ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I’m very grateful to Caroline Stockdale, Joy Cann and all the lovely people at York City Archive for loads of help, photocopies, etc.

Also to Jayne Amat at The Manuscripts and Special Collections Department at The University of Nottingham for supplying an image of a previously unknown letter of Richard’s.

Also to my cousin Pam for spending so much of her time doing research for me.

And to Geoff Matthews and his page on the Guild of One Name Studies site where I first found details of my gt-gt-grandfather’s connection with Micawber. Unfortunately, Geoff has died and his pages have been taken down but this is the paragraph that I stumbled upon:

There was also a Richard Chicken of York (1799-1866) and his family, on which Charles Dickens based his well-known character “Mr Micawber” in his book “David Copperfield”.

This well-educated gallinaceous Clerk, descendant of Nicholas Chicken of Ryton, Co Durham, fell on hard times in York, and was most industrious and eloquent in the many begging letters he circulated around the better-off of that community to support himself and his growing family. He sired twelve children, of whom seven died in infancy (four in one month alone in 1845).

One son (Quintus Gilbert Chicken - Richard had some most unusual names for all his children) and two daughters (Dorcas and Lavinia) survived to marry and have their own families, whose descendants were living into this century in Essex and Leeds.

Richard Chicken died in York Union Workhouse, and was buried in a public grave in York Cemetery in January 1866. A true though much impoverished eccentric member of the Species.

And to the lovely people at Emersons Stone Masons at York Cemetery. I understand that Richard’s cover stone / plaque was created (at his own expense) by Mr Fred Emerson (now deceased) and has been maintained by Anthony, to whom I am very grateful.

LINKS:

The following are useful links —

Explore York libraries and archive. York Archive has five registers showing Richard applying for parish aid. They also have Nicholas Chicken’s Will.

Dickens On The Web.

The David Copperfield Site containing Wilkins Micawber: The Story Within where all the passages relating to Micawber are reproduced.

I found the following on the Internet Archive site. It’s a transcript of a book called “Twelve Masters Of Prose And Verse with selections by Wilfred Whitten (John O’London)”. The section on Charles Dickens begins thus:

“It may he questioned whether, after Mr. Pickwick, the most popular of Dickens’ characters is not the great Wilkins Micawber. Certainly it would be hard to find in his writings passages of richer humour than those here given. Mr. Micawber was drawn to some extent from Dickens’ father, whose letters to his family and son were often in the true Micawber vein. He would write from Manchester that he expected to he in town “with the pheasants.” To a person whom he disliked he once wrote, “The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual from what I have every reason to believe Him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations.” Strange to say, however, Dickens had another, and sufficient, model in Mr. Richard Chicken of York, who worked in the same engineering office in that city as Charles Dickens's brother, Alfred. It seems more than probable that Alfred supplied his literary brother with particulars of Chicken, many of whose letters have been treasured as gems of Micawberism, and it is a significant coincidence that “Wilkins” was in the early part of the last century a York slang name for a person in straits, originating in the fifty years imprisonment for debt, in York Castle, of a certain Major J Vilkins.”

There then follow passages from “David Copperfield” in which Micawber is featured. Find them here.