The proverbial saying ‘adversity makes strange bedfellows’ suggests that, in times of trouble, people who wouldn’t normally associate with each other may form an alliance.

For the origin of ‘adversity makes strange bedfellows’ we need to call on some literary heavyweights. The first writer to record anything close to this expression was Shakespeare, in The Tempest, 1611:

My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

Adversity makes strange bedfellowsThat’s close but not quite a cigar. For the precise proverb as it is now used we need to wait for Charles Dickens, in The Pickwick Papers, 1837:

Illustrative, like the preceding one, of the old proverb, that adversity brings a man acquainted with strange bedfellows.