Real Georgians…who were really weird…

As the English says, I’m feeling poorly. I’ve spent most of the day lying in bed with the onset of a chest infection so I decided to read something. A few weeks ago I found a book at the charity shop that dealt with how London’s growth has been affected by wealthy people over the centuries. If it doesn’t sound like something to read while ill, you’d be right! After opening it I sat there feeling terribly confused…so and so married so and so’s daughter who inherited such and such from her uncle who was so and so and they spent the money buying such and such to make this or that… I started skimming and came across a number of interesting people and one of them was John Elews, an eccentric miser who lived in the mid to late 18th century. On looking him up on Google I came across this fantastic free on line book that was published in 1852, The lives and Portraits of Curious and Odd Characters. I think the book was originally published in the early 1800’s as it comments on eccentrics living in 1801 and 1810 as being recent. If you, like me, enjoy reading about eccentric weirdos you will love this book. Each eccentric only gets a page or two and the author seems to have a gift of noting the weird and bizarre details. I just finished reading about Mr Statham, the blind magazine seller who never got lost….but who froze to death one winter because he got lost. The author somehow managed to report both these facts without irony! It’s turns out that John Elews came from a family of misers…his mother left him 100,000 pounds (that would have been multiple millions in modern day money) and she starved to death because she didn’t want to spend money on food. John too, it was noted, would have lived a further 20 years if he hadn’t spent so much energy worrying about people stealing his money and spent more time eating food that wasn’t rotten. Look over the book and tell me if it made you laugh! It’s making me laugh! The weird and bizarre make the world go round…really!