Misers

British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860

Timothy Alborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000586008
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment.

Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with adding to the nation's stock of capital and novelists newly imagined their capacity to empathize with fellow human beings. These characters shared the spotlight with real people who posthumously donned that label, populating into a cottage industry of miser biographies by the 1850s. By the time A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, many Victorians had come to embrace misers as links that connected one generation's extreme saving with the next generation's virtuous spending.

With a broad chronological period, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in representation of misers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

1 Miserable Sinners

DOI: 10.4324/9781003058052-2

In 1771, John Ryland, the precocious teenage son of a Northampton preacher and the future founder of the Baptist Missionary Society, included a poem on “The Parable of the Rich Miser” as one of more than a hundred “Serious Essays on Experimental Religion, attempted in Verse.” His attempted poem, based loosely on a parable in the Book of Luke, features a rich farmer whose love of gold banishes the “starving beggar” and “neighbour poor… from his iron door,” and who builds a bigger barn to hold his hoarded wealth after asking himself: “What shall I do? Where my provisions lay?… On what? The poor to feed! / No, no, this miser, Sir, was one indeed.” After he secures his treasure, “death's angel comes” and berates him: “Unthinking fool! this night the Lord demands / Thy soul—Whose now is all thy corn and lands?” Spreading its “sable pinions,” the angel carries off the miser's spirit, “leaving the carcase breathless on the bed.” This story taught the stern lesson: “Hail, gold! that pay'st thy worshippers so well, / First with short joy, but last with endless hell.”¹

Ryland's poem was typical of religious commentary on covetousness over the course of the eighteenth century in Britain—not least because he went out of his way to personify that sin as a miser, a figure who would have invited instant recognition among the “serious and experienced Christians” to whom he addressed his poem.² Although the rich man in the original parable does build bigger barns to store his “fruits and goods,” and does die prematurely, no explicit mention is made of his cruelty toward starving beggars. And while he hoards his wealth, the man in the original parable (who was more typically called a rich fool) states his intention on the eve of his destruction to “eat, drink, and be merry.”³ Moreover, neither this parable nor the dozens of other references to covetousness in the King James translation of the Bible ever actually mentions misers by name—mainly because the term had only just entered the English language when that book appeared in 1611.⁴ That task was left to hundreds of sermons, treatises, poems, and hymns, which energetically exposed the trespasses and tribulations of these most miserable of sinners.

Although misers played a leading role in religious diatribes against bad behavior, they shared the spotlight with a large supporting cast. Since the avarice they personified was only one of the seven deadly sins, they commonly comingled with ambitious men (whose sins were envy and pride) and prodigals (whose sins included lust and gluttony).⁵ A Presbyterian sermon on making “your calling and election sure” faulted “the covetous, the voluptuous, or the ambitious sinner, each unweariedly pursuing what he takes to be his interest” instead of “working out the salvation of their souls.” Others urged that the “pretensions of a Voluptuary and a Miser” were “vastly different, but equally unnatural”; called misers and libertines comparably “condemned to endless Shame and Punishment”; and insisted that the miser and the “licentious prodigal” would both be eternally excluded from heaven.⁶

Also, although all misers were deemed to be covetous, not all covetous people were deemed to be misers. In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Mr. Gripeman (a schoolmaster in “the County of Coveting”) was an expert in “the art of getting” but not a miser. And when, a century later, the Unitarian William Enfield urged his congregants to pay “benevolent attention to the interests of others,” he warned them against “the sordid miser” but was quick to add to his list “the frugal and busy man” whose generosity extended only to “his domestic connections.” Others broadened their definition of covetousness to include pride and prodigality. Recalling that the rich fool in the parable both hoarded and intended to spend his wealth, a Norwich Presbyterian took its lesson to be that “the luxurious prodigal may harbor in his mind as sordid and insatiable avarice, as he who defrauds himself of the… necessaries of life, to save expence.”⁷ Finally, preachers seldom accused misers of undue lust, despite the prominence of “thy neighbor's wife” in the commandment against covetousness. Instead they taunted misers with Luke 12:15, which focused on a passion for “abundance of … things” and not women, perhaps because they associated adultery with sins of the flesh—as opposed to merging it with an avaricious desire for property, as playwrights were starting to do.⁸

Yet it remains the case that John Ryland was far from alone in singling out misers as worthy of special condemnation, even to the point of shoehorning them into the Bible. One reason for this was that misers presented greed in its purest form. The Oxford don Thomas Haweis, preaching on “The Deceitfulness and Corruption of the Heart,” identified the miser—who was “merely intent upon heaping up … and worships with most unfeigned affection his golden god”—as a case where covetousness “reigns alone or chief in the heart.” He contrasted misers with others in whom “Pride, Lust and Vanity take the ascendency,” whereby “the fruits of covetousness are dispersed.” Identifying covetousness in its primary colors made it easier to detect in cases where competing vices made it harder to spot. By way of interpreting Solomon's condemnation of “he that loveth silver,” an Anglican bishop presented the miser as having “the worse name in the world” in order to make the case that “a certain alliance … has taken place between luxury and avarice” in the spendthrift as well.⁹

