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Spontaneous human combustion was such a well- known phenomenon during the late 18th and 19th centuries that a number of authors used it to dispose of some of their fictional characters.
In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, published in the mid-1800’s, Krook, an old, cadaverous, gin-soaked rag-and-bottle merchant, dies gruesomely of spontaneous combustion. Krook was a symbol for all the social evils and inequities then rampant in England, and through his horrible death Dickens prophesied the self-destruction of“all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretenses are made, and where injustice is done.” The chapter depicting Krook's demise concluded:
Call the death by any name [you] 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.
An illustration from Dickens's Bleak House shows William Guppy and a friend as they arrive at Krook's house only to find he had combusted. Nothing of him remained.
When this installment of the serialized Bleak House appeared, the literary critic George Henry Lewes severely chided his old friend Dickens for perpetuating what he felt to be a vulgar and unscientific superstition. But Dickens vigorously defended the reality of spontaneous combustion, citing many documented cases, including those of Mme. Millet of Rheims and of the Countess di Bandi as well as his own memories of inquests he attended when he was still a young reporter. Later, when Bleak House was reissued in a single volume, Dickens continued to defend the authenticity of spontaneous human combustion in his foreword:
I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.
The earliest literary account of spontaneous combustion is from the 1798 novel Wieland, written by Americas first novelist and master of the gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. The main character is a German pietist who observes the mysterious solitary rites of his religion in a tumbledown wooden shack he calls his chapel. One night his wife is startled by a bright light that bursts above the chapel and by a “loud report, like the explosion of a mine.” She hears horrible shrieks, but by the time she gets to the shack, the light and cries have died away. She finds Wieland “insensible,” his clothing in cinders, his body frightfully burned, but the chapel unharmed. The wretched man dies after terrible suffering:
... the disease ... betrayed more terrible symptoms. Fever and delirium terminated in lethargic slumber.... Yet not until insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction had driven from his chamber and the house everyone whom their duty did not detain.
In Frederick Marryat’s 1834 novel Jacob Faithful, the hero’s mother is a victim of spontaneous combustion. In his account Marryat closely followed the details of an 1832 case reported in London. Jacob enters his parents’ cabin aboard a barge on the Thames:
The lamp fixed against the after bulkhead, with a glass before it, was still alight, and I could see plainly to every corner of the cabin. Nothing was burning—not even the curtains to my mother’s bed appeared to be singed ... there appeared to be a black mass in the middle of the bed. I put my hand fearfully upon it — it was a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder. I screamed with horror.... I staggered from the cabin, and fell down on the deck in a state amounting to almost insanity.... She perished from what is called spontaneous combustion, and inflammation of the gases generated from the spirits absorbed into the system.
In Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) there is a regretful mention of the death of a blacksmith combined with relief that the smithy itself had not burned:
He caught fire himself. Something inside him caught fire. Must have had too much to drink. Only a blue flame came out of him, and he smoldered, smoldered, and turned as black as coal. And he was such a clever blacksmith....
Nikolai Gogol is famous for his social commentary, in which he ridiculed Russian society and officials. Dead Souls, one of his greatest works, contains an episode in
which a man catches on fire. Gogol hypothesized that the flames, presumably induced by alcohol, were the just reward of drunkenness.
Herman Melville, too, used the device. In Redburn (1849), Miguel, a shanghaied sailor, is found on deck in a stupor, drunk and stinking. As the rest of the horrified crew look on, ...two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips and in a moment, the cadaverous face was covered by a swarm of worms like flames ... the uncovered body burned before us, precisely like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea.
Herman Melville's Redburn is based upon his first experience at sea as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool. Could it be that he had witnessed an incidence of spontaneous combustion?
And Thomas de Quincey, in the 1856 revised edition of Confessions of an English Opium - Eater, included as one of the ''Pains of Opium'' the fear that the narcotic, like alcohol, might result in spontaneous combustion and that he might himself take leave of the literary world in that fashion.
The mysterious fiery death was also used by Mark Twain in his Life on the Mississippi (1883):
Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die.
Finally, in Emile Zola's 1893 novel, Le Docteur Pascal, one of the members of the degenerate Macquart family catches fire from the smoldering tobacco of his pipe while he sits in a drunken stupor, as his sister watches with horror:
At first Felicite thought that it was his linen, his underpants or his vest, which was burning. But, there was no doubt about it, it was his flesh, burning with a flickering blue flame, light, dancing, like a flame spreading over the surface of a bowl of alcohol... it was growing, spreading rapidly and the skin was splitting and the fat beginning to melt.... Now the liquid fat was dribbling through the cracks in his skin, feeding the flame which was spreading to his belly. And Felicite realized that he was burning up, like a sponge soaked in alcohol.
Emile Zola, leader of French literatures' naturalist school, emphasized in many of his works the influence of heredity on the individual. In Le Docteur Pascal, one of 20 novels in his famous series, Les Rougon-Macquart, he graphically portrayed the death of Antoine Macquart, who burst into flames while in a drunken sleep.
#combustion #humancombustion #spontanehumancombustion #charlesdicken #bleakhouse #HermanMelville #emilezola #LeDocteurPascal #PainsofOpium #ThomasdeQuincey #NikolaiGogol
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