"Literary Links" - Mr Scrooge

 "Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

St Mary de Crypt, Gloucester

The Church of St Mary de Crypt in Gloucester is the burial spot for James “Jemmy” Wood (1756-1836) - one of four ‘misers’ claimed as the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ well known character Ebenezeer Scrooge.  The four skinflints are:

• Contestant number one was Gabriel de Graaf a cruel19th century gravedigger from the Netherlands who disappeared one Christmas Eve and resurfaced years later a reformed man.
• Our second contestant is the Londoner John Elwes (1714-1789) who was orphaned at an early age, and inherited around £100,000 from his father's estate.  Years later his rich uncle bequeathed £350,000 to him (1763) and he acquired over 100 London properties.  Despite his huge wealth he was frugal to the extreme looking more like a poverty stricken debtor than a man of means. 
• The next contestant is a generous Edinburgh merchant called Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie (1792-1836).   Their story goes that in 1841 Dickens was lecturing in the city and visited the Canongate Kirk graveyard where he saw Ebenezer's tomb describing him as a - "meal man" referring to his trade as a corn merchant.  Dickens mistakenly read it as "mean man". Two years later (1843) Ebenezer Scroggie a "mean man" was resurrected by Dickens as Ebenezer Scrooge.  This version is disputed as no more than an urban legend. 
• And finally, Gloucester’s contestant was our very own James “Jemmy” Wood (1756-1836), owner of the Gloucester Old Bank and possibly Britain’s very first millionaire.  He is buried here in St Mary de Crypt.   He was nationally renowned for his stinginess, and Dickens actually mentions “Jemmy Wood of Gloucester” in Our Mutual Friend.  

  

  James 'Jemmy' Wood

Maybe Dickens did a bit of cut and paste editing from all of these contestants to create his  wonderful character:

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. ….External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he…”

St Mary de Crypt

However, our James Wood from Gloucester is also claimed to influence another of Dickens’ novels – Bleak House.

Wood’s will was very obscure which resulted in years of legal wrangling over who was entitled to his remaining £900,000.  The court case dragged on for so long that most of the funds disappeared in legal fees.   In the preface to Bleak House Charles Dickens explained “At the present moment there is a suit before the Court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago…”     In Bleak House the very first chapter introduces us to the court case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce which,  

“…drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. …. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; …but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.”

This is an excerpt from the tour Gloucester City Tour - Part Two which explores the streets around the Cathedral.  The full tour is found on  www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - Dickens and Fagin

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

Charles Dickens

The current Southwark Bridge was opened in 1921 and replaced a Georgian bridge from 1819.  When Charles Dickens was still a boy he regularly crossed this first bridge on his way to visit his father in Marshalsea Prison – a debtor’s prison located half a mile south of this point.  Young Charles was put to work in a blacking factory near to where Charing Cross station is.  One day a work colleague started walking home with him.  Dickens recalled:

“I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there.  As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr Robert Fagin’s house.”

His colleague is forever immortalised as the lovable rogue of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

This is an excerpt from the tour London River Walks - South Bank which explores the southern bank of the River Thames.  The full tour is found on  www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - London - Waterloo Bridge

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

Charles Dickens

For some reason a number of suicidal Victorians chose Waterloo Bridge as their spring board into the eternities.   Charles Dickens made mention of these poor unfortunate souls as he approaches Waterloo with a night police patrol rowing on the Thames:

“Every colour but black seemed to have departed from the world.  The air was black, the water was black, the barges and hulks were black, the piles were black, the buildings were black, the shadows were only a deeper shade of black upon a black ground.   Here and there, a coal fire in an iron cresset blazed upon a wharf; but, one knew that it too had been black a little while ago, and would be black again soon.  Uncomfortable rushes of water suggestive of gurgling and drowning, ghostly rattling of iron chains, dismal clankings of discordant engines, formed the music that accompanied the dip of our oars and their rattlings in the rullocks.  Even the noises had a black sound to me …” 

   “There was need of encouragement on the threshold of the bridge, for the bridge was dreary… the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. “

He used these dark feelings in David Copperfield when Martha Endell  says, 

“I can’t keep away from it.  I can’t forget it.  It haunts me day and night.  It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s fit for me.  Oh, the dreadful river!”

And in Oliver Twist he has Nancy declare,

“Look before you, lady. Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them. It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.”

Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) wrote a lengthy poem about a real young woman called Mary Furley who jumped in with her young child (1844).  The child died but Mary lived through the ordeal.  Hood relabelled Waterloo as “The Bridge of Sighs.”   The most famous section of the poem goes:

The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurl'd—
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
 In she plunged boldly—
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran—
Over the brink of it,
Picture it—think of it,
Dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it,
Then, if you can! Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!

Anyone who did reclaim a body from the River would do well to take it to the southern side.  In Victorian times the Surrey officials would pay a crown for the corpse, whereas on the northern bank the stingy Middlesex officials only paid half a crown.  

This is an excerpt from the tour London River Walk - South Bank which explores the southern bank of the River Thames.  The full tour is found on   www.obelisktours.co.uk