Ebenezer Scrooge

Dickens describes Scrooge as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,… secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster." He does business from a warehouse and is known among the merchants of the Royal Exchange as a man of good credit. Despite having considerable personal wealth, he underpays his clerk and hounds his debtors relentlessly, while living cheaply and joylessly in the house of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. Most of all he detests Christmas, which he associates with reckless spending. When two men approach him on Christmas Eve for a donation to charity, he sneers that the poor should avail themselves of the treadmill or the workhouses, or else die to reduce the surplus population.

Flashbacks of Scrooge's early life show that his unkind father placed him in a boarding school, where at Christmas-time he remained alone while his schoolmates traveled home. He then apprenticed at the warehouse of a jovial and generous master, Fezziwig. He proposed to a woman named Belle and dedicated himself to making enough money to rise out of poverty, but his fiancée was disgusted by his obsession with money and left him one Christmas, eventually marrying another man. The present-day Scrooge reacts to these memories with a mixture of nostalgia and deep regret.

After the three visiting spirits warn him that his current path brings hardship for others and shame for himself, Scrooge commits to being more generous. He accepts his nephew's invitation to Christmas dinner, provides for his clerk, and donates to the charity fund. In the end, he becomes known as the embodiment of the Christmas spirit.

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

• Ebenezer Scroggie, a merchant from Edinburgh who won a catering contract for King George IV's visit to Scotland. He was buried in Canongate Kirkyard, with a gravestone that is now lost. The theory is that Dickens noticed the gravestone that described Scroggie as being a "meal man" (corn merchant) but misread it as "mean man".[1][2] This theory has been described as "a probable Dickens hoax" for which "[n]o one could find any corroborating evidence".[3]
• It has been suggested that he chose the name Ebenezer ("stone (of) help") to reflect the help given to Scrooge to change his life.[4]
• One school of thought is that Dickens based Scrooge's views on the poor on those of demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus, as evidenced by his callous attitude towards the "surplus population".[5][6]
• 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).[7][8]
• 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.[9]
• The man whom Dickens eventually mentions in his letters[10] 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).

Kelly writes that Scrooge may have been influenced by Dickens's conflicting feelings for his father, whom he both loved and demonised. This psychological conflict may be responsible for the two radically different Scrooges in the tale—one a cold, stingy and greedy semi-recluse, the other a benevolent, sociable man.[11] Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English literature, considers that in the opening part of the book covering young Scrooge's lonely and unhappy childhood, and his aspiration for money to avoid poverty "is something of a self-parody of Dickens's fears about himself"; the post-transformation parts of the book are how Dickens optimistically sees himself.[12]

Reginald Owen as Scrooge in the 1938 film adaptation

Scrooge could also be based on two misers: the eccentric John Elwes, MP,[13] or Jemmy Wood, the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank who was also known as "The Gloucester Miser".[14] According to the sociologist Frank W. Elwell, Scrooge's views on the poor are a reflection of those of the demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus,[15] while the miser's questions "Are there no prisons? ... And the Union workhouses? ... The treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" are a reflection of a sarcastic question raised by the reactionary philosopher Thomas Carlyle, "Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?"[16][lower-alpha 2]

There are literary precursors for Scrooge in Dickens's own works. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens's biographer, sees similarities between Scrooge and the elder Martin Chuzzlewit character, although the miser is "a more fantastic image" than the Chuzzlewit patriarch; Ackroyd observes that Chuzzlewit's transformation to a charitable figure is a parallel to that of the miser.[18] Douglas-Fairhurst sees that the minor character Gabriel Grub from The Pickwick Papers was also an influence when creating Scrooge.[19][lower-alpha 3]

• Stuart Brennan in 2018[26]
• Guy Pearce in the BBC/FX miniseries, 2019

• Grinch
• Scrooge McDuck

• Works by or about Ebenezer Scrooge in libraries (WorldCat catalog)