A Christmas Carol: Ebenezer Scroggie and The Canongate Connection

The Canongate Kirk

Take a stroll through the Canongate Kirkyard, on the Royal Mile, and you'll find any number of literary associations with those buried there.

Robert Fergusson, the young poet who inspired Robert Burns, is memorialised not just with a statue at the entrance to the churchyard, but has his grave here too. Agnes Maclehose, who gave her pseudonym to the nearby Clarinda's Tearoom, was also associated with Burns - she was his muse, for whom he wrote Ae Fond Kiss, and other poems. Figures associated with the writer Walter Scott are buried here, as well - but their stories are all for another day.

At this time of year, the story that seems most appropriate is also one of the least expected ones, and the one I most enjoy telling!

In 1822, when George IV visited Edinburgh as part of his grand tour of Scotland (under the organisational care of Walter Scott, no less) he attended a large party at the Assembly Rooms, on George Street in the New Town. Here he danced and ate until he was satiated, with food produced by a local caterer and grain merchant, Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie.

​Scroggie was a cousin of Adam Smith (who also happens to be buried at Canongate Kirk) and had been born in the county of Fife, north of Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth. During his time in Edinburgh he lived above the Beehive Inn in the Grassmarket - the inn itself is still there - and established himself as an importer of food and wine from Europe. Because of this access to fine foods he became widely recognised as a jovial figure who could always be counted on to provide the necessary ingredients for a grand night out.

When Scroggie died, in 1836, he was buried with a rather grand tomb in the Canongate Kirkyard, which described him - not inaccurately - as a 'meal man' - one who worked with corn and grain and other 'meal' products.

Barely five years later, the writer Charles Dickens was visiting Edinburgh and took a short walk through the graveyard at the Canongate Kirk (as, indeed, visitors still do!). There, perhaps in the evening gloom, he misread the grave stone of Ebenezer Scroggie, and thought it described the person buried under it as a 'mean man'...

​Curious as to what life such a mean man might have lived in order to get such a grand grave, Dickens borrowed the man's name and made him Ebenezer Scrooge, in his Christmas story A Christmas Carol.

---

As well as gifting the world the phrase 'Bah humbug!' for those disinclined to festivities, and, of course, the synonymous figure of Scrooge himself, Dickens also almost overnight made the name Ebenezer unfashionable - what had once been a reatively popular Scottish children's name became less common. No more would mothers stand at their open doors calling down the treet, 'Ebenezer, come awa' hame, yer tea's ready!'

Perhaps most intriguingly, it may have been Dickens who helped to cement one othe most enduring stereotypes of Scottish character and identity - the trait of financial frugality! To those original readers of the book, Scrooge would have been self-evidently a tight-fisted Scotsman, working over Christmas Day - as most Scots did, even up until the 1950s; while the English were celebrating Christmas Day and Boxing Day, our midwinter holiday was Hogmanay, to celebrate the new year.

Unfortunately the grave of Scroggie/Scrooge was one of the casualties of efforts to clean up and improve the city's graveyards, so although you can no longer visit the grave of Scrooge himself, it's no less satisfying to know that he's buried here!

Explore Edinburgh's many other historical and literary associations with my private walking tours of the city.

---