'I Have No Puling Apology to Make'

People used to get sick and die of exotically named diseases we have never heard of. We have cancer and congestive heart failure. They had quinsy and squinsy (two of the Seven Dwarfs), dropsy, catarrh, French disease, gleet and bone-break fever. It was a more colorful time. As S.J. Perelman puts it: “I've got Bright’s Disease and he’s got mine.” 

Leave it to Charles Lamb to die of erysipelas, from the Greek for “red skin,” also known as St. Anthony’s Fire and “the rose.” It occurs when streptococcus enters a break in the skin. Today it would be quickly cured with a simple course of antibiotics. Lamb died on December 27, 1834, five days after tripping on a stone on Edmonton High Street in London and slicing open his face. He was probably returning from the nearby Bell Tavern, a favorite drinking spot. Eric G. Wilson in Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022) tells us:

 

“Wounds, in particular face wounds, are a common conduit for the bacteria. Within forty-eight hours, a hot, painful rash appears at the point of infection, and it swells and spreads. Its texture resembles an orange peel, frequently dotted with blisters and vesicles. Fever, chills, headaches, and vomiting ensue. Sometimes the lymph nodes swell. Those with compromised immune systems are most susceptible to the condition, such as older people and alcoholics.”

 

At age fifty-nine, Lamb was unquestionably an alcoholic. He admitted as much in his essay “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1813; rev. 1822): “Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it.” For a certain species of alcoholic, humor is the mask used to deny or minimize the problem, and Lamb was a notably funny writer. In a letter to Robert Southey, Lamb once wrote: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

 

Wilson continues: “[E]rysipelas can intensify into necrotizing fasciitis, a ‘flesh-eating’ infection causing hideous coloring, corrosion, and death. Charles Lamb likely died disfigured and in agony.” That Lamb drank to excess, that he was a tippler, a toper, a tosspot, seems inarguable. In his final letter, composed on the day of his fall, Lamb writes to the wife of his friend George Dyer and closes with a typical Lambian wisecrack:

 

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called [Edward] Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum; but it in an English book. I think I left it in the parlour . . . If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”