page_title: Wilkins Micawber
section_title: Quotations
hierarchical_section_title: Wilkins Micawber / Quotations
caption_attribution_description: English: Watercolour of Mr Micawber from David Copperfield
context_page_description: Wilkins Micawber is a clerk in Charles Dickens's 1850 novel David Copperfield. He is traditionally identified with the optimistic belief that "something will turn up."
context_section_description: Besides the Micawber Principle, Micawber is notable for a number of memorable quotations:
  I have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if -if, in short, anything turns up. - (Chapter 1)
  Every happiness and prosperity! If, in the progress of revolving years, I could persuade myself that my blighted destiny had been a warning to you, I should feel that I had not occupied another man's place altogether in vain. - (Chapter 12)
  You HEEP of infamy! - (Chapter 52)
  I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation -of which the smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon, combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre.  I ask no more. Let it be, in justice, merely said of me, as of a gallant and eminent Naval Hero, with whom I have no pretensions to cope, that what I have done, I did, in despite of mercenary and selfish objectives, "FOR ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY." Remaining always, &c, &c, Wilkins Micawber.
  Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!
caption: Mr Micawber by 'Kyd' c.1890
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