Two misers for the price of one!
Charles Dickens created the world-famous character Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1840s, but he may have been inspired by a real-life miser named John Elwes.
Another famous miser is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Krakow, Poland. However, it turns out that Yossele the Holy Miser wasn’t as miserly as everyone believed him to be during his life.
Scrooge and Elwes, by Mick Sullivan
“Marley was dead, to begin with.” These are the words that greet you when you first open the cover of a famous author’s famous book.
The first words of a book can make a big impact. And there are a lot of famous opening lines – both in kids books and grown-up books.
Just listen to these opening lines and see if you recognize them, if not maybe there are context clues that will help you to guess what book they start:
Ready?
The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.
All Children, except one, grow up.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The sun did not shine – that’s from The Cat in the Hat.
All Children, except one grow up – that’s from Peter Pan
And the last one, that was written by Charles Dickens. I don’t imagine many of the younger listeners have read this book, but even people who may never read A Tale of Two Cities, have probably heard that opening line. Dickens was no stranger to great opening lines. He also wrote that first one you heard.
“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
That my friends, is the first line of A Christmas Carol. Whether by Dickens or Mickey or Muppet, you probably know a bit about the tale and the characters it brings to life, or back to life – because, yes, it is a Christmas story, but also, it is a ghost story. Marley is the old business partner of Ebeneezer Scrooge. And Marley is dead. So when he shows up, we know that means Mr. Scrooge is seeing a ga-ga-ga-ghost. The first of several, actually. Because in the story, Marley is just the opening act of a ghost parade – the ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas yet-to-come, will all be visiting Scrooge to show him the error of his Scrooge-y ways.
It only took Charles Dickens six weeks to write A Christmas Carol, but his publisher wasn’t very excited about paying to print it. Mr. Dickens had already written some popular stuff – real bangers like The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby and Oliver Twist, but his most recent book, about a young man named Martin Chuzzlewit was kind of a dud.
Mr. Dickens, don’t you chuzzlewit me, sir. I can’t abide another chuzzlewitting.
Yes, I understand. Tell you what, I believe I’ll just pay for publishing A Christmas Carol myself. That way if anyone is chuzzlewitted, it shall be me!
Charles Dickens himself paid to print and publish the book – so, yes, a Christmas Carol, one of the most famous books in the world, was originally self-published. It was released on December 19th ,1843 in London, England. There would be no chuzzlewitting. Dickens had 6000 copies printed. By December 24th, Christmas Eve, the book was completely sold out. People loved it. It was an instant classic – and one that was inspired by the hardships of the poor of the time. Dickens was moved by what he saw in society, in particular, the way that children growing up poor with no security also had no education or healthcare. What would that mean as they grew up? Bad things, he believed.
But while the inequality around him was a big inspiration, many people believe that an actual once-upon a time, real life, living, breathing man, who was quite well known, was the inspiration for the main character, the miserly Ebeneezer Scrooge.
A miser is a person who hoards wealth and spends as little money as possible. And though he died decades before A Christmas Carol, the life of John Elwes lived on in British legend. Because, for much of his life, John Elwes was known to be a world-class miser. He came by it naturally. His mother was miserly, as well as his uncle, who left him his fortune. And it was quite a fortune. Thanks to his inheritance, John Elwes became lavishly rich. But you would never know it by looking at him. He wore old clothes until they fell apart on his body, and even then he tried to stitch them back together with the cheapest materials he could find. Most of those clothes he had inherited from his deceased family.
Now, many people are thrifty, and that can be really cool. Or just a matter of necessity. But what made John unusual, and caught people’s attention was the fact that he could afford to clothe an entire town. But instead, he kept his money and lived with next to nothing. I’m talking moldy cheese, and stale bread crusts for dinner. Practically every night. The idea of enjoying anything was horrifying to poor rich John Elwes.
He never paid for a cab, so if it was raining, he would walk, getting soaked to the bone. But since he despised the idea of comfort, once he arrived, he would just sit in wet clothes until they dried rather than put on fresh ones.
