The strange life of Lord Timothy Dexter

nodle

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Lord Timothy Dexter is the luckiest person to have ever lived. He lived during the American revolution, and was known for his being very strange. He started out the poor uneducated son of a shoe maker, but got lucky and married a rich widow. This was enough to thrust him into the elite of his city, but it did not suddenly make him sophisticated or a genius.

Timothy Dexter felt like he needed to invest his money so that he could be like all the other wealthy elite around him. He was uneducated so he didn't know what would be a good investment, so he just bought into whatever was cheap. This strategy paid out big for him, and others grew jealous of his success. Some local gentlemen decided to test him by suggesting the Jamaica was in desperate need of mittens, warming pans, and Bibles. Timothy Dexter decided to follow this insane advice and sent all three to the island. While his ships were on the way there was a huge religious revival sweeping Jamaica and the Bible's were sold as soon as they arrived. Next a fleet of Russian ships bought up all the mittens to ship home because they had some extra room in the cargo holds. Finally an enterprising farmer discovered that the warming pans were just perfect for skimming molasses, and all of them were sold at a profit.

People were shocked by this and tried to ruin him financially. They told him that Newcastle England was desperately in need of coal. Newcastle is the center of coal mining in England. Well, Timothy followed their advice again, and sent seven ships full of Virginia coal to England. Almost as soon as the ships were sent off a workers strike happened in Newcastle. Absolutely no coal was produced for weeks. By the time the ships arrived there actually was a coal shortage and Timothy Dexter made a huge profit.

He was also a bit insane. Timothy Dexter decided to write a book titled "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones" it was self published and horribly misspelled, it also lacked any form of punctuation. He was ridiculed so much for this that in the next edition he added two pages of nothing but punctuation and told the reader to "pepper and salt it as they please". He also convinced his family to hold a fake funeral for him. He was so upset that his wife didn't look sad enough that he jumped out of his coffin and chased her out of the church with his cane. His treatment of his wife got worse when he decided that she had died while she was very much still alive. He would introduce people to her as the ghost of his dead wife.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter

 
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