  thumb|245px|a detail from l'avaro, a print by antonio piccinni (1878) a miser is a person who is reluctant to spend, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities, in order to hoard money or other possessions.oxford dictionary although the word is sometimes used loosely to characterise anyone who is mean with their money, if such behaviour is not accompanied by taking delight in what is saved, it is not properly miserly. misers as a type have been a perennial object of popular fascination and a fruitful source for writers and artists in many cultures. ==accounting for misers== freud attributed the development of miserly behaviour to toilet training in childhood. some infants would attempt to retain the contents of their bowels and this would result in the development of an anal retentive personality that would attempt to retain their wealth and possessions in later life. in the christian west the attitude to those whose interest centred on gathering money had been coloured by the teachings of the church. from its point of view, both the miser and the usurer were guilty of the cardinal sin of avarice and the two were often confounded.richard newhauser, the early history of greed: the sin of avarice in early medieval thought and literature, cambridge 2000 according to the parable of the elm and the vine in the quasi-biblical shepherd of hermas, the rich and the poor should be in a relationship of mutual support. those with wealth are in need of the prayers of the poor for their salvation and can only earn them by acts of charity.iii.2 a typical late example of christian doctrine on the subject is the reverend erskine neale's the riches that bring no sorrow (1852), a moralising work based on a succession of biographies contrasting philanthropists and misers.online archive running parallel with this has been a disposition, inherited from classical times, to class miserly behaviour as a type of eccentricity and include accounts of misers in such works as g. h. wilson's four-volume compendium of short biographies, the eccentric mirror (1807).online archive charles dickens put these works to comic use in our mutual friend (serialised 1864/5), with its cutting analysis of victorian capitalism. in the third section of that novel, mr boffin decides to cure his ward bella 
Stock_characters