Daniel Dancer

Daniel Dancer (1716–1794) was a notorious English miser whose life was documented soon after his death and continued in print over the following century.

A "strange and unaccountable life" The miser Daniel Dancer was born in Pinner, then a rural area in the county of Middlesex, in 1716. His grandfather and father were both noted in their time as misers and are only less famous because their accumulation of wealth was less. Daniel was the eldest of four children and inherited the family estate, eighty acres of rich meadow land and an adjoining farm, when his father died in 1736.

Posthumous reputation Accounts of Dancer followed almost immediately after his death, at first in periodicals such as the Edinburgh Magazine and the Sporting Magazine, then in the volume Biographical Curiosities and in The Strange and Unaccountable Life of Daniel Dancer, Esq., both published in 1797. The latter work, which incorporated the lives of several more misers, was often to be reissued under various titles in the years to come. A later account based on these was contained in Frederick Somner Merryweather's Lives and anecdotes of misers (1850), a work made memorable by its appearance in an amusing chapter of Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend. Wishing to give himself the character of a miser, the 'Golden Dustman' gets an assistant to begin reading to him Dancer's life from this book:

The account then continues to the discovery of hoards of banknotes and coins to the value of several thousand pounds hidden in various places about the house.