QI The Book of the Dead

the price of one shilling, the gentlefolk of London would be able to enjoy an audience with ‘the Heaviest Man in Britain’. Lambert had decided that, as his condition prevented him from working, he would turn people’s nosiness into an income. He had strict rules: politeness was an absolute prerequisite, and gentlemen were ejected if they refused to remove their hats. He did what he could to defuse the invasiveness of some people’s questions with humour. When a young beau accosted him by peering through the fashionable device of a quizzing glass (a monocle on a long stick) and asking what he most disliked, he retorted, ‘To be bored by a quizzing glass.’ A woman who asked him how much his enormous red coat cost was told, with a twinkle, ‘If you think it proper to make the present of a new coat, you will then know exactly what it costs, madam.’ With rudeness, he operated a zero-tolerance policy: a man who accused him of paying too much attention to the lady guests was threatened with immediate defenestration. His ‘act’ was simply to tell amusing stories, discuss the news ofthe day, and pick over in detail the qualities of particular horses or packs of hounds. He did brisk business on the side, selling his own lines of pedigree pointers and spaniels. His pet terrier was so admired he was once offered a hundred guineas for it – equivalent to over £8,000 today – but he refused, pleading that it was his closest and most loyal companion. A visit to Lambert became a must for every fashionable Londoner and some afternoons as many as 400 people would pass through his house. The Times wrote admiringly:
    To find a man of his uncommon dimensions possessing great information, manners the most affable and pleasing, and a perfect ease and facility in conversation, exceeded our expectations, high as they had been raised. The female spectators were greater in proportion than those of the other sex, and not a few of them have been heard to declare, how much they admired his manly and intelligent countenance .
     
    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 .
     
    In another, Napoleon eats a small bowl of soup while Lambert feasts on a round of roast beef, with a bowl of mustard, a whole loaf and a foaming pot of stout. No further caption was needed. Here was John Bull in all his splendour.
    Over the next two years, Lambert toured the country in a specially reinforced coach to exhibit himself in provincial