ABSTRACT
During the seven decades after the publication of Edward Topham's Life of the Late John Elwes in 1790, the portrayal of real-life misers in biographies and newspaper obituaries became a cottage industry in Britain. With a few exceptions, these misers were neither nefarious nor miserable, in stark contrast to their fictional eighteenth-century counterparts. The tone shifted from moral turpitude to self-imposed social dislocation, which introduced a new focus on social class in such discussions. Real-life misers added true grit to moralists’ warnings against covetousness, the penny press repackaged miser biographies for new audiences, the new genre of eccentric biography included misers alongside other social outliers, and local histories mentioned them among the “odd folk” who had left their mark in the community. The constraint of reporting on outcasts redirected the writer's eye to misers’ diet, clothing, and furnishings—and subtly altered plots that had been handed down from earlier fictions. The more balanced portrayal of misers, in turn, led many to doubt the relevance of the term to many of the people who were thus labeled.
