A miser , or scrooge, is a person who is reluctant to spend money, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities, in order to hoard money or other possessions. Although the word is sometimes used loosely to characterise anyone who is mean with their money, if such behaviour is not accompanied by taking delight in what is saved, it is not properly miserly.
Misers have been a perennial object of popular fascination and a source for writers and artists in many cultures.
Accounting for misers One attempt to account for miserly behaviour was Sigmund Freud's theory of anal retentiveness, attributing the development of miserly behaviour to toilet training in childhood, although this explanation is not accepted by modern evidence-based psychology.
In the Christian West the attitude to those whose interest centred on gathering money has been coloured by the teachings of the Church. From its point of view, both the miser and the usurer were guilty of the cardinal sin of avarice and shared behaviours.Richard Newhauser, The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature, Cambridge 2000, p.31 According to the parable of the Elm and the Vine in the quasi-Biblical Shepherd of Hermas, the rich and the poor should be in a relationship of mutual support. Those with wealth are in need of the prayers of the poor for their salvation and can only earn them by acts of charity. A typical late example of Christian doctrine on the subject is the Reverend Erskine Neale's The Riches that Bring No Sorrow (1852), a moralising work based on a succession of biographies contrasting philanthropists and misers.
Running parallel has been a disposition, inherited from Classical times, to class miserly behaviour as a type of eccentricity. Accounts of misers were included in such 19th century works as G. H. Wilson's four-volume compendium of short biographies, The Eccentric Mirror (1807). Such books were put to comic use by Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend (serialised 1864–1865), with its cutting analysis of Victorian capitalism. In the third section of that novel, Mr Boffin decides to cure his ward Bella Wilfer of her obsession with wealth and position by appearing to become a miser. Taking her with him on a round of the bookshops,
In the following chapter, Mr Boffin brings a coachload of the books to his premises and readers are introduced to a selection of typical titles and to the names of several of the misers treated in them. Among the books appear James Caulfield's Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons (1794–1795);Various volumes appear in Google Books Kirby's Wonderful Museum of Remarkable Characters (1803); Henry Wilson's Wonderful Characters (1821); and F. Somner Merryweather's Lives and Anecdotes of Misers or The Passion of Avarice displayed in the parsimonious habits, unaccountable lives and remarkable deaths of the most notorious misers of all ages (1850).
The majority of the misers are 18th century characters, with John Elwes and Daniel Dancer at their head. The first account of Elwes' life was Edward Topham's The Life of the Late John Elwes: Esquire (1790), which was initially published in his paper The World. The popularity of such accounts is attested by the seven editions printed in the book's first year and the many later reprintings under various titles. Biographies of Dancer followed soon after, at first in periodicals such as the Edinburgh Magazine"Anecdotes of the late Daniel Dancer Esq", 1794, pp.399-40 and the Sporting Magazine,"Anecdotes of the Late Daniel Dancer" 1795 then in the compendiums Biographical Curiosities (which also included Elwes) and The Strange and Unaccountable Life of Daniel Dancer, Esq. ... with singular anecdotes of the famous Jemmy Taylor, the Southwark usurer (1797), which was often to be reissued under various titles.Roy Bearden-White, How the Wind Sits; Or, The History of Henry and Ann Lemoine, Chapbook Writers and Publishers of the Late Eighteenth Century, Southern Illinois University 2007 pp.55-7
Jemmy Taylor's name also appears in the list of notable misers that Mr Boffin enumerates. He is coupled with the banker Jemmy Wood of Gloucester, a more recent miser about whom Dickens later wrote an article in his magazine All the Year Round.April 10, 1869 pp.454-6 Others include John Little (who appears in Merryweather), Reverend Mr Jones of Blewbury (also in Merryweather) and Dick Jarrel, whose surname was really Jarrett and an account of whom appeared in the Annual Register for 1806. The many volumes of this publication also figured among Mr Boffin's purchases.
Two more of the misers mentioned made their way into other literary works. John Hopkins, known as Vulture Hopkins, was the subject of a scornful couplet in the third of Alexander Pope's Moral Essays, "Of the Use of Riches":
John Overs, with a slight change to his name, became the subject of a three-act drama by Douglas William Jerrold, John Overy or The Miser of Southwark Ferry (1828), roughly based on an incident when he feigned death to save expenses and was killed by accident.The Dramatic Magazine 1, 1829 pp.78-9
Another public source of information about misers, in Scotland at least, was the prose broadside. One example concerns Isobel Frazer or Frizzle, who died in Stirling on 26 May 1820. Much of the broadside is taken up with detailing the contents of her three rooms, into which she had let no one enter. Not more than £8 in currency was discovered there, but she had bought and hoarded many articles of dress over the years, although rarely wearing them. She had also carefully picked up every pin that fell in her way, till she nearly filled one hundred pincushions. In addition to much other bric-a-brac, there were a great number of buttons, which had been cut off old coats. This makes her sound more like a compulsive hoarder than the "Female Miser" that she is called in the report. The title was more deserved by Joseph MacWilliam, who was found dead of a fire on 13 June 1826. A servant whose home was a damp Edinburgh cellar without either bed, chair or table, his colleagues and neighbours claimed to have seen him in the same threadbare clothes for 15 years. After his death, property to the value of more than £3,000 was found in the cellar, some in the form of property deeds, and more in bank receipts.
