You may be wondering who John Elwe's is but you have certainly heard of the character based on him because he was visited by everyone from the Muppet's to Blackadder on Christmas Eve as he is A Christmas Carol's central character, Scrooge, the miser whose visits from spirits force him to change his ways. Elwes was a British 18th Century politician who, despite being fabulously wealthy by inheriting a fortune, hated spending money and would go to bed at sundown to avoid having to pay for candles, bought no new clothes and was always seen in filthy rags, would buy cheaper spoiled meat and once fought a rat over the rotting corpse of a hen that it had dragged out of a river, would walk everywhere rather than hail a cab and would stay in whichever of the properties he rented out who did not have a tenant at the time.
Elwe's lived to the age of 75, but the doctor who attended his deathbed said he would have lived at least another 20 years if he had spent some of his money on taking care of himself.
The name of Scrooge was inspired by an inscription Dickens found on a tombstone of Ebeneezer Scroggie while he was writing the story.
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