Something has turned up

Something has turned up is Mr. Micawber’s expression of expectant hope, made memorable by the gap between waiting for a change and finally receiving one. When he writes to David Copperfield that an anticipated event has arrived, the phrase becomes more than a habitual optimism: it marks a real reversal, an opportunity that will take Mr. Micawber and his family out of London.

Meaning and Use

The expression presents hope as readiness for an unforeseen change. In Mr. Micawber’s letter, he says he had previously mentioned his expectation that something would happen; he can now establish himself in a provincial town in connection with one of the learned professions. The prospect is concrete: Mrs. Micawber and their children will accompany him, and the family is preparing to depart after years of vicissitudes in London.

The narrator confirms the turn with the reflection that “something really had turned up at last.” The phrasing gives the expression its characteristic comic rhythm: expectation is grand, circumstances remain modest, and the promised change nevertheless arrives. Mr. Micawber imagines the family’s ashes eventually mingled in the cemetery of their new town, while the immediate occasion is a farewell visit rather than a display of sudden wealth or comfort.

The Fulfilled Expectation

David Copperfield and Thomas Traddles visit Mr. Micawber at his lodging near the top of the Gray’s Inn Road. Its limited resources are visible in the twins’ turn-up bedstead in the family sitting-room and Mr. Micawber’s preparation of a drink in a wash-hand-stand jug. The scene does not erase the family’s precarious circumstances; instead, it places the new professional prospect beside the familiar signs of constraint.

Mr. Micawber invites David and Thomas Traddles to join him before the departure, and David is glad that Mr. Micawber has, at last, found a way forward. The expression thus names a change in direction, not an instant transformation of the family’s material life. Its fulfillment is a chance to begin again elsewhere, with the family still together and the future still uncertain.

Hope Against the Novel’s Other Losses

The expression’s buoyancy gains definition from the novel’s contrasting scenes of grief. When David Copperfield learns that his mother, Clara Copperfield, is dead, he feels himself an orphan and cries until exhaustion; his memories turn to the closed, silent house and the grave beside his father’s. That loss is not presented as a problem solved by waiting for an opportunity. The Micawber phrase therefore belongs to one particular register of the novel’s emotional world: resilient expectation amid hardship, not a promise that every sorrow will be reversed.

The distinction matters in the stories of Daniel Peggotty and Martha, too. Daniel Peggotty is driven to search for Emily, but Mrs. Gummidge first urges him to sit and remember the shelter he once gave her and the other orphans. Later, when Daniel Peggotty pleads with Mrs. Steerforth to spare Emily further disgrace, he offers no demand for wealth or social advancement; he asks that Emily be saved and promises that her family will not condemn her. Martha, meanwhile, describes the river as an image of despair and regrets having been parted from Emily. Set beside these passages, Something has turned up is neither a universal explanation for suffering nor a guarantee of rescue. It is a compact expression of the hope that, in Mr. Micawber’s case, an opening may eventually appear.