Trial by Fire: Dickens, Drink and Spontaneous Combustion

Chris Willis

(Birkbeck College, University of London)

One of the strangest deaths in Victorian fiction is that of Krook in Dickens' Bleak House. Calling at Krook's home late once night, his two visitors become aware of a strange burning smell accompanied by "a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling."

"Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is - is it the cinder of a small charred and broken leg of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.

Help, help, help! come into the house for Heaven's sake!

Plenty will come in but none can help ... Call the death by any name. Your Highness will attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally - inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only - Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died."(1)

Not surprisingly, some of Dickens' readers found this a little hard to swallow. GH Lewes, took Dickens to task in his weekly journal The Leader, complaining that Krook's death was a scientific impossibility: "it is a fault in Art and a fault in Literature, overstepping the limits of Fiction and giving currency to a vulgar error."(2)

Dickens rose to the challenge. Bleak House was then being published as a serial and the next instalment was already in the press. Dickens added a paragraph to the next chapter at proof stage, citing various supposedly scientific sources for the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, and satirising Lewes' scepticism. At the inquest into Krook's death:

"Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) held with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths, reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown, on English Medical jurisprudences; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini ... and also of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who would investigate the subject; and further of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon ... Still they regard the late Mr. Krook's obstinacy, in going-out of the world by any such by-way, as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive."(3)

Scholars have established the authenticity of Dickens' sources (4), which come from nineteenth century scientific writings. The first reported case of spontaneous human combustion occurred in 1662, and by Dickens' time over 30 cases had been documented (5). Spontaneous combustion was widely debated in the press of the time, much in the way that alien abduction or false memory syndrome are debated in today's press, and many reputable scientists believed wholeheartedly in the phenomenon. The 1833 Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine included an eight-page section on the subject by a professor of chemistry. In 1845 the popular Penny Cyclopedia carried a long piece on spontaneous combustion which argued that cases

"have been constantly put on record, and although often misrepresented by superstition and ignorance, the evidence of such a combustion of the human body is admitted as perfectly satisfactory by the best writers on medical jurisprudence of the present day."(6)

Behind such supposedly scientific accounts lurked a strong moral agenda. In many supposedly objective scientific accounts, spontaneous combustion is seen as the result of over-indulgence in alcohol. According to the Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, "this condition is ... often promoted by the dispersion throughout the system of alcoholic vapours"(7). Dickens relies heavily on this belief. Krook is a habitual drunkard who has "drunk himself blind" on the night he dies(8).

Most of Dickens' authorities are taken from a chapter on "Spontaneous Combustion of Drunkards" in Robert Macnish's The Anatomy of Drunkenness. Macnish held that drunks were particularly liable to spontaneously combust because of the build-up of inflammable alcohol in their bodies. Dickens' other source, the Philosophical Transactions, attempted to account for the mysterious death of Contessa Cornelia Zangari ne' Bandi by claiming that flammable gases from the wines and spirits she had taken had caused her to spontaneously combust. In such cases, it was believed that it would only take a spark (possibly produced by the body's own electricity) to set the body ablaze. Modern physiologists dismiss such ideas as ridiculous. As John West points out,

"For the physiologist of today, the remarkable thing is that there was so much earnest discussion of the preposterous notion that spontaneous combustion could occur, no matter how many bottles of gin had been imbibed. The greenest medical student would be able to calculate that the concentration of alcohol in the body was infinestimally low."(9)

However, spontaneous combustion of drunkards had taken a firm hold in the popular imagination. Other writers before Dickens had portrayed spontaneous combustion as a punishment for alcoholism. The narrator of Frederick Marryat's 1834 novel Jacob Faithful recounts that his mother

"perished in that very peculiar and dreadful manner, which does sometimes, although rarely, occur to those who indulge in an immoderate use of spirituous liquors ... She perished from what is termed spontaneous combustion, an inflammation of the gases generated from the spirits absorbed into the system"(10)

Herman Melville recounted a similar incident in Redburn (1849) in which a drunken sailor spontaneously combusts in front of his horrified shipmates.

Such incidents fitted neatly with Victorian Christian ideas of divine retribution. Christian temperance campaigners preached the evils of drink, urging people to sign a pledge of total abstention from alcohol. In a theology which held that the fires of hell were a punishment for evildoers, death by fire was a frequent form of divine retribution for sin. In the Bible, the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by fire from heaven (11) The righteous, however, are able to survive fire. The prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a chariot of fire (12) and, as every Sunday School child knows, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged unscathed from the flames of a furnace(13). These stories would have been familiar to Dickens' readers at a time when belief in the literal truth of the Bible was widespread, and the fires of hell were perceived as a very real threat.

Dickens counterpoints Krook's death by putting another character through a trial by fire. Esther Summerson, the insufferably pious Christian narrator of large sections of the novel, is stricken with smallpox at the time of Krook's death. In a raging fever, she hallucinates that she is on fire:

"Strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads"(14).

Unlike Krook, Esther survives her fiery ordeal, living to preach Christian morality to the reader at every opportunity. Her illness is convincing to the reader: Krook's death is less so. However, Dickens was certainly not at fault in giving further credence to a widely-held belief of the time. In his preface to a later edition of Bleak House, he emphasised that he did not "wilfully or negligently mislead [his] readers" and would not abandon his belief in the "fact" of spontaneous combustion "until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion" of the evidence (15).

Footnotes:

1) Charles Dickens: Bleak House (1852-3), Chapter 32

2) The Leader, 11 December 1852

3) Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Chapter 33

4) see e.g. Trevor Blount: "Dickens and Mr Krook's Spontaneous Combustion" Dickens Studies Annual 1, 1970, pp 183-211; Peter Denman: "Krook's Death and Dickens's Authorities" The Dickensian, 82 (1986), pp 130-141; E. Gaskell: "More About Spontaneous Combustion" The Dickensian, 69, 1973, pp 25-35;

5) Guy MP Coates: "Spontaneous Human Combustion" http://www.urbanlegends.com/

6) quoted Gaskell, pp 46-47

7) quoted Gaskell, p 46

8) Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Chapter 32

9) John B West: "Krook's Death by Spontaneous Combustion and the Controversy between Dickens and Lewes: A Physiologist's View" The Dickensian, 90, 1994, pp 125-129

10) Frederick Marryat: Jacob Faithful, quoted George Perkins: "Death by Spontaneous Combustion in Marryat, Melville, Dickens, Zola and Others" The Dickensian, 60, 1964, p 58

11) Genesis 19, 24

12) 2 Kings 2, 11

13) Daniel 2, 19-27

14) Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Chapter 35

15) Charles Dickens: Preface to first one-volume edition of Bleak House

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