Micawber takes a job with Heep and moves to Canterbury

Mr. Micawber’s move to Canterbury follows a string of hopeful plans that have not secured his family’s livelihood. When David Copperfield asks what the Micawbers will do after Mr. Micawber’s release from debt, Mrs. Micawber reports that her family favors leaving London and using Mr. Micawber’s talents in the country, perhaps through a position at the Custom House in Plymouth. Another proposal is the coal trade: Mr. and Mrs. Micawber travel to inspect the Medway, but conclude that the business needs capital, which Mr. Micawber does not possess. Their arrival in Canterbury is first framed as another hopeful search for a chance to make a living. His eventual agreement to work for Uriah Heep gives that search a definite destination and a precarious professional footing.

From schemes to an appointment

The job grows out of the Micawbers’ continuing financial pressure and their willingness to pursue uncertain openings. Mrs. Micawber explains that her practical suggestions helped prompt an advertisement: the Micawbers throw down the gauntlet, and Heep responds. Mr. Micawber presents the resulting arrangement in formal terms. He is pledged to assist and serve Heep as confidential clerk, with the appointment tied to relief from some of his pecuniary difficulties and to the value of the services he may provide. The pay is not fixed at a high figure; the arrangement’s promise lies partly in the possibility that his work will ease his debts.

Mr. Micawber treats the position as a chance to put his abilities to use, while his account of those abilities retains its familiar mixture of grandness and self-deprecation. He says that he has some acquaintance with law, gained as a defendant in civil process, and intends to study Blackstone’s Commentaries. The detail makes the appointment both comic and consequential: his legal knowledge begins not with professional training but with his own encounters with debt, yet he is ready to convert that experience into clerical employment. His confidence exceeds what the evidence establishes about his qualifications, but the employment itself is real, and it requires him to take up work in Heep’s service.

Leaving London with the family

Before the move, Mr. Micawber invites David and Thomas Traddles to visit the family at its lodging near the top of Gray's Inn Road. The invitation arrives in a letter announcing that something has turned up and that the family will accompany him to a provincial town. Its ceremonious language presents departure from London as a major domestic occasion, even though the immediate surroundings are markedly cramped: the twins sleep in a turn-up bedstead in the family sitting-room, and Mr. Micawber has prepared his celebrated drink in a wash-hand-stand jug. Mrs. Micawber remains beside him in the transition, consistent with her declaration that she will not desert him.

The family’s departure is thus not a comfortable passage from hardship to security. The small lodging, the improvised hospitality, and the children’s crowded sleeping arrangements keep material scarcity in view. Yet the move differs from the earlier schemes because Mr. Micawber now has a named employer and an agreed role. His repeated expectation of an opportunity is no longer merely a prediction: Heep has taken up the advertisement, and the household is preparing to follow the employment to Canterbury.

The Canterbury office

The change of residence becomes visible when David later finds Mr. Micawber at work in Mr. Wickfield’s house, in the small ground-floor room where Heep formerly sat. Mr. Micawber is plying his pen with great assiduity, dressed in a legal-looking black suit and appearing large in the confined office. The scene supplies a concrete counterpart to his earlier announcement: he is no longer only speaking about a prospective occupation but is at his desk, doing clerical work in the place associated with Heep’s business.

The setting also gives the appointment a telling spatial shape. Mr. Micawber occupies the office Heep had used, but now as Heep’s employee, and his work places him inside the business rather than at a distance from it as a debtor seeking relief. David declines Mr. Micawber’s offer to take him immediately to Heep and instead goes upstairs through the familiar house. The contrast makes the change in Mr. Micawber’s position plain without suggesting that he has become secure or independent: he has entered another person’s service, and the pressing financial circumstances that helped produce the agreement remain part of its terms.

Significance of the move

Mr. Micawber’s appointment gathers together two persistent strands of his story: financial instability and faith that a new opening may arrive. His earlier proposals—from a possible Custom House post in Plymouth to the Medway coal trade—depend on prospects that fail to become workable. The Canterbury position is different not because the evidence shows prosperity, but because it converts expectation into a specific obligation, employer, occupation, and place of residence. Mrs. Micawber’s advice and the advertisement are practical links in that conversion; Mr. Micawber’s legal self-presentation supplies its characteristic flourish.

The move also connects domestic survival with legal and clerical labor. Mr. Micawber’s familiarity with legal process begins through his experience as a defendant, while his new role requires him to serve in a legal-looking office and study a standard legal work. The episode therefore does not erase his debt or turn aspiration into assured success. It shows the family responding to insecurity through mobility, Mrs. Micawber’s counsel, and Mr. Micawber’s acceptance of employment under Heep. Canterbury is at once the destination of another search for a livelihood and the place where that search, for the moment, takes practical form.