Later in the 19th century there were small regional publications dealing with single individuals of local interest. Examples of such works include Frances Blair's 32-page Memoir of Margery Jackson, the Carlisle miser and misanthrope (Carlisle 1847) and in the United States the 46-page Lochy Ostrom, the maiden miser of Poughkeepsie; or the love of a long lifetime. An authentic biography of Rachel Ostrom who recently died in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., aged ninety years, apparently very poor, but really wealthy (Philadelphia 1870).
One trait of misers arising out of the accounts about them was their readiness to incur legal expenses where money was involved. Daniel Dancer was notorious for spending five shillings in an unsuccessful effort to recover three pence from a shop woman.Biographical Curiosities, (London 1797), pp.14-15 He was also involved in a lawsuit with his equally miserly brothers when his sister died intestate, although this time he was more successful.Biographical Curiosities (London 1797), p.6 In the same century, Margery Jackson was involved in an epic Chancery suit between 1776 and 1791 over a family inheritance.Frances Blair, Memoir of Margery Jackson, pp.12-14 The American Hetty Green, who despite being a multimillionaire had also a reputation as a miser, involved herself in a six-year lawsuit to obtain her aunt's fortune, only to have it proved against her that she had forged the will.Notable American Women. (Harvard Univ 1971), vol.1, p.81 More modern times yield the Chinese example of an 80-year-old affronted by being called a miser in a poem by his son-in-law. Blaming his hospitalization with Parkinson's disease three years later on this, he sued his daughter for medical fees and 'spiritual compensation'.China Daily, 13 Feb 2009, "Daughter sued by dad over 'miser' poem"
Misers in literature
Fables There were two famous references to misers in ancient Greek sources. One was Aesop's fable of "The Miser and his Gold" which he had buried and came back to view every day. When his treasure was eventually stolen and he was lamenting his loss, he was consoled by a neighbour that he might as well bury a stone (or return to look at the hole) and it would serve the same purpose. The other was a two-line epigram in the Greek Anthology, once ascribed to Plato. In this a man, intending to hang himself, discovered hidden gold and left the rope behind him; on returning, the man who had hidden the gold hanged himself with the noose he found in its place.The Greek Anthology III, London 1917, pp.25-6 Both these stories were alluded to or retold in the following centuries, the most famous versions appearing in La Fontaine's Fables as L'avare qui a perdu son trésor (IV.20)The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, translated by Norman Shapiro, University of Illinois 2007, p.101 and Le trésor et les deux hommes (IX.15) respectively. Yet another of La Fontaine's fables was the late addition, ""The miser and the monkey" (XII.3), used as a cautionary tale for financiers. Here a man keeps his hoard in a sea-encircled tower until a pet monkey amuses itself one day in throwing the coins out of the window.
In Asia, misers were the butt of humorous folklore. One very early cautionary tale is the Illisa Jataka from the Buddhist scriptures. This includes two stories, in the first of which a rich miser is miraculously converted to generosity by a disciple of the Buddha; following this, the Buddha tells another story of a miser whose wealth is given away when the king of the gods impersonates him, and when he tries to intervene is threatened with what will happen if he does not change his ways.Tale 78, Sacred texts online Two 16th-century stories concerning misers are included among the witticisms attributed to Birbal during Mughal times. In one he extracts from a casuistical miser a fee for a poem written in his praise.Anindya Roy, Akbar-Birbal Jokes, New Delhi 2005 "The Miser's Misery", pp. 125–6 In the other the miser is forced to reward a merchant who rescued his hoard from a fire with the whole of it.Clifford Sawhney, 50 Wittiest Tales Of Birbal, Bangalore 2005, "A question of 'like'", pp. 47–9 Arabs similarly made extensive use of misers in their literature. The most famous being the 600 page collection of anecdotes called Kitab Al Bukhala or Book of Misers by Al-Jāḥiẓ. He lived in 800 CE during the Abbasid Caliphate in Basra, making this the earliest and largest known work on the subject in Arabic literature.
When there was renewed European interest in Aesop during the early Renaissance, the Neo-Latin poet Laurentius Abstemius wrote two collections of original fables, among which appeared Avarus et poma marcescentia (The miser and the rotten apples, fable 179), published in 1499. This was eventually translated into English by Roger L'Estrange and published in his fable collection of 1692.Fable 458, p. 430 It concerns a miser who cannot bring himself to eat the apples in his orchard until they start to go rotten. His son invites in his playmates to pick the fruit but asks them not to eat the rotten ones since his father prefers those. The 18th century French fabulist Claris de Florian was to adapt the story in his "L'avare et son fils" (The miser and his son, IV.9). In this version the miserly father hoards his apples and only eats those going rotten. His son, upon being caught raiding them, excuses himself on the grounds that he was confining himself to eating just the sound ones.Fables de Florian, Paris 1846, p. 109