Daniel dancer biography

18th century English miser

Daniel Dancer (–) 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 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 ^[1]

Hitherto Dancer had given no manifestation of his miserly instincts, but now, in company with his only sister, who shared his tastes and lived with him as his housekeeper, he commenced a life of the utmost seclusion and most rigid parsimony.

His lands were allowed to lie fallow so that the expense of cultivation might be avoided. He took only one meal a day, cons