Micawber Day 2016
By:
January 18, 2016
Happy Micawber Day!
This is the fourth time we’ve celebrated the only holiday for idlers.
Introduced to the world in 1850 via Dickens’s David Copperfield, the character Wilkins Micawber is known for his oft-repeated beautiful-loser credo, “Something will turn up.”
As HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn put it in The Idler’s Glossary, the adjective “Micawberish” has come to mean someone who lives in optimistic expectation of better fortune, but won’t lift a finger to make it come any sooner.
On Micawber Day, each year, HiLobrow seeks to remind readers that SOMETHING WILL TURN UP.
PS: Why do we celebrate this Dickensian idler’s holiday on January 18? Because that’s the date (in 1935) on which George Cukor’s excellent film adaptation of David Copperfield, in which W.C. Fields brilliantly portrays Micawber, was released.