Daniel Lambert - After Death

After Death

In late 1809, a Mr J. Drakard released The life of that wonderful and extraordinary heavy man, the late Danl. Lambert, from his birth to the moment of his dissolution, with an account of men noted for their corpulency, and other interesting matter, the first full biography of Lambert to be released after his death. Lambert's position as the heaviest person in recorded history was soon overtaken by the American Mills Darden (1799–1857), but Lambert had by now become a cult figure, and virtually every item connected with him was preserved for posterity. His clothes and possessions were sold at auction to collectors, and many of them are preserved in museums today.

Across England, many public houses and inns were renamed after Daniel Lambert, particularly in Leicester and Stamford. The Daniel Lambert public house at 12 Ludgate Hill, near the entrance to St Paul's Cathedral in London, was well known, and had a large portrait of Daniel Lambert and Lambert's walking stick on display in the lobby. James Dixon, owner of the Ram Jam Inn in Stamford, bought the suit of clothes Lambert had been wearing when he died and put it on display, renaming the inn the Daniel Lambert.

The term "Daniel Lambert" entered common use in English speech and writing, to refer to any fat man. His name continued in this use long after the details of his life had been largely forgotten; in 1852, Charles Dickens remarked that "Lambert's name is known better than his history". Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby compares the obese George IV to Lambert, and William Makepeace Thackeray used the term in Vanity Fair to refer to the obese Joseph Sedley, and in The Luck of Barry Lyndon to refer to the fat servant Tim. As time progressed, "Daniel Lambert" came to mean anything exceptionally large; Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology used the phrase "a Daniel Lambert of learning", while Thomas Carlyle referred sarcastically to Oliver Cromwell as "this big swollen Gambler and gluttonous hapless 'spiritual Daniel Lambert'". In 1874, The Times, in reviewing the newly translated French comedy La Fiammina by Mario Uchard in which a character is named "Daniel Lambert", noted that the name is "always associated in the English mind with the notion of obesity", and in 1907, almost 100 years after Lambert's death, the Château de Chambord was referred to as "the Daniel Lambert among châteaux". Nellie Lambert Ensall, at the time the heaviest woman in Britain, claimed in 1910 to be Daniel Lambert's great-granddaughter, but her claim is likely to be untrue; Lambert was unmarried and is unlikely to have had any children.

In 1838, the English Annual published a series of poems, purportedly written by Lambert and found amongst his papers at the Waggon and Horses after his death. No source published during Lambert's lifetime mentions his having any interest in poetry or in any reading matter other than periodicals on field sports, and it is unclear why his papers should have been with him in Stamford at his death, rather than at his home in Leicester. The discoverer of the poems is credited only as "Omega". It is possible that the poems are a hoax.