You may not recognize the name John Elwes, but you almost certainly know his literary and cartoon heirs— Ebenezer Scrooge (the cold-hearted miser at the center of Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol), and Scrooge McDuck (the fabulously wealthy yet miserly uncle of Donald Duck). Both were modelled, at least in part, on this extraordinary 18th-century Englishman whose avarice was so extreme that it became a national curiosity. Born into immense wealth yet living as if penniless, Elwes’s life was a study in contradiction— a man who hoarded riches but dressed in rags, who lent vast sums yet refused himself a fire on a freezing night, and whose eccentricities would inspire one of the most famous misers in fiction.
Ebenezer Scrooge sitting by the fireplace. Illustration by John Leech. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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