Ebenezer Scrooge visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present. An illustration from an 1843 edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. A bearded man in a green fur suit and head adorned with holly holds aloft a flaming torch and gestures to a man in Victorian nightclothes. Around them are food and drink for a Christmas feast. The caption reads, “Scrooge’s third Visitor.”
13 December 2021
A scrooge is a miser, a stingy person. And most of us recognize that the word comes from the name of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol. The transition from character name to general term for a miser was astoundingly quick; it took less than a year for the generalized sense of scrooge to catch on. But few people today realize that in coining his character’s name Dickens was making a play on words, in particular on a couple of slang senses of screw. For when Dickens wrote the story, screw was slang for a miser, and to screw meant to extort rent from a tenant. The speed at which Ebenezer Scrooge became simply a scrooge was due not just to the popularity of Dickens’s story but also to the fact the name relied on the existing slang screw.
This slang use of screw dates to the mid seventeenth century. It appears in William Cartwright’s play The Ordinary, written sometime before 1643. The underlying metaphor is that of applying pressure:
Why, I’ve heard say
You’re wont to skrew your wretched Tenants up
To th’ utmost farthing, and then stand upon
The third Rent Capon.
And Richard Alestree’s 1658 The Practice of Christian Graces has this:
And thus also it is often with exacting Landlords, who when their poor tenants know not how to provide themselves elsewhere, rack and skrew them beyond the worth of the thing.
The noun screw, meaning a miser, comes along later, in the early nineteenth century. Bernard Blackmantle’s 1825 The English Spy has this dialogue where a cabbie describes the generous and not-so-generous tippers in town:
A hand-some chariot, with a most divine little creature in the inside, and a good-looking roué, with huge mustachios, first attracted my notice: “that is the golden Ball,” said coachee, “and his new wife; he often rolls down this road for a day or two—spends his cash like an emperor—and before he was tied up used to tip pretty freely for handling the ribbons, but that's all up now, for Mamsell Mercandotti finds him better amusement. A gemman who often comes down with me says his father was a slopseller in Ratcliffe Highway, and afterwards marrying the widow of Admiral Hughes, a rich old West India nabob, he left this young gemman the bulk of his property, and a very worthy fellow he is: but we’ve another rich fellow that’s rather notorious at Brighton, which we distinguish by the name of the silver Ball, only he’s a bit of a screw, and has lately got himself into a scrape about a pretty actress, from which circumstance they have changed his name to the Foote Ball.
And William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, published in 1848, five years after Dickens invented Ebenezer Scrooge, uses screw thusly:
This gentleman and the guard seemed to know Sir Pitt very well, and laughed at him a great deal. They both agreed in calling him an old screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person. He never gives any money to any body, they said.
So, when it came time to create a name for his miser, Dickens came up with Scrooge, a name that would evoke the slang term. Here is what may be the most famous passage describing Ebenezer Scrooge’s penurious nature, in which Scrooge says the poor belong in the prisons and workhouses that the taxes he paid built:
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Within a year of the 1843 publication of A Christmas Carol, people were already using scrooge as a generic term for a miser. From the Boston, Massachusetts Christian Register of 19 October 1844, a description of a man seen from a window:
His eyes are dull, or if they are ever lighted up, it is with a twinkle that only silver and gold can excite. As to his mouth, humor has not developed a trace about it. It is a mere “fissure in his face.” The entire frame of the man appears like a machine for counting coppers. His whole demeanor seems to say—“I had so many dollars this morning; to-night may I have so many more or die; get one of them out of my grasp, if you can.” He is a perfect Scrooge of a man,—a Scrooge such as Scrooge was at sunset, Christmas eve, not as he was at dinner, Christmas day.
And from 19 April 1847, here is a description of the inhabitants of New Bedford, Massachusetts that appeared in the Gloucester Telegraph of 24 April:
New Bedford, with her princely mansions,—(John Quincy Adams, when here a couple of years since, remarked, that in all his travels, he had nowhere seen so many beautiful ones in a place of its size and population)—and private gardens, her well laid streets, shaded as great many of them are by stately trees, together with her public buildings and elegant churches, is certainly a handsome city. All this is very pleasant, but there is a coldness, a stiffness, an exclusiveness, or something of the sort, that a stranger is not long in discovering to pervade the people; and it may be, induce him to exclaim—“What fit region for a Scrooge to live in—there are no Christmas days here!”
Not only is A Christmas Carol a beloved Christmas story, but the name Scrooge provides a lesson in how proper names can become slang—it helps if the name is patterned on an already existing slang term.
Sources:
Alestree, Richard. The Practice of Christian Graces. London: D. Maxwell for T. Garthwait, 1658, 234. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Blackmantle, Bernard [Charles Molloy Westmacott]. The English Spy. London: Sherwood Jones, 1825, 284–85. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Cartwright, William. The Ordinary, a Comedy. London: Humphrey Mosely, 1651, 5.3, 78–79. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. John Leech, illustrator. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843, 13–14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Friend Rogers” (19 April 1847). Gloucester Telegraph (Massachusetts), 24 April 1847, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Glimpse from a City Window.” Christian Register (Boston, Massachusetts), 19 October 1844, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified September 2021, s.v. screw, n.1; second edition, 1989, s.v. Scrooge, n.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: John Leech, 1843.