ABSTRACT
When biographies and obituaries attached the “miser” label to people who invested the lion's share of their wealth, this moved them into the category of productive, if eccentric, members of society. Poorer misers who hoarded their savings earned pity, but seldom scorn, and inspired hope that sufficient training could convince them to redeem their unproductive savings by converting them into interest-bearing bank accounts. Regardless of class, people increasingly viewed their extreme saving as lessons to be followed. As the gospel of thrift superseded a celebration of spending, the miser receded as a personification of vice and emerged instead as an indication that virtue might bloom in the unlikeliest of environs. Similar shifts applied to the fate of misers’ savings and their souls after they died. By attaching the “miser” label to the recently deceased, obituaries created a class of people who defended them, for the simple reason that they inherited the fruits of their assiduous saving. Most preachers, meanwhile, stopped paying nearly as much attention to the spiritual fate of misers, focusing on examples that resonated with their congregants’ everyday experience.
