“Never do tomorrow what you can do today”

“Never do tomorrow what you can do today” is Mr. Micawber’s brisk prescription for action, but in David Copperfield it carries an unmistakable irony: the man who gives it has repeatedly postponed the very measures that might have helped him. Spoken to David during a visit to the King’s Bench Prison, the maxim turns Micawber’s financial failures into advice, while his conduct keeps the advice from becoming a simple lesson in self-discipline.

The Maxim and Its Irony

Mr. Micawber delivers the saying as a command: “My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!” The brisk imperatives briefly replace his usual elaboration with an air of certainty. Yet he immediately acknowledges that he has never taken his own advice, calling himself the miserable figure David sees. The maxim is therefore both practical counsel and a self-indictment: Micawber can name the habit that undermines him even as he remains caught in it.

His advice belongs to a larger pattern of fluent explanations for financial difficulty. He expects that “something turns up,” and his descriptions of calamity repeatedly borrow the language of theatrical reversals, including the image of the “God of day” going down. When debt reaches a crisis, he tells David that the sun has set on him; yet he is later reported playing skittles before noon. The contrast makes his declarations emotionally real without making them reliable predictions. The maxim is sharper and more useful than these forecasts, but Micawber’s own example complicates its authority.

Debt, Counsel, and David’s Circumstances

The setting gives the advice weight. Before Micawber’s arrest, David has spent his leisure time with the family while supporting himself on six or seven shillings a week. He buys his own breakfast and keeps a little bread and cheese for supper; during the working day, he has no counsel or consolation to rely on. His childhood poverty is not an abstract backdrop to the maxim but the condition under which he encounters adult advice about managing life and money.

Micawber is arrested and taken to the King’s Bench Prison. On David’s first Sunday visit, the two weep together in Micawber’s room, where he warns the boy to learn from his fate. He illustrates the danger of overspending with a precise calculation: an annual income of twenty pounds and expenditure of nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and sixpence should mean happiness, whereas spending twenty pounds and sixpence should mean misery. After making the lesson, he borrows a shilling from David for porter and gives him a written order on Mrs. Micawber for repayment. The small loan makes the advice inseparable from the household’s immediate dependence on David, even as Micawber frames it as a general rule.

Mrs. Micawber’s response to their shortage further clarifies the family’s circumstances. When she says there is nothing to eat, David offers the two or three shillings remaining from his weekly money. She refuses the loan and instead asks him to help by selling the family’s books and other possessions. The episode places his generosity beside the Micawbers’ difficulty in meeting ordinary expenses; the maxim’s call to act today is delivered within a household where even modest resources must be converted into food and necessities.

Variations on the Rule

Micawber’s advice has a counterpart in a second financial formula, the income-and-expenditure calculation he gives David in prison and later repeats. At home, he expands the arithmetic into a miniature drama: the “blossom” is blighted, the “leaf” withered, and the “god of day” goes down when expenditure exceeds income. The comic grandeur of that description sits beside the exactness of the sums. Micawber can articulate a clear boundary between solvency and shortfall, though his own repeated crises show that recognizing the boundary is not the same as keeping within it.

The saying also resonates with Mrs. Micawber’s recollection of her father’s maxim. She attributes the advice to him, and Micawber connects it to the couple’s marriage, which, he says, was entered into prematurely as a result. He adds that he does not regret the marriage. This exchange makes the warning extend beyond household accounts: in Micawber’s telling, acting too soon can also carry lasting expense. The qualification does not cancel his command to avoid procrastination; it reveals that his maxims are comic rules of experience rather than a consistent, universal system.

Recurrence and Moral Consequence

Micawber’s financial reversals continue to shape how the maxim is understood. His petition eventually succeeds, and he is ordered discharged under the Act; the creditors’ conduct is presented as a demand for payment rather than implacable persecution. Later, at a moment when his troubles are again acute, a letter to David adopts legal phrasing and announces that its writer is “Crushed.” Such returns to crisis make the earlier counsel recur in memory: Micawber knows the value of prompt action, but his eloquent diagnosis has not prevented repeated embarrassment.

His later dealings with Thomas Traddles offer a related, more practical measure of responsibility. Before leaving London, Micawber identifies two bills for which Traddles had put his name, checks their combined amount with David, and gives Traddles an IOU. He describes the document as a way to recover his moral dignity and walk erect. The episode does not erase his debts, but it distinguishes his expansive talk from a concrete acknowledgment of what he owes. Across these scenes, “Never do tomorrow what you can do today” remains both sound counsel and a comic measure of the distance between knowing what should be done and doing it.