Vast inherited wealth did nothing to deter one Georgian gentleman from his mission to be a legendary skinflint.

There can be no better example of money not buying happiness than the fabulously wealthy but unbelievably stingy John Elwes, the man widely credited with inspiring the character of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843).

Elwes, born John Meggot in 1714, seems to have learnt his miserable monetary tendencies from his family. His mother inherited about £100,000 when his father died in 1718, equivalent to a couple of hundred million today, but reputedly starved herself to death because she was too mean to fork out on mundane things such as personal well-being.

The greatest influence on young John’s stinginess, however, was his desire to impress his baronet uncle, Sir Harvey Elwes. Though a typically extravagant rich youth, John changed his ways to try to curry favour with Sir Harvey, an eye on his fabulous fortune.

Tidy sum: Elwes inherited the equivalent of £500m in today's money Credit: Mary Evans

Schooling himself in the ways of tight-waddery, John would join his uncle for evenings railing at others’ extravagance while the two men shared a single glass of wine. In 1751, the young man changed his surname to Elwes as a further gesture of obsequiousness. And when Sir Harvey died in 1763, John was duly bequeathed his uncle’s entire fortune of more than £250,000 – somewhere in excess of £500m today.

True to type, he set about not spending it by dint of a breathtakingly skinflint lifestyle. Elwes would go to bed in darkness to save using a candle, and sit with his servants in the kitchen to save lighting a fire in another room. Apart from the chill, the other rooms in his various houses would not have been particularly nice places to sit, since Elwes refused to pay for any maintenance. In his final years, his many homes had all become virtually uninhabitable, though he seemed not to care, becoming of ‘no fixed abode’ as he moved from one to another.

Elwes usually wore ragged clothes, going for months at a time in a single suit of clothing that he wore in bed as well as during the day. He once spent weeks wearing a tatty wig he found discarded in a hedge. To avoid paying for a coach Elwes would walk in the rain, and then sit in wet clothes to save the cost of a fire to dry them. He regularly ate mouldy or putrefying food. One rumour was that he even ate a rotten moorhen he took from a rat.

Another story recounts how Elwes once badly cut both his legs while walking home in the dark, but would only allow the apothecary to treat one, wagering his fee that the untreated limb would heal first. Elwes won the bet by a fortnight, delightedly saving himself paying the doctor.

Elwes usually wore ragged clothes, going for months at a time in a single suit that he wore in bed as well as during the day

Elwes was elected MP for Berkshire in 1772, laying out just 18 pence in election expenses. His new position required regular travel to London, but he made these journeys on an emaciated horse via a roundabout route to avoid turnpike tolls. He would take along a single hardboiled egg to eat en route. After 12 years, he gave up his seat, doubtless tiring of the outrageous financial demands of being a politician. He immersed himself in full-time miserliness. On his death in 1789, he left £500,000 (almost £1bn today) to two sons born out of wedlock.

Paradoxically, Elwes enjoyed watching others splash out, regularly going to London’s gambling houses to watch fellow toffs lose each night. He even lent huge sums for betting, never seeking repayment as Elwes considered such requests ungentlemanly. But he did put some of his money to good use. Fine Georgian architecture in areas of London such as Portman Square, Piccadilly, Baker Street and Marylebone was financed by the man who inspired fiction’s greatest miser.

Keeping traditions alive