Miser

This article is about parsimonious people. For other uses, see Miser (disambiguation).

Death and the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch in 1494

A miser is a person who is reluctant to spend, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities, in order to hoard money or other possessions. Although the word is sometimes used loosely to characterise anyone who is mean with their money, if such behaviour is not accompanied by taking delight in what is saved, it is not properly miserly.

Freud attributed the development of miserly behaviour to toilet training in childhood. Some infants would attempt to retain the contents of their bowels and this would result in the development of an anal retentive personality that would attempt to retain their wealth and possessions in later life.

Misers in literature

There were two famous references to misers in ancient Greek sources. One was Aesop’s fable of The Miser and his Gold which he had buried and came back to view every day. When his treasure was eventually stolen and he was lamenting his loss, he was consoled by a neighbour that he might as well bury a stone (or return to look at the hole) and it would serve the same purpose. The other was a two-line epigram in the Greek Anthology, once ascribed to Plato. In this a man, intending to hang himself, discovered hidden gold and left the rope behind him; on returning, the man who had hidden the gold hanged himself with the noose he found in its place. Both these were alluded to or retold in the following centuries, the most famous versions appearing in La Fontaine's Fables as L'avare qui a perdu son trésor (IV.20) and Le trésor et les deux hommes (IX.15) respectively.

Misers were represented onstage as figure of fun in Classical times. In particular the Latin treatment of the character Euclio in the Aulularia of Plautus, with the subplot of a marriageable daughter to complicate matters, was very influential. One of the earliest Renaissance writers to adapt it was the Croatian Marin Držić in about 1555, whose Skup (The Miser) is set in Dubrovnik. Ben Jonson adapted elements from Plautus for his early comedy The Case is Altered (c.1597). The miser there is Jaques de Prie, who has a (supposed) daughter, Rachel. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and Samuel Coster followed with their very popular Dutch comedy Warenar (1617). The play is named from the miser, whose daughter is Claartje. Molière adapted Plautus' play into French as L'Avare (The Miser, 1668) while in England Thomas Shadwell adapted Molière's work in 1672 and a version based on both Plautus and Molière was produced by Henry Fielding in 1732. In addition,Vasily Pashkevich based his 18th century comic opera The Miser on Molière's play.

Aubrey Beardsley's 1898 title page for Ben Jonson's play

Among independent dramatic depictions of misers have been the Jewish moneylender Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1598) by William Shakespeare and the title character of Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606). In Aubrey Beardsley's title page for the latter, Volpone is shown worshiping his possessions, in illustration of the lines "Dear Saint, / Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues."

As a general example, in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, misers are put in the fourth circle of hell, along with spendthrifts. They roll weights representing their wealth, constantly colliding and quarreling. During the 16th century, emblem books began using an illustration of an ass eating thistles as symbol of miserly behaviour, often with an accompanying poem. They appeared in various European languages, among them the illustrated trencher of 1567 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, on which an ass laden with rich foods is shown cropping a thistle, surrounding which is the quatrain:

The Asse which dainty meates doth beare

And feedes on thistles all the yeare

Is like the wretch that hourds up gold

And yet for want doth suffer cold.

Later poetic treatments have included Malbecco – "a cancred crabbed Carle" - in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Cotta in Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst.

There have also been several famous portrayals of misers in prose fiction:

• Yan Jiansheng in an episode of The Scholars by Wu Jingzi (吳敬梓), written about 1750. This miser was unable to die easily until a wasteful second wick was removed from the lamp at his bedside.
• Jean-Esther van Gobseck − an affluent usurer in the novel Gobseck (1830) by Balzac
• Felix Grandet – whose daughter is the title character in the novel Eugénie Grandet (1833) by Balzac
• Plyushkin - a compulsive hoarder in Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls (1842)
• John Scarve - in the novel The Miser's Daughter (first serialised 1842) by William Harrison Ainsworth. The story is set in the 1770s and the character of Scarve was inspired by the real-life miser John Elwes. A dramatic version was put on by Edward Stirling in October 1842 and another version was produced by T. P. Taylor in November 1842 at the City of London Theatre. In April 1872, a version called Hilda was produced for the Adelphi Theatre by Andrew Halliday.
• Ebenezer Scrooge – the lead character of A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. He too was based on John Elwes.
• Mr. Prokharchin – title character of the short story Mr. Prokharchin (1846) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Silas Marner – title character of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861), who eventually abandons his avaricious ways
• Miser Farebrother - in the novel of that name by Benjamin Leopold Farjeon (1888)
• Ebenezer Balfour – antagonist in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped (1886), an embezzler who attempts to have his nephew David (the hero of the novel) killed, then kidnapped
• Henry Earlforward – in Arnold Bennett's novel Riceyman Steps (1923)

