"Micawber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bread. Too proud to become an additional charge to these two hard-working women, she helped the latter with her sewing and so contributed her share to the family means. It was not a congenial occupation. But to her any work was preferable to waiting, Micawber-like, for something better to turn up. Though she was happy because she was with her friend, her life here was wellnigh as tragic as it had been in her father's house. The family sorrows were great and many. Mr. Blood was a ne'er-do-weel and a drunkard. Caroline, one of the daughters, had then ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... responsible ministry. As it is, the representative branch of our government is practically a nullity. What with his immense patronage, the progress of events, and the chance of luring the opposing party into by-questions, the Presidential Micawber of the moment is almost sure that something will turn up to extricate him from the consequences of his own incompetency or dishonesty. The only check upon this system is the chance that the temerity engendered by irresponsible power may lead the executive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... walking the streets, where, as a child, he had picked up the most valuable part of his education. His tramps about London—often after {269} nightfall—sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. He knew, too, the shifts of poverty. His father—some traits of whom are preserved in Mr. Micawber—was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison, where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles, then a boy of ten, was employed at six shillings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's blacking warehouse. The hardships and loneliness of this part ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and waits for a nibble of the drowsy sucker that sleeps on his oozy bed, oblivious of the baitless hook from which he has long since stolen the worm. There he sits, and fishes, and fishes, and fishes, and like Micawber, waits for something to "turn-up." But nothing turns up until the shadows of evening fall and warn the truant home, where he is welcomed with a dogwood sprout. Then "sump'n" does turn up. He obeys the call of the Sunday school bell, and goes with solemn face, but ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... in a sense that the holders of high office never can be. Dickens could only write of natural people, so he wrote of common men: 'You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Micawber; you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like Swiveller; you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like Crumples; you will find him as an unsuccessful doctor like Sawyer; you will always find the rich and reeking ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... an optimistic ending, but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily, or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of a sea ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... last. So exhausted was he, that death must have been only like a release from the trouble of living. His last entries, though giving evidences of fading faculties, are almost cheerful. He jocularly alludes to himself as Micawber, waiting for something to turn up. It is evident that he had given up hope, and waited for death's approach in a calm and resigned frame of mind, without fear, like a good ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... all this disproportion by its immortal pause. It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion. Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having kindled, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... a post, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, as an assistant in the British Museum Library, and was reduced to writing reactionary political leaders for a Norwich paper; he was, in fact, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up, or, in his own graphic phrase, "digging holes in the sand and ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... takes it as an act of God. "This, my dear Miss Betham, waiving all connexion of sentences, is the history of my breach of engagement, of its cause, and of the occasion of that cause." There is much of Mr. Micawber here. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly nobody ever talked ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Patterson laughed. "Some time you and I'll go to see them and take Honey-Sweet, won't we?—Sarah, Sarah! Let's not make any more investigations. Wait, like our old friend, Mr. Micawber, for 'something to ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... apartments are protracted until any hour, as the servants usually go to bed when they have provided every one with his flat candle-stick—that emblem of gentility which always so prominently recurred to the mind of Mrs. Micawber when recalling the happy days when she "lived at home with papa and mamma." In some fast houses pretty high play ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... How Mr. Micawber's heart would have glowed over this realisation in colossal figures of his cherished principle! You remember his formula to young Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six; result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... contain very little evidence of the manners and customs of his time, and what they do contain is forced and untrue. He invented characters whose names have become common nouns and adjectives for individual types which are found in all societies at all times (Pecksniff, Micawber, Turveydrop, Uriah Heep, etc.), but which may, at a time, be especially common and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... may be accepted as autobiographical. He was fond of putting himself and his own people into his books, and of drawing his scenes and his characters from real life, sometimes only slightly disguised. Tradition says that he built both Mr. Micawber and Mr. Turveydrop out of his own father; that Mrs. Nickleby was based upon his own mother; and that his wife, who was the Dora of 'Copperfield' in the beginning of their married life, became in later years the Flora of 'Little Dorrit.' The elder Dickens had unquestionably ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... year the Wollstonecraft girls opened a private school, a kind of "Young Ladies' Establishment," quite on the Mrs. Nickleby order. And indeed, if a Micawber had been wanting, Mary knew where to look ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... to luck to carry them through the world. Like Dickens' Micawber, they're 'always waiting for something to turn up.' I have heard of a man who was so pleased at finding a big horseshoe that he placed it over his bedroom door. The next morning, as he closed the door, he jarred the horseshoe from its place and it fell and ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... lay, perhaps chiefly, in his ability to draw these unforgettable exaggerations, these outstanding types: "Micawber" waiting for something to turn up; the fiendish cruelty of "Bill Sikes"; the angelic self-effacement of "Little Nell"; the hypocritical "Mr. Pecksniff"; the gossipy "Sairy Gamp." He had a unique gift for representing psychological traits in large. The so-called ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... natural constitution, of broad distinctions—of classifications that put the whole interests and objects of this world to iho Tight-hand and to the left. We long for Aye or No—for Heads or Tails. We are impatient of limitations, qualifications, restrictions. You remember how Mr. Micawber explained the philosophy of income and expenditure, and urged people never to run in debt. Income, said he, a hundred pounds a year; expenditure ninety-nine pounds nineteen shillings: Happiness. Income, a hundred pounds a year; expenditure ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... have no doubt many of my hearers will agree it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it. The road to wealth is, as Dr. Franklin truly says, "as plain as the road to mill." It consists simply in expending less than we earn; that seems to be a very simple problem. Mr. Micawber, one of those happy creations of the genial Dickens, puts the case in a strong light when he says that to have an income of twenty pounds per annum, and spend twenty pounds and sixpence, is to be the most miserable of men; whereas, to have an income of only twenty pounds, and spend ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... watching its proceedings. For my own part, I will confess that I find all the novels of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do not flow into one another more than they do. I wish Micawber and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than their own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the Pickwick Club into "Master Humphrey's Clock." That experiment ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... fewest in number. At one station where we stopped, one respectable-looking man asked of another, "Have you got anything to do yet, Robert?" "Still waiting for something to turn up," was the answer. This man was not at all of the Micawber type, but a well-brushed, decent-looking person with a keen peremptory face, evidently of Scottish descent. A group of such men came on the train, whose only talk was of emigrating if ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... one of the main movements of our day which call, in the Dean's judgment for unpleasantness—the unpleasantness of telling people not to make fools of themselves. Humanity must not go over in a body to Mr. Micawber. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor. Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children. Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage. I heard a group of brawny pioneers in the street eagerly discussing the quantity of tail required for a boy's kite; and one graybeard undertook the sport of flying it, volunteering ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir |
