Inspiration for Scrooge

[Dyer, Sonia]

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L. Schulte wrote:
>...Americans admire the Bill Gates/Andrew Carnegie/-types ...
>Class warfare based on envy tends to be a European phenomenon
>think France 1789), although you can see it in America too of
>course, especially in election years!  So I wonder if Uncle
>Scrooge is in fact such an American archetype that he could
>not have come from the pen and brush of a European.

And yet Carnegie was very much driven by the European model you mention.
Biographies of him show that once he became wealthy, he took his old
mother back to Scotland, and drove her up and down High Street of the
town they had left in a big fancy carriage, waving for all their old
neighbors to see, and then he bought the local castle, and a flower
garden he and his family were never allowed to set foot in when he was a
child.  Whether it was Andrew Carnegie or his mother driving these
actions, they were acknowledged to be blatantly intended to generate
envy from their former European neighbors.  

While we're on this general subject, does anyone know who was the
inspiration for Scrooge?  We know the name came from the miserly Mr.
Ebenezer Scrooge character in Dickens' "Christmas Carol", but that
particular Mr Scrooge never travelled the world, or had big adventures
seeking lost treasures, or settled in America.  Andrew Carnegie seems
like a good source of inspiration for some of those aspects.  Carnegie
was certainly a tightwad (at least til he got old and became a famous
philanthropist).  Could there be other sources of inspiration
contributing to Scrooge?  

        Sonia