Inventing Scrooge: The Incredible True Story Behind Charles Dickens' Legendary A Christmas Carol

by Carlo DeVito

  In 1772 with the help of Lord Craven he became a Member of Parliament for Berkshire (his election expenses amounted to a mere eighteen pence). He entered the House of Commons in a by-election as a compromise candidate to replace Thomas Craven, which began the first of three terms. He held his seat unopposed until he stood down at the 1784 election. Elwes sat with either party according to his whim, and he never once rose to address the House of Commons. Fellow members mockingly observed that since he possessed only one suit, they could never accuse him of being a “turncoat.” The post did, however, cause Elwes to frequently travel to London. This journey was accomplished on a poor, lean horse, the route chosen being always the one whereby he could avoid turnpike tolls. He was known to put a hard-boiled egg in his pocket, and midway on his journey would sit under some hedge and eat his egg or sleep. After twelve years he retired rather than face the prospect of laying out any money to retain his seat.

  In the meantime, Elwes lost huge sums of money to his colleagues in unrepaid loans, uncollected debts, and dubious investments. Besides being a Member of Parliament, Elwes’ accomplishments include financing the construction of a significant amount of Georgian London, including Portman Place, Portman Square, and parts of Oxford Circus Piccadilly, Baker Street, and Marylebone.

  When his parliamentary career was over, Elwes devoted his full energies to being a miser as he moved about among his many properties. At his neglected estates he continued to forbid repairs, joined his tenants in postharvest gleaning, and sat with his servants in the kitchen to save the cost of a fire elsewhere. If a stableboy put out hay for a visitor’s horse, Elwes would sneak out and remove it. In his last years he had no fixed abode and frequently stayed in his unrented London properties in the neighborhood of Marylebone. A couple of beds, a couple of chairs, a table, and an “old woman” (housekeeper) were said to be all his furnishings. This same housekeeper was known to frequently catch colds because there were never any fires and often no glass in the windows.

  These practices nearly cost Elwes his life when he fell desperately ill in one of his houses and no one could find him. Only by chance was he rescued. His nephew, Colonel Timms, inquired in vain at Elwes’ banker’s and at other places. A potboy recollected having seen an “old beggar” go into a stable at one of Elwes’ uninhabited houses in Great Marlborough Street and lock the door behind him. Timms knocked at the door, but when no one answered he sent for a blacksmith and had the lock forced. In his book Old and New London: Volume 4, Edward Walford wrote, “In the lower part [of the house] all was shut and silent, but on ascending the stairs they heard the moans of a person seemingly in distress. They went to the chamber, and there on an old pallet bed they found Mr. Elwes, apparently in the agonies of death.”

  He remained in this condition until some “cordials” could be administered by a neighboring apothecary. After he had sufficiently recovered, Elwes stated that he believed he had been ill for “two or three days” and that there was an “old woman” in the house, but he supposed she had “gone away.” Upon searching the premises, Timms and the apothecary found the woman stretched lifeless on the floor, having been dead for two days.

  Toward the end of his life Elwes grew feverish and restless, hoarding small quantities of money in different places and continually visiting them to see that they were safe. He began suffering from delusion, fearing that he would die in poverty. In the night he was heard struggling with imaginary robbers. The family doctor was sent for, and looking at the dying miser was heard to remark, “That man, with his original strength of constitution, and lifelong habits of temperance, might have lived twenty years longer but for his continual anxiety about money.” Even his barrister, who drew up his £800,000 will, was forced to undertake his writings in the firelight by the dying man’s bedside in order to save the cost of a candle.

  The famed miser was also known to sleep in the same worn garments he wore during the day. He was discovered one morning between the sheets with his tattered shoes on his feet, an old torn hat on his head, and a stick in his hand. It was in this condition that he died on November 26, 1789. His burial took place in Stoke-by-Clare. After having lived on only £50 a year, Elwes left £500,000 to his two sons who were born out of wedlock, George and John (whom he loved but would not educate, believing that “putting things into people’s heads is the sure way to take money out of their pockets”), and the rest to his nephew.

  His friend and biographer, Edward Topham, remarked, “ . . . his public character lives after him pure and without stain. In private life, he was chiefly an enemy to himself. To others, he lent much; to himself, he denied everything. But in the pursuit of his property, or in the recovery of it, I have it not in my remembrance one unkind thing that ever was done by him.”

  And Dickens himself may as well have been describing Elwes when he writes of Scrooge in Stave 2:

  “I’m sure he is very rich, Fred,” hinted Scrooge’s niece. “At least you always tell me so.”

  “What of that, my dear!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. He don’t make himself comfortable with it. He hasn’t the satisfaction of thinking—ha, ha, ha!—that he is ever going to benefit us with it.”