But a good outfit of warm clothes would have served him well in other ways. He lived in a huge mansion, which eventually began falling down around him because he refused to pay to keep it up. It was cold and drafty. The roof leaked. Most nights, John Elwes refused to light a fire. Coal and wood came at a cost. And he did not want to spend even the tiniest amount of money. Instead he’d walk around – pace back and forth if necessary – to keep his body temperature up. He would not light a candle at night, but rather just go to bed as soon as the sun set. These penny savings added up, he felt. And since he lived in fear of financial ruin, he kept every little cent he could. In doing so, he grew isolated – shut off from many of the people around him.
He was well-known though. Because of his inheritance, he was one of the wealthiest men in his area just outside of London. This lead him, for a time, to politics. He was elected to Parliament in 1772. But while he was one of the wealthier men in a group of wealthy men, he stood out for many reasons.
His wig, like those traditionally worn by parliamentarians, was messy, tattered, and ill-fitting. Probably because he found it tangled in twigs on a hedgerow during one of his frequent walks home. Maybe someone lost it walking through the trees – snagged by a stick unbeknownst to the original owner, or perhaps it blew off the owner’s head and nestled like a powdered, stringy bird nest in twiggy branches. Either way, John Elwes plopped it on his head and called it his own. Even if it was a little tattered, nothing like that mattered. At least not to John.
He never paid for fancy meals like the other parliamentarians. Not that he wouldn’t eat one if someone else was paying, but he sure as the dickens wasn’t gonna open his wallet. Once he and another man were heading home on horseback when they saw a toll collector on the road up ahead. John convinced the man to follow him up a muddy hill. The man was nearly hurt on the steep slippery slope and complained to John about the path they had taken. But John was not sympathetic. Danger mattered little to him if he could save himself money. He refused to pay any toll he could find a way to avoid – even if it was at physical risk.
There were other kinds of risks he took. Walking home a different time, he happened to come upon a rat pulling a dead bird from out of the river. No telling how long it was dead. Or what germy creatures had already had a bit of it themselves. But it was clear that the rat intended to chow down on the remains of the dead bird.
Well, not if John had anything to say about it. A free meal is a free meal. So John snatched the bird from the rat and carried it home where he instructed a servant to cook it for him for dinner that night.
John Elwes was unlike Ebeneezer Scrooge in two ways. I mean maybe more. It’s doubtful that Charles Dickens would have even considered writing a passage about Scrooge wrestling a rat for a free rotten meal, but that’s not the point. In matters of character, there are two differences to point out.
Though he was never willing to spend money on himself, it is remembered that John Elwes was, at least willing to occasionally loan money to friends. This was a matter of etiquette, and was expected at the time of a wealthy man such as himself.
However, the other, bigger difference between Ebenezeer Scrooge and John Elwes, is that John never learned from his miserly ways, and never changed himself for the better.
As he grew older, it was the opposite. He grew even more obsessed with losing his wealth, while also denying himself nearly everything – including medical care. He died rich but lived miserably. One wonders if he would have considered changing his ways if he knew how his life would ultimately go. That, yes, he died with a fortune, but that fortune helped very few during his life, and then remained on earth after he was gone. Of course, it did him no good in the afterlife.
Anyway, most historians agree that John Elwes was a big inspiration on Charles Dickens. Ebenezeer Scrooge is now a character that shows us what kind of redemption is possible when one opens their eyes to the world around them.
And John Elwes wasn’t the only famous miser of the past. After the break you’ll hear about one from a hundred years before, but with a more surprising end.
Yossele the Holy Miser
The City of Krakow is one of the oldest in Poland. People have lived there since it was a tiny little hamlet way back in the 900s. That’s well over a thousand years of people in one place. In the many, many years that have followed, lots of people have helped it grow into one of Europe’s great old cities. Now if you add time and people to a place, that recipe is gonna cook up a lot of stories. People like to tell stories, and sometimes the stories are 100% true, sometimes not so much. But often times, a legend lands somewhere in between. Like this one.
An old city like Krakow has old cemeteries. The Remah cemetery is certainly old. By 1850, it was so full that they had to call it on new burials. People were really dying to get in there, if ya know what I mean. But there was no more room. The first burial happened way back in the 1500s, it fille dup and no one has been buried there in the last 175 years. The community had to find new places to bury their loved ones. But the cemetery is still visited, not just for its historic beauty, but because of who is buried there.
