'Affluent Plenty and Literary Ease'

“We are in a pickle.”

I know the phrase but was surprised to see Charles Lamb using it. He is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on this date, Nov. 23, in 1810. Like unrefrigerated potato salad, colloquialisms tend to be quickly perishable. What is cornier than yesterday’s slang? How did you react the last time you heard someone say “groovy” without irony?

The earliest use of pickle in the idiomatic sense, according to the OED, dates from 1562, when John Heywood wrote in his Proverbs and Epigrams: “Time is tickell / Chaunce is fickell / Man is brickell / Freilties pickell / Poudreth mickell /Seasonyng lickell.” Subsequent users include Shakespeare, Fielding, Stevenson and Hart Crane. The Dictionary defines it as “a (usually disagreeable) condition or situation; a plight, a predicament.” Back to Lamb:

“We are in a pickle. Mary [Lamb’s sister] from her affectation of physiognomy has hired a stupid big country wench who looked honest, as she thought, and has been doing her work some days but without eating—eats no butter nor meat, but prefers cheese with her tea for breakfast—and now it comes out that she was ill when she came with lifting her mother about (who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk 4 days and nights in the waggon.”

If you know Lamb, you know this will not turn into a heartfelt account of suffering and perhaps death. No, the ailing maid is pretext for having some fun:

   

“She got advice yesterday and took something which has made her bring up a quart of blood, and she now lies, a dead weight upon our humanity, in her bed, incapable of getting up, refusing to go into an hospital, having no body in town but a poor asthmatic dying Uncle, whose son lately married a drab who tills his house, and there is no where she can go, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed.—O God! O God!—for the little wheelbarrow which trundled the Hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different professions of Mankind!”

As Lamb wrote in an 1815 letter to Robert Southey: “Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” Don’t mistake Lamb’s jocularity for cruelty or indifference to suffering. He had a horror of reflexive sentimentality. I suspect he was equipped with less buffering than some of us. Rather than weep he joked. He would have made excellent company, depending on your tolerance for unregulated hilarity. Lamb goes on:

“Here’s her Uncle just crawled up, he is far liker Death than He. O the Parish, the Parish, the hospital, the infirmary, the charnel house, these are places meet for such guests, not our quiet mansion where nothing but affluent plenty and literary ease should abound.”