8vx
— Bantership Potemkin (@Bonesdrawstuff) December 25, 2021
When he died in 1789 aged 75, his fortune was worth £36.5 million in today’s money. He owned a picturesque country house with an imposing mansion in the Suffolk village of Stoke-by-Clare, a London property empire of 100 houses and many bloated bank accounts.
Family stinginess
His father was a wealthy brewer, the son of a London MP. Elves’ unusual life began with a family tragedy when he was orphaned at the age of five or six. First his father died and soon after his mother. From them he inherited the foundations of his fortune, and then a second, even more substantial sum from his eccentric uncle, Sir Hervey Elwes, baronet and MP for the town of Sudbury in Suffolk.
So what could explain his frugality? One answer is that it was a family phenomenon, as both his mother, the granddaughter of a Suffolk baron, and her mother, sister of the Earl of Bristol, were famous misers. His uncle Sir Hervey Elwes was also a known miser.
Sketch from “A Christmas Story” (Source: Pixabay)
His avaricious ways meant that his roof leaked, his windows were repaired with paper, he ate sparingly which was usually game he had caught and killed on his estate. At night he walked to keep warm instead of lighting a fire. He taught his nephew everything he knew about economics, and when he died unmarried and without heirs in 1763, he left Elves his fortune.
Elves did not maintain his own household in the capital, preferring to sleep in whichever of his many properties were temporarily vacant, he never married, believing marriage to be too expensive, but had two sons, George and John, with his housekeeper of 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 frugality escalated.
It is said that in Stoke-by-Clare he used to sleep in the stables with his horses to escape the house fire.
The end of similarities
Elves’ life and crazy habits were chronicled in a biography written by journalist and playwright Edward Topham. This book, a bestseller published around the time of Dickens’s birth in 1812, kept alive the stories that had made Elves a legend during his life in Suffolk and Westminster.
It is said that Dickens was obsessed with the parliamentarian lifestyle – being so rich that he could have everything in life and yet choosing to distance himself from any kind of pleasure. The author even included him in the plot of a later novel, referring to him by name in Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865.
However, this is where the differentiation between John Elves and Ebenezer Scrooge ends. The glaring difference between Elvis and the character he inspired is that he didn’t need lessons in kindness or compassion. For all his eccentricity, he was known as a decent and good man, a moral MP and a believer.
Edward Topham wrote of him: “His public character lives after him pure and unblemished. In his private life he was mostly his own enemy. To others he lent much – to himself he denied everything.”
What Dickens Scholars Think
Professor Leon Litvak, of Queen’s University Belfast, lead editor of the Charles Dickens Letters Project, which brings together the author’s rich correspondence, says the similarities between Scrooge and Elves are clear.
The Elves’ refusal to consider the weather so as not to incur a cost is echoed in Scrooge’s intransigence to heat and cold, for example.
“No heat could warm him, no wintry weather could chill him,” Dickens writes.
Sketch from “A Christmas Story” (Source: Pixabay)
Many Dickens experts believe that illustrator John Leach based the sketches of Scrooge in the first edition of A Christmas Story on contemporary portraits and engravings of Elves. “You can see that [ο Ελβς] he has the exaggerated features that we associate with Scrooge, the long nose, the emaciated face, the pointed chin, the famous grimace,” Professor Litvak continues.
“It is believed that Leach used one of these to create his own effigy of Scrooge, that these sketches are the embodiment of the Elves,” he added.
Professor Michael Slater, consultant to the Dickens Museum in London and Dickens biographer, agrees.
“Dickens enjoyed the eccentric and colorful characters that find their way into his writing,” he said.
“His great characters – Scrooge, Mr. Pickwick, Fagin – all have characteristics of people he’d met or heard about in real life. What Dickens did with them in his novels is his genius. And we know he knew John Elwes because Elwes was going to appear on ‘A Mutual Friend,’” he concluded.
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