It is common for Jewish people to leave a small stone on top of an important grave when they come to pay their respects. These visitation stones are a way to honor and remember the person buried there. And one grave at Remah cemetery, written in Hebrew like most of the others there, stands out. Near the rear of the cemetery today, it is easy to spot because of the many small rocks piled on top of it. It is surrounded by many of the most important rabbis from the area, But this is the tombstone most people come to see. It is probably the most visited grave in the whole cemetery. It belongs to a famous miser named Yossele.
As you might assume by the teetering potential avalanche of rocks at his gravesite, his story has endured and he has become a man of great honor. That’s true. People come to honor him. But to make the change from miser to man of honor is not an easy thing to do after you die. But that’s what makes Yossele so remarkable. When he was alive he was disliked, pitied, even despised by some.
In the 1600s, there was a large Jewish population in Krakow. It was a tight community and everyone knew, or knew of, everyone else. Everyone knew Yossele. He was the richest man in the community. His wealth was clear. So was his unwillingness to share it. When people would approach him on the street asking for a donation to help with this charitable cause or another, he would often seem to be suddenly overcome with violent sneezes that never seemed to end.
What? Sorry, Can’t hear you over the sound of my own sneezing.
Those sneezes seem comically fake, sir. Are you just trying to avoid me?
There is nothing funny about my sneezes. I’m leaving.
Or when someone asked for money to buy bread, he’d find another excuse.
No. I’ve just run out of money. You’re five minutes too late. I have nothing left today.
That of course was as untrue as the phony sneezing fit.
Yossele, despite his nice house and vast fortune was as miserly as they come. Every appeal to his heart was met with a cold no, a door slammed in the face, or a silent refusal. After a while the people of the town just gave up. He would not share his money no matter what.
So he lived alone, shunned from the community, and he was perfectly fine with that. But at some point, news began to spread around the town that Yossele was not well. He was sick and dying. The people of the Jewish community in Krakow believed that if he was dying, he would change his ways. In hopes of getting right with his god, he may finally open up his heart, AND his pockets to help the community around him with their many needs.
Were they right? They were worse than right. They were wrong. Yossele’s answer was still no. Over and over again. No after no after no.
Would you…NO
Have you considered…NO
Just enough for a …NO
He probably said no with his last dying breath. And when he died, the people around him probably felt the urge to say no themselves. No to burying him with honor, that is. No one mourned him. What honor should a miser like him have? Finally, he was buried in the back of the cemetery, with little fanfare or even notice.
But in the days and weeks that followed, people did notice some other things. The widows in town who had always found a loaf of bread at their doorstep found their stoops empty when they opened the door. Poor families who had always somehow had coal in their coal bin soon ran out of fuel. As their homes grew colder and colder, they wondered what happened to the supply that had previously never seemed to run out.
Stories like this poured in. There had always been coins and toys for orphans. Clothes for the needy, milk for families. It was mysterious but no one had ever gone looking for an explanation as to where they came from. Now there was none of this. After discussing the strange changes with the rabbi, it dawned on people. Yossele had been helping them all along. He had kept the people of town fed, warm, clothed, and sheltered. But not a single person had even known it. He had done it in secret and with no desire for recognition. Now that he was gone, it was clear.
According to the story of Yossele, who became known as the Holy Miser, the important Rabbi Yom-Tov was so moved by his story that he requested to be buried in the back of the cemetery with Yossele.
Where the truth of the story begins and ends, is hard to deduce. A few historians have pointed out that the rear of the cemetery actually was once the front – there was an entrance by the rabbi and the holy miser, but when that section was full, they moved the entrance to another part of the cemetery to make new burials more accessible. Forgetting this, years later, people began asking why such important rabbis were buried in the back – didn’t that seem disrespectful? Some say the story of Yossele was told, perhaps fictitiously, as an explanation for this.
But as with many things, it’s hard to know for sure – There certainly is a gravestone for Yossele. And it certainly has been covered in stones for a long time. So who is to say at this point?
Whatever the case, it’s a chance to remember that many people are charitable and there’s different ways to do it. Some believe that charity without recognition is most honorable.
But for many of us, when we see someone being charitable and kind, it can inspire us to follow their lead and be charitable and kind ourselves.
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