  Indeed, Scrooge inhabited a part of Dickens’ own soul. As biographer Peter Ackroyd noted, “So it is perhaps only in fiction such as A Christmas Carol that his real preoccupation with money can come to the fore. Miserliness is a vice. Generosity is a virtue. How people obtain money. How people exert power over others because of money. How money can be an aspect of cruelty. How money can destroy a family. How the want of money is oppressive. How the greed for it is a form of unworthiness, a form of human alienation. And, central to A Christmas Carol, how the experiences of childhood can lead ineluctably to miserliness itself. For, if Scrooge is in one sense an exaggerated aspect of Dickens himself, it is clear that the author knew where the springs of at least his fictional character were buried—not only in the doomed childhood of the miser but also the anxiety which can emerge from it.”

  “He was halfway through a serialization that no one considered a success, and he was in conflict with his father and mother, as well as with his publishers,” wrote Jane Smiley of Dickens at this juncture. “Just as every literary character is the author in some guise . . . so Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens, a man for whom money itself offered the prospect of safety, a man for whom isolation from the obligations of human relationship might be a form of peace.”

  In a sense, Dickens was struggling with himself and his past, and it would preoccupy him for the next six weeks until he wept and cried and laughed through the streets of London.

  Dickens now had his miser. The venom would come later.

  * * *

  Scrooge and Marley

  Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.

  While Charles Dickens never tells us precisely where Ebenezer Scrooge’s counting house was located, the clues in A Christmas Carol suggest it was in the City of London. The “City” refers to a particular area of London, the core of roughly one square mile (it is even called “The Square Mile” colloquially) from which the capital historically grew. It was and continues to be the center of finance and commerce in London.

  Indeed, today one can pass Simpson’s, which has been serving mutton chops and roast beef to well-dressed City gentlemen since 1757.

  “It was within this maze of alleyways that Dickens placed the counting house,” wrote Richard Jones. “In this quaint, atmospheric backwater of twisting passage ways and dark courtyards, time appears to have stood still, and it is not difficult to conjure up images of Scrooge’s neighbors ‘wheezing up and down, heating their hands on their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.’ ”

  We can guess this location partly because Scrooge is a trader, merchant, or businessman of som
e sort, but also because Dickens mentions several parts of the City by name. St Paul’s Cathedral, with its famous dome, is mentioned in Stave I. And on his way home to Camden Town, Bob Cratchit (we only know him as Scrooge’s anonymous clerk at this stage) slides down Cornhill (a City street) on the ice. As Camden Town is several miles northwest of the City, Scrooge’s offices would certainly be somewhere east or south of Cornhill.

  Describing the immediate vicinity of the office, Dickens mentions a courtyard and “the ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall.” The church may well be St Michael’s, Cornhill, on which basis the City of London’s Dickens Walk identifies the exact site of Scrooge & Marley’s as Newman’s Court.

  Newman’s Court is off the north side of Cornhill about 165 yards east of Bank Station and just east of Finch Lane. Located in the financial heart of the city, opposite the towering spire of St Michael’s, Cornhill is the little covered alley where a Mr. Newman and his family set up home in 1650 amidst a bustling market. In the many changes that Cornhill has seen over the centuries and in this heyday of modern development when concrete frames filled with plate glass are shooting forever skyward, it is amazing how this Court and numerous others have survived. Old Newman would hardly recognize it now, with cars of Midland Bank employees parked where his house once stood. But, along with his descendants, he would probably be overjoyed to find it still here at all.

  Newman’s Court first became famous in 1652 when the first public coffeehouse in London opened there. A merchant by the name of Edwards, who traded in Turkey, brought with him some bags of coffee from the Levant, and a Greek servant knew how to prepare the blend. The new elixir was an instant success with Edwards’ friends. The Greek servant, Pasquet (some have it as Pasqua), then opened the first public coffee house in London. It was an instant success.

  Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather . . . .

  A counting house, or compting house, literally is the building, room, office, or suite in which a business firm carries on operations, particularly accounting. By a synecdoche, it has come to mean the accounting operations of a firm, however housed. The term is British in origin and is primarily used in the context of the nineteenth century or earlier periods. Counting house is also the name given to early businesses which safely stored public and private money and loaned money.

  By today’s standard definitions, a counting house would be called an accountant’s office. In Victorian England, these offices handled financial transactions for clients, such as collecting rent, paying bills, auditing etc. It also probably served the function of being a loan office or a collection office. Clerks and executives would literally be counting money in the “counting house.” Then they would fill out the ledgers of their clients and harbor the money collected. Such offices would be filled with numerous ledgers, which required constant copying, and large and small cash boxes with which to keep the money safe.

  It has been pointed out by literary historian Ruth Richardson that Dickens might have gotten the name for the firm of Scrooge and Marley from a sign from a neighborhood where he lived in his late teens. Richardson pointed out that Dickens’ address at this time had changed over the years, and that the east Marleybone Street address had become 22 Cleveland Street, and before that it was 10 Norfolk Street. She further revealed that in the same neighborhood at the same time there was a sculptor who was derided by locals as a miser, and also that there was a sign nearby with the name “Goodge and Marney” signaling the workplace of two tradesmen, and finally a local cheesemonger by the name of “Marley.” There is little question that these names probably figured into Dickens’ process of creating the enigmatic sign hanging above old Scrooge’s office. It seems that, in addition to the reference above, the name “Marley” showed up in a lot of places where Dickens might have poached it from.

