That Ebenezer geezer... who was the real Scrooge?
It’s been suggested that during a walk in Edinburgh’s Canongate churchyard in June 1841, Dickens came across the gravestone of one Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie. The gravestone gave ‘meal man’ as Scroggie’s profession, referring to his trade as a merchant. Somehow Dickens misread this as ‘mean man’ and later wrote in his notebook: "To be remembered through eternity only for being mean seemed the greatest testament to a life wasted."
The other inspiration for Scrooge is likely to have been John Elwes (1714-1789), the MP for Berkshire who was born in to a prestigious and wealthy family of reputed skinflints.
Dickens would have known of Elwes through a biography written by Edward Topham, Life of the Late John Elwes (1790), which became a bestseller, going through 12 editions and establishing ‘Elwes the miser’ as the archetypal penny-pincher:
“All earthly comforts he voluntarily denied himself: he would walk home in the rain, in London, sooner than pay a shilling for a coach: he would sit in wet clothes sooner than have a fire to dry them: he would eat his provisions in the last stage of putrefaction sooner than have afresh joint from the butcher's…”
And this was a man who was bequeathed an estate by his uncle which exceeded 23 million U.S. Dollars in today’s money.
Much more at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4y78YB9vVMG1xYrW8CmzjPw/that-ebenezer-geezer-who-was-the-real-scrooge