Misery

"A misanthrope is a being who likes nobody, whom nobody likes, and who is like nobody."

Today I found myself, for the second time this week, unexpectedly offered a lift off a passing driver. Maybe it's something they're putting in the drinking fountain at the petrol station. Either way, the bloke spent the duration of the ride telling me all about the life of Marjery Jackson, the Carlisle miser. She was a fiercesome, Scrooge-like woman who lived to be ninety years of age in a time when many people barely managed forty. When she died, her property and money amounted to around fifty thousand pounds (of which nine thousand guineas were found in cash beneath her bed, next to two loaded pistols). And yet, in spite of her formidable wealth, she had worn pretty much the same set of clothes for twenty years before dying. She regarded the acquisition of wealth above all else in the world.

Contemporary accounts of her are mildly terrifying: "Miss Jackson was of the middle stature, thin, sallow, and shrivelled, with a most forbidding aspect; in her countenance...envy, malice, and hatred; we may safely conjecture that no love-lorn sigh was ever breathed for her, nor voice e'er said, 'O were that maiden mine.'" Likewise, "To children Margery had a strong aversion. When applied to for rooms, as many of her houses in Carlisle were let off in single apartments at the rate of five and six pounds a year, she used to say, 'How many toads have you?' meaning children; and invariably rejected as tenants such as had large or increasing families."

Now, the inevitable conclusion that these accounts cause one to draw is that Margaret Thatcher has obviously travelled back in time. And yet, as tempting as it is to believe that the Iron Lady somehow led a Goodnight Sweetheart style double-life in eighteenth-century Carlisle, it's clear that Marjery Jackson was just one in a long line of selfish, introverted, thoroughly horrible people to exist purely for the sake of their own existence. And if it's any comfort, they're never remembered by their money, but rather by how their contemporaries considered them. Which tends to be fairly negative:

An auld bearded hussie suin caw'd me her man,
And frae that day, I may say't, aw my sorrows began.
Neist my deame she e'en starv'd me, that niver liv'd weel;
Her hard words and luiks wou'd hae freeten'd the deil;

She had a lang beard, for aw't warl leyke a billy goat
Wi' a kil-dried frosty feace: and then the smawest leg o' mutton
In aw Carel market sarrad the cat, me, and hur for a week.
The bairns meade sec gam on us, and thunder'd at the rapper,
As if to waken a corp.


So, what does all of this have to do with today's photograph? Very little, actually. This is quite obviously a tree, not an eighteenth-century Cumbrian cheapskate. But then, they're so very difficult to get pictures of these days.


A musical about the life of Marjery Jackson will be opening in Carlisle in a couple of weeks, and the nice bloke who gave me a lift today is involved (hence his staggering knowledge on the subject). I can't make it, but for any of you in or around Carlisle, it sounds like an entertaining bit of local history brought to life!