  * * *

  Fred

  “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

  “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

  He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

  Scrooge’s nephew Fred is a jovial, well-intentioned man. But who is Fred?

  There is no question among scholars that Fred was probably based on Frederick Dickens, Charles’ favorite brother of his youth. Fred had been born on July 4, 1820. Fred attended a school in Hampstead with their brother Alfred Dickens for two years, until their father John Dickens could no longer afford the fees. At the end of the school day, the boys would be collected by their older brother, Charles.

  When John Dickens was imprisoned for debt on February 20, 1824, in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens and her three youngest children, including 4-year-old Fred, joined her husband there in April of that year.

  In 1834, at the age of fourteen, Charles took Fred in when he moved into a three-room apartment in Furnival’s Inn. By then, the word was out that Dickens was in fact Boz, the writer of The Pickwick Papers. He was still a reporter and was making £275 a year, a very nice sum in those days for a young man on the rise. Charles was now twenty-two years old, and he was slowly becoming the man of the family.

  His father had continued to struggle. In the intervening years, Charles, already an established court reporter, had helped find jobs for his father who lost many of them. And Charles’ own finances became worse and worse; at one point, he spent every penny he had to keep his father from debtors’ prison once again, only to find that there were other creditors unknown to the family who were ready to press new charges.

  In an effort to change the fortunes of his mother and father, Charles arranged for new and less-expensive lodgings for them and his remaining young siblings. And in an effort to help his young brother, Fred, of whom he was very fond, he took him in.

  “Furnival’s Inn was inhabited largely by solicitors with comfortable incomes. The rent of 35 pounds a year that Dickens paid was not small, and he himself would have been in no difficulties but for his father’s debts,” wrote Edgar Johnson.

  American journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis, who visited the young writer at his home, remarked on the Spartan accommodations after climbing three flights of stairs and coming “into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy, and Mr. Dickens for all the contents.”

  Fred and Charles spent much time together. Dickens worked furiously during the day as a reporter, then came home nights to work on Sketches by Boz. Fred was always a help. In fact, when Dickens’ future wife, Catherine Hogarth, took ill with a cold, Charles dispatched Fred to Catherine with a jar of blackcurrant jam. Dickens took great interest in his younger brother, almost paternal, and his fiancé was fond of Fred as well. Fred proved himself dependable, and most importantly loyal, to Charles. They had become very close. And it was Charles’ wish that he school Fred so that Fred would not end up unable to manage his own finances like their father, but to be a solvent and reliable man.

  And of course it was Dickens who helped Fred, at fifteen years old, find his first job. Writing to his friend Macrone, “I have deliberated a long time about the propriety of keeping him at his present study, but I am convinced that at his present period of life, it is really only so much a waste of time.” Dickens insisted that Fred take tea at home so that he might continue studying; he thought it a good idea for Fred to take a stool and learn good business habits. Dickens said of Fred to Macrone that “any sharp young fellow, you could not have better suited to your purposes.”

  After Charles married Kate, Fred continued to live with Charles in new lodgings at Doughty Str
eet. “The Doughty Street home was soon full of lively doings. In addition to Mary, young Frederick Dickens—by this time sixteen—was now a member of the household, and added to its high spirits. A full-lipped, snub-nosed youth, with raised eyebrows and an amusing oily laugh, he had a ludicrous gift for comic imitations in which Dickens abetted him. The bright, first-floor sitting room often resounded with Kate’s and Mary’s happy laughter.”

  And when Kate’s sister Mary was suddenly seized by a grave illness, of whom Charles was immensely fond, shortly thereafter it was Fred who, in the middle of the night, ran through the streets of London to fetch the doctor to no avail.

  By now Fred was growing into a gentleman, and Dickens succeeding in getting Lord Stanley to appoint his brother to the Secretary’s Office in the Custom House. The two remained close, and when Dickens took a small summer home in Broadstairs, Fred came to visit. He was a popular personality in the house with friends and family alike. Fred and Mitton would trade barbs and laughs for long periods of time. And Fred and Charles would go aboard ships, keeping the sailors laughing by roaring out a series of completely absurd nautical commands in full loud burst with all the seriousness they could muster, generally keeping the crews in stitches.

  It was not uncommon for Fred, the most popular of uncles with Charles and Kate’s brood, to care for the children in the couple’s absence. And when Dickens and Kate traveled to America the first time in 1842, the 22-year-old Fred was left in charge of their young family. As Dickens once wrote to a friend, he trusted Fred so much that he even entrusted him with the key to their wine cellar.

  Dickens wrote to Forster before their trip to America that Kate “is satisfied to have nobody in the house but Fred, of whom, as you know, they are all fond. He has got his promotion, and they give him the increased salary from the day on which the minute was made by Baring, I feel so amiable, so meek, so fond of people, so full of gratitudes and reliances, that I am like a sick man. And I am already counting the days between this and coming home again.”