Ebenezer Scrooge - Origins

Origins

In his diaries, Dickens states that Scrooge stems from a grave marker which he saw in 1841, while taking an evening walk in the Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The headstone was for the vintner Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, a relative of Adam Smith, who had won the catering contract for the visit of George IV to Edinburgh and the first contract to supply whisky to the Royal Navy. The marker identified Scroggie as a "meal man" (corn merchant), but Dickens misread this as "mean man", due to the fading light and his mild dyslexia. Dickens wrote that it must have "shrivelled" Scroggie’s soul to carry "such a terrible thing to eternity". The grave marker was lost during construction work at part of the kirkyard in 1932.

Several theories have been put forward as to where Dickens got additional inspiration for the character.

• One school of thought is that Dickens based Scrooge's views on the poor on those of demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus.
• Another is that the minor character Gabriel Grub from The Pickwick Papers was worked up into a more mature characterization (his name stemming from an infamous Dutch miser, Gabriel de Graaf.)
• Jemmy Wood, owner of the Gloucester Old Bank and possibly Britain’s first millionaire, was nationally renowned for his stinginess, and may have been another.
• The man whom Dickens eventually mentions in his letters and who strongly resembles the character portrayed by Dickens's illustrator, John Leech, was a noted British eccentric and miser named John Elwes (1714–1789).