The democratic Micawber
William Jennings Bryan, in full-length portrait, appears as the eternally hopeful Mr. Micawber from the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. Caption: “Waiting for something to turn up.”
Comments and Context
The main character, or at least the most memorable figure after the eponymous hero of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, is Wilkins Micawber. Always on the verge of poverty — indeed the survivor of debtors’ prison — Mr. Micawber continually waited “for something to turn up.” This philosophy was not optimism but self-centered sloth; it betrayed his determination never to manage that he work in some way to make things “turn up” by his own industry.
