Part 1 of 2
‘MY dear young friend,’ said Mr Micawber, ‘I am older than you; a man of some experience in life, and—and of some experience, in short, in difficulties, generally speaking. At present, and until something turns up (which I am, I may say, hourly expecting), I have nothing to bestow but advice. Still my advice is so far worth taking, that—in short, that I have never taken it myself, and am the’—here Mr Micawber, who had been beaming and smiling, all over his head and face, up to the present moment, checked himself and frowned—‘the miserable wretch you behold.’
‘My dear Micawber!’ urged his wife.
‘I say,’ returned Mr Micawber, quite forgetting himself, and smiling again, ‘the miserable wretch you behold. My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!’
‘My poor papa’s maxim,’ Mrs. Micawber observed.*
Another of her papa’s favourite maxims was ‘experientia does it’, a misquotation of Latin ‘experientia docet’, ‘experience teaches’. It goes back at least to Tacitus, in his remarks on the Dead Sea in History V.6: “At a certain season of the year the lake throws up bitumen, and the method of collecting it has been taught by that experience which teaches all other arts”.
Précis
Mr Micawber gave David Copperfield some parting advice, drawn from his own experience – not because he had benefited from it himself, but because he had suffered from not heeding it. His first word of counsel to never put something off until later, but to seize every opportunity, a rule by which his own father-in-law had sworn. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘MY dear,’ said Mr Micawber, ‘your papa was very well in his way, and Heaven forbid that I should disparage him. Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall—in short, make the acquaintance, probably, of anybody else possessing, at his time of life, the same legs for gaiters, and able to read the same description of print, without spectacles. But he applied that maxim to our marriage, my dear; and that was so far prematurely entered into, in consequence, that I never recovered the expense.’
Mr Micawber looked aside at Mrs Micawber, and added: ‘Not that I am sorry for it. Quite the contrary, my love.’ After which, he was grave for a minute or so.
‘My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr Micawber, ‘you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.* Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’*
That is, £19 19s 6d, or nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence. There were 12 pence to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound, so what Mr Micawber is saying that happiness is when your income exceeds your expenditure, even if it is by as little as sixpence.
That is, £20 0s 6d, or twenty pounds, no shillings and sixpence – misery is when your expenditure exceeds your income by as little as sixpence. ‘Ought’ was a 19th-century alternative to ‘nought’, which apparently arose because people misheard ‘a nought’ as ‘an ought’. A number of other words have come into English this way, including (n)apron and (n)umpire, though ought = nought is rare today.
Précis
After advising David Copperfield to follow his own father-in-law’s maxim, and never do tomorrow what can be done today, Mr Micawber expressed regret that his father-in-law had encouraged him to rush into marriage. However, he quickly passed on to his second piece of advice: never to let annual expenditure exceed annual income, even by a sixpence. (56 / 60 words)