Charles Dickens and Human Spontaneous Combustion

 

  

   I find it interesting that Charles Dickens, the beloved writer who gave us A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol, would be in the proverbial hot seat with his 1852 serialized novel Bleak House. The reason for this isn’t due to his satire of the legal system and the conflicting of wills, but that of spontaneous human combustion. Perhaps, it’s been a few years, or decades, since you read it, or maybe you’ve never read this author’s work, and for this, I give you the small snippet that started the ruckus.

The first thing they noticed was the smell—like someone frying rancid meat. The two men sat in their flat in central London, awaiting their midnight appointment with the old, alcoholic Mr. Krook, who lived downstairs. As they chatted uneasily, ominous sights and smells kept distracting them. Black soot swirled through the room. A pungent yellow grease stained the windowsill. And that smell!

At last, after midnight, they descended the stairs. Mr. Krook’s shop—crammed with dirty rags, bottles, bones, and other hoarded trash—was unpleasant even in daytime. But tonight, they sensed something positively evil. Outside Krook’s bedroom near the back of the shop, a cat leaped out and snarled. When they entered Krook’s room, the odor choked them. Grease stained the walls and ceiling as if it were painted on. Krook’s coat and cap lay on a chair; a bottle of gin sat on the table. But the only sign of life was the cat, still hissing. The men swung their lantern around, looking for Krook, who was nowhere to be seen.

Then they saw the pile of ash on the floor. They stared for a moment, before turning and running. They burst onto the street, shouting for help. But it was too late: Old Krook was gone, a victim of spontaneous combustion.

   Dickens wrote about many physical ailments, such as smallpox, and penned them in a scientific way so most of his readers took the story as scientific fact. At this time in the scientific field Michael Faraday was conducting his experiments in electromagnetism and electrochemistry, and many scientists were looking at things such as mesmerism, clairvoyance, and ghosts. William Crookes, who is known in my circle as one of the first paranormal investigators, had discovered the element thallium as well as helium. And one scientific mind took on the idea of spontaneous combustion as noted in Dickens’ tale, George Lewes.

   George Lewes, who was an English philosopher as well as a literature critic, was also an amateur physiologist. Even though Lewes was a friend of Charles Dickens he felt he needed to put in his two cents. Lewes wrote in a well-known newspaper at the time, The Leader, that Dickens was obviously bending the truth and that, “The[se] circumstances are beyond the limits of acceptable fiction,” he wrote, “and give credence to a scientific impossibility.” He accused Dickens of cheap sensationalism and “of giving currency to a vulgar error.”

   This became a series of both public and private letters of debate whether the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion was real. Dickens in a private letter told of an Italian countess in 1731 who died of spontaneous combustion. The countess had bathed in camphorated spirits of wine (a mixture of brandy and camphor) and the next morning her maid found the countess’ legs, just her legs, near a pile of ash and a charred skull. Nothing else seemed amiss, except for two melted candles nearby. A priest transcribed the story and so Dickens took it as fact. Lewes thought that all the stories that Dickens gave to back his own story up was “humorous, but not convincing.”

   Most of Dickens’ accounts involved alcohol in the system. Lewes retorted by giving data to show recent experiments that revealed how the liver metabolized alcohol, breaking it down for elimination, and Lewes pointed out that the human body is roughly 75 percent water, so it could not catch fire by itself. Their disagreement would continue for 10 months, while Bleak House was being serialized, eventually Lewes and Dickens made up and continued to be good friends.

   

There are those today who still believe in the possibility of human combustion. Others believe that an external agent, such as candles or cigarettes, is the real culprit that leads to the premature cremation of a person.  History and modern science tell us that Lewes was the winner. No human body has been the victim of spontaneous combustion, except of course in the tabloids.