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
Written byCharles Dickens1812–1870 · English novelist & journalist
Spoken by Wilkins Micawber in Chapter 12 of David Copperfield, first published in the novel’s fourth monthly part — dated August 1849 — and then in the 1850 first book edition. One caveat on the wording: Dickens printed “annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six”; the familiar “nineteen nineteen and six” adds a word he did not put there.
“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” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 12 — spoken by Mr. Micawber; first printed in monthly part No. IV, August 1849 (London: Bradbury & Evans). Dickens's text reads 'nineteen nineteen six'; the familiar 'nineteen nineteen and six' adds a word. Verified by Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
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Provenance
Where it comes from
Work
David Copperfield, Chapter 12
First printed
Monthly part No. IV, August 1849 (London: Bradbury & Evans); book form 1850
Speaker
Wilkins Micawber, at a farewell dinner, to David Copperfield
Original wording
“nineteen nineteen six” — without the “and”
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!” To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe.
David Copperfield, ch. 12 — 1850 first edition
Text of the first book edition (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850), Chapter 12, as transcribed on Wikisource from the scanned volume.
The maxim belongs to Wilkins Micawber, not to Dickens speaking in his own voice, and it lands in Chapter 12 of David Copperfield. Its first appearance in print was the novel’s fourth monthly number, whose advertiser pages carry the heading “No. IV. — August, 1849” — the scanned part is on the Internet Archive ↗.
That 1849 part, and the first book edition of 1850, both print the first half as “annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness” — no connective. See Wikisource’s transcription of the 1850 text ↗.
Later Victorian and Edwardian printings keep that reading. The 1900 Chapman & Hall edition also has “nineteen nineteen six” — Internet Archive scan ↗. We found no printed edition carrying the extra word.
David Copperfield was issued in monthly parts from May 1849 and in book form in 1850, and Charles Dickens died in 1870 — so the novel and this passage are long out of copyright in the United States. That is why the complete text is freely available on Project Gutenberg ↗.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What travels wrong
Nobody seriously doubts Dickens wrote this. What gets garbled is who is speaking — and, by one small word, what he actually printed.
✕
Wording“nineteen nineteen and six” Extra word
The version that circulates has a connective Dickens did not print. The August 1849 monthly part, the 1850 first book edition and the later reprints we checked all read “annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness” (1850 text on Wikisource ↗). The “and” form matches the widely copied Project Gutenberg e-text ↗, which is the text most online quotations resemble.
✕
Wording“twenty pounds nought and six” Modernised
A second, smaller drift. Dickens wrote “twenty pounds ought and six”, catching how the figure was said aloud; Wikipedia’s article on Micawber ↗ prints it as “nought and six”. Wikiquote keeps Dickens’s “ought”.
It is dialogue, and the joke is the speaker. Wilkins Micawber is a fictional character in Dickens’s 1850 novel ↗ who has been jailed as a debtor in the King’s Bench Prison, and who never once manages to follow his own rule. Quoting him as a straight-faced budgeting authority inverts the scene.
✓Dickens wrote it — Chapter 12 of David Copperfield, first printed in the monthly part dated August 1849 (scanned part ↗) — and what he printed was “annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness”, with no “and”.
Context
Why it stuck
Micawber delivers the maxim over a glass of punch at a farewell dinner, and he is the last man in the novel qualified to give it. That is the point: Dickens hands the most quotable budgeting rule in English to a man permanently, cheerfully “floored” by his own arithmetic, then has him whistle the College Hornpipe. The advice is sound and the adviser is ruined, which is exactly why it is funny and exactly why it stuck.
Dickens knew the sums personally. Wikipedia’s article on John Dickens ↗ records that his father — the acknowledged model for Micawber, and a man Dickens described as a jovial opportunist with no money sense — was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison on 20 February 1824, which sent Charles out of school and into a factory at the age of twelve.
Dickens gave the era’s most-quoted budgeting rule to a man his readers knew was ruined.
Read the full story
The figures are pre-decimal. “Nineteen nineteen six” means nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence; “twenty pounds ought and six” means twenty pounds, no shillings and sixpence. Wikipedia sets them out ↗ as £19/19/6 and £20/0/6. The whole distance between happiness and misery is a shilling.
The idea now travels under the name “the Micawber Principle” — a label attached to the passage by later readers, not a phrase Dickens uses in the novel.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and journalist, and the defining novelist of the Victorian era. David Copperfield, serialised in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850, was the most autobiographical of his books. Its comic debtor Wilkins Micawber was drawn from Dickens’s father, John Dickens, whose imprisonment for debt in 1824 pulled the twelve-year-old Charles out of school and into a factory — the wound running under most of his fiction about money.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Charles Dickens, “The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger,” No. IV (London: Bradbury & Evans, August 1849), chap. 12; first book edition, London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘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’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/annual-income-twenty-pounds-annual-expenditure-nineteen/