I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.
— Charles Dickens
John Elwes was a notorious Parliamentarian whose miserly antics entertained Londoners seven decades before Dickens lampooned him in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.
Elwes inherited both his mother's and uncle's money upon their deaths and, to Londoners' delight, set about hoarding it.
Elwes' stinginess was the stuff of legends.
Too cheap to pay for a coach, he walked everywhere, even in the rain and snow. When he traveled to London from his country estate, he always took the long way, to avoid turnpike tolls. He routinely ate moldy bread, rancid meat, and rotted gleanings from the harvest; refused to see doctors when he was ill; and, despite being a Member of Parliament, wore a single, ragged suit and a ratty wig he'd found in a gutter. (His fellow Members of Parliament observed that, since Elwes only had one suit, they could never accuse him of being a turncoat.)
Elwes would spend his evenings sitting beside a woodfire in his kitchen, to save on candles and coal; and would find his way to bed in the dark. He let his several townhomes fall into ruin, rather than pay for their upkeep, and relocated each time one became uninhabitable, which they all did. He quit Parliament after only 12 years, because he thought it too costly to remain a Member.
When he died in 1789, Elwes' net worth exceeded £38 million. His obit said his name would become "proverbial in the annals of avarice." But it didn't.
Instead, the name Scrooge did.
Dickens took that name from a grave in Scotland.
Although the real Ebenezer Scroggie wasn't a miser—quite the opposite—Dickens made him one.
