“A hair of the dog that bit him”

“A hair of the dog that bit him” is Wharton’s name for drinking beer to relieve the effects of earlier drinking. Spoken as he pours a bottle kept under his bed, the proverb makes a comic, circular remedy into a compact portrait of his dependence on alcohol and his cheerfully resigned way of enduring hardship.

The phrase in context

Wharton teaches Philip Carey mathematics in a shabby room on the top floor of a house in Heidelberg. The room is dirty and untidy, filled with a pungent mixture of smells; Wharton is often still in bed when Philip arrives at ten in the morning. He jumps up, puts on a filthy dressing gown and felt slippers, and teaches while eating his simple breakfast.

Wharton has been in Germany for five years. He speaks scornfully of Cambridge and dreads returning to England for a pedagogic career after completing his doctorate at Heidelberg. By contrast, he admires the freedom and companionship of German university life, belongs to a Burschenschaft, and promises to take Philip to a Kneipe. His lessons are also a source of needed income: he does not hide that the money means the difference between meat for dinner and bread and cheese.

A remedy that repeats the cause

After a heavy night, Wharton sometimes has such a headache that he cannot drink his coffee. He keeps several bottles of beer under the bed for just such mornings, and pours one carefully so the foam will not delay him from drinking. Calling the beer “A hair of the dog that bit him,” he presents another drink as a cure for the consequences of drinking.

The proverb’s humor rests on its circularity: Wharton answers the discomfort produced by alcohol with more alcohol. The phrase is not an abstract maxim in this scene but an explanation attached to a recognizable routine—hangover, bottle, and immediate relief. Its lightness also sits beside the less comic details of his poverty and the precariousness of his academic prospects.

Characterization and narrative effect

Wharton’s easy use of the proverb gives his behavior a practiced, almost jaunty self-awareness. He neither disguises his drinking nor turns it into a solemn confession; the joke lets him name the habit while carrying on with the morning. His occasional acknowledgment that he and Philip have done no work, and that Philip need not pay for the lesson, reinforces the impression of an unconventional teacher whose ordinary struggles and humor enter the lessons alongside mathematics.

The expression therefore does more than explain a hangover remedy. It compresses the tension between Wharton’s attraction to a freer university life and the material limits of his circumstances, while making his drinking part of the texture of his daily existence. In Philip’s education, Wharton teaches more about life than mathematics, and this small, repeated ritual is one vivid instance of that informal education.