Misers also offered a hard case—perhaps the hardest, many argued—for the ultimate goal of all Christian discourse, which was to assist people's progress to heaven. For this reason, they emerged as central characters in one of the most heated doctrinal disputes in eighteenth-century Britain, concerning whether faith or works were more important to secure salvation. The doctrine of justification by faith alone, which dated back to Luther and Calvin and was included (albeit in a modified form) in the Anglican articles of faith, reappeared with new emphasis in the eighteenth century among Methodists and Baptists. Although this view did not wholly disregard the importance of good works, it also assumed that even misers could achieve salvation by seeking personal forgiveness from God. A competing latitudinarian position emerged after 1660 within Anglican theology that insisted, in a partial return to Catholic doctrine, on the regular “practice of … a holy life” to ensure both happiness on earth and eternal bliss in heaven.¹⁰ Especially through the 1740s, many Anglicans included misers on a list of sinners who fell irredeemably short of passing this test. These two doctrines also employed different transactional metaphors for salvation. Preachers who focused on faith cast conversion as a case of radical debt forgiveness, with the terms of redemption being set either by sinners themselves or through the grace of Jesus.¹¹ Those who emphasized good works presented these as mortgage payments on a future abode in heaven: the miser's failure to give to the poor, in this moral economy, carried the risk of spiritual foreclosure.¹²

With these important exceptions, misers occasioned an enduringly unified front among British religious writers throughout the eighteenth century. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Dissenters, and Catholics all came together in condemning them, and, in doing so, seldom strayed from a formulaic script that borrowed liberally from several timeworn Bible passages. The misers who populated these scripts—which numbered in the hundreds—were far more often caricatures than sympathetic portraits of human beings with a complex array of virtues and vices.¹³ Yet, as historian Brodie Waddell has reminded us, such “moralised representations” of economic life often had a more enduring impact on people's opinions and behavior than real-life economic actors.¹⁴ Although most of these sermons circulated locally in limited editions or moldered in posthumous collections, several sermons and treatises featuring misers did remain in print for a generation or more.¹⁵ And while gauging reception is never an easy task—especially when so many of these images emanated from pulpits and only occasionally circulated in print—historians of eighteenth-century preaching have made a strong circumstantial case for the impact these ubiquitous references to misers might have had.¹⁶

By 1700, nearly all the categories were in place that would inform how misers appeared in religious discourse through the next century. Four sermons on covetousness preached by John Tillotson in the late seventeenth century, and reprinted at least ten times into the 1750s, provide a convenient summary of these categories.¹⁷ Influential during his life, first as Dean of St. Paul's and then as Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson's stock rose during the decades after his death in 1694.¹⁸ A firm proponent of the doctrine of good works, his other sermons focused on virtuous deeds more than sinful acts.¹⁹ And truer to his source materials than many of his successors, he mentioned misers only once (as “a sort of Rich Men … who starve themselves more than the Poor, and fare many times more hardly”) in more than a hundred greed-filled pages. Still, the ample space he devoted to avarice in these sermons provided a detailed map that others would color in with misers of many hues. This map included his claim that covetous people sinned by refusing to dispense “what they have to spare in Charity,” and his tally of the many ways in which riches “contribute very much to our Misery, and Sorrow.”²⁰

Both of these tenets hinged on a contrast between hoarding God-given wealth on earth and husbanding treasures in heaven. Tillotson opened his first sermon on covetousness by urging that “we are the Proprietors of [wealth] in respect of Men, but in respect of God we are but Trustees, and Stewards, and God will require an Account of us how we have disposed of it.”²¹ Anglican and Catholic priests reinforced this point when they exhorted their flocks to heed Jesus's advice, in the Sermon on the Mount, not to “lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth … where thieves break through and steal,” but instead to accumulate “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” By such logic, hoarding earthly wealth was the worst business model imaginable. According to the Catholic author of Sundays Kept Holy, the miser made “a wretched bad Bargain” when he “barter[ed] the never-ending Riches of Heaven for a few earthly Pence.” In his “Dissuasive from Covetousness,” the Norfolk vicar Elisha Smith faulted the man who sacrificed “the whole Kingdom of Heaven upon easy Service” in order to acquire “a few of this World's good Things upon much harder Terms.”²²

All these references to misers were part of a sustained struggle, which permeated British religious discourse throughout the eighteenth century, to come to terms with a rapidly changing world of capital and credit. By failing to abide by what historian Ethan Shagan has called “the rule of moderation,” misers (as well as spendthrifts) disrupted the economic dicta that preachers and politicians had relied on during the previous two centuries to preserve the “good, happy, and quiet estate of a society.” Preachers had long invoked the Lord's prayer to defend the universal provision of daily bread, by law if possible and through charitable giving if not. The rise of money complicated this effort, since—as John Locke and others argued—it promised to replace the daily provision of scarce resources with a future provision of plenty. That preachers bought into this new recognition of money's power is evident in their recourse to the language of credit to describe salvation. Their invocation of misers, in this context, can best be seen as a rearguard effort to carve out some space for prior condemnations of covetousness, with its close connection to an older ethic of “sufficiency,” in the face of the apparently inexorable ascension of private property.²³

This context helps to account for the common identification that religious writers insisted on making between misers and hoarders throughout the eighteenth century, despite the fact that most British wealth at this time came in the form of land or credit. By depriving others of their property, misers exerted a centrifugal force on a social system that was always threatened by scarcity. In response to that threat landed elites and clergy preached giving, not saving. With the rise of an urban merchant elite, the Anglican clergy who tended their souls tried to recreate this sense of noblesse oblige among their wealthy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Miserable Sinners
• 2 Necessary Evils
• 3 Misers, Sex, and the Family
• 4 The Butt of All Jokes
• 5 Characters
• 6 Saving Graces
• 7 Succeeding Misers
• Selected Bibliography
• Index