QI The Book of the Dead by Mitchinson John & Lloyd John

Author:Mitchinson, John & Lloyd, John [Lloyd, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571255559
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2009-11-18T23:00:00+00:00

For all his handsome profile and his witty conversation, there is no record of Lambert ever having had a romantic attachment. He was not, by this point in his life, built for love:

When sitting he appears to be a stupendous mass of flesh, for his thighs are so covered by his belly that nothing but his knees are to be seen, while the flesh of his legs, which resemble pillows, projects in such a manner as to nearly bury his feet.

One of his regular visitors was the celebrated Polish dwarf Count Joseph Borulawski whose ‘entertainment’ Lambert remembered visiting in Birmingham when he was an able-bodied apprentice, twenty years earlier. As Lambert stood to show the count his full bulk, the tiny visitor grasped one of his calves (by then over three feet in circumference) and exclaimed, ‘Ah mein Gott! Pure flesh and blood. I feel de warm. No deception! I am pleased: for I did hear it was deception.’ In turn, Lambert asked if his (normal-sized) wife was still alive. ‘No she is dead,’ the midget replied. ‘I am not very sorry, for when I affronted her, she put me on the mantel-shelf for punishment.’

Lambert returned to Leicester later that year wealthy and famous. Through his excellent manners and his cheerfulness, he had turned the nightmare of his condition to good account. Most important of all, he had done it on his own terms, escaping the horrors of the freak show. Even allowing for a more tolerant attitude to fatness than in our own diet-obsessed times, Lambert was considered an astonishing phenomenon, in the words of the Morning Post, ‘the acme of mortal hugeness’. But perhaps because of his dignity and his utter lack of self-pity, he became a symbol of British pride. Rather like a champion bull, his size and good nature showed off the best of the national character. In a cartoon of April 1806 a gargantuan Lambert is shown taunting the amazed (and tiny) Napoleon:

I am a true born Englishman from the county of Leicester – a quiet mind and good constitution nourished by the good air of Britain makes every Englishman thrive.

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