Scrivener.net

Tuesday, December 28, 2004


The real-life Scrooge wasn't such a Scrooge after all.

Roland Patrick points us to the story of the true-life Ebenezer in the Scotsman...
Dickens was in the capital to deliver a lecture to an audience of Edinburgh notables. He was wandering the city, killing time before the talk, when he visited the Canongate Kirk graveyard.

There, as revealed by his diaries, he saw a memorial slab which read: "Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie - meal man". The description referred to his main trade as a corn merchant. However, the author mistakenly translated it as "mean man".

Though he was shocked by the description, it gave him food for thought and two years later, art imitated life - or so the author believed...

The real "Scrooge", an Edinburgh merchant, could not have been more different from his literary counterpart ...

Scroggie was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife; his mother was the niece of Adam Smith, the 18th century political economist and philosopher....

Perhaps Scroggie’s most delightful claim to fame was the result of his dramatically halting proceedings at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, when he "goosed" the Countess of Mansfield during a particularly earnest debate...

No mention of whether it was as Christmas goose.