Misers in art

Miser by Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia (1890)

One of the earliest paintings to depict a miser was a panel from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Titled Death and the Miser, and dating from the 1490s, it started a fashion in depicting this subject among Low Countries artists. Where Bosch shows the miser on his deathbed, with various demons crowding about his possessions, Jan Provoost paints a 16th century diptych in which death confronts the man of affairs with his own account. A century later, Frans Francken the Younger treats the theme twice, in both versions of which a skeleton serenades a luxuriously dressed greybeard sitting at a table.

The link between finance and the diabolical is also drawn by another Fleming, Jan Matsys, in his late 16th portrayal of the man of affairs being assisted in his double bookkeeping by a demon. But the “Miser Casting His Accounts” presented by Jan Lievens is more straightforward. It is not just that he is a man of affairs, as in the other paintings. His interest in hoarding is indicated by the way he gloats on the key that will lock his money away. Jan Steen makes much the same point with his miser hugging a small sack of silver coins and holding one up for intent inspection. These last two characters have worn the rough dress associated with misers, but Hendrik Gerritsz Pot’s painting from the 1640s in the Uffizi is again fashionably dressed and wearing a ring. He may be inspired by the wealth and jewellery piled on his table, but he has no objection to advertising his well-to-do status.

In the majority of cases, the moral message of these Low Country paintings is of the Christian deprecation of money-making rather than of hoarding for its own sake. This is underlined by similar treatments of other types of financier. Thus the Matsys painting relates to the contemporary "The devil and the usurer" in the Valenciennes Musée des beaux-arts, formerly attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Younger, in which two devils pluck at the sleeve of a poorly dressed moneylender. Quentin Matsys refers back to the pull between religion and the world (represented by the angel supporting the miser in the Hieronymus Bosch painting) in his "The moneylender and his wife" (1514). Here the wife is studying a religious book while her husband is testing coins by weight. In the hands of the later Marinus van Reymerswaele this is totally secularised and the wife of his moneylender is shown helping with the bookkeeping but leaning sideways, as mesmerised as her husband by the pile of coins. It may be also that some of the earlier paintings in reality depict those focused on money by their profession. After all, although Shakespeare's Shylock is perceived as a miser, he is in fact a moneylender.

Genre pictures of misers appeared elsewhere in Europe during the 18th century. Jean-Baptiste Le Prince's character is also richly robed as he sits surrounded by his possessions, while Theodore Bernard Heuvel's miser sits on the chest containing his hoard and looks anxiously over his shoulder. The box in the hand of Empress Maria Feodorovna's miser in her 1890 painting is much smaller. Two other aristocrats made Jewish moneylenders their subject. The Indian Raja Ravi Varma paints a character type for his miser, dated 1901, but the Hungarian nobleman Ladislav Medňanský preferred to title his humanised study "Shylock" (1900). English depictions of misers in the 18th century also begin as genre paintings. Gainsborough Dupont's poorly dressed character clutches a bag of coin and looks up anxiously in the painting in the Ashmolean Museum. John Cranch (1751-1821) pictures two armed desperadoes breaking in on his. After the turn of the century, real examples became the subjects. Local painter William Brown portrayed Margery Jackson, the Carlisle Miser (c.1811), who was to become the inspiration of the modern Miser! The Musical (2011). Robert Mendham (1792-1875) painted a Suffolk subject, "The Miser of Eye" (c.1820).

Several other painters were inspired by theatrical misers. In the 18th century, Samuel De Wilde pictured the actor William Farren playing Lovegold in a production of Henry Fielding's "The Miser" at the Theatre Royal, Bath, while it was the French Grandmesnil playing Harpagon in Molière's L'Avare who was painted by Jean-Baptiste Francois Desoria. But Shylock is the most favoured by English artists. Johann Zoffany painted Charles Macklin in the role that brought him fame at Covent Garden in London (1767–68). Character portraits of other actors in that role have included Henry Urwick (1859–1931) by Walter Chamberlain Urwick (1864-1943), Herbert Beerbohm Tree by Charles Buchel and Arthur Bourchier, also by Buchel. The reason for this preference is Shylock's more complex character. Although Shakespeare underlines his avarice, it is overlaid by racial antagonism. Rather than simply hoarding for its own sake, he makes use of money as a weapon to accomplish his malice.

External links

Media related to Misers at Wikimedia Commons