When a character (literally) goes up in smoke
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
"I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!" Tony ends this with a groan.
In foggy, Victorian London, two young men, Tony and Mr Guppy, have entered the room of Mr Krook, who has mysteriously vanished. They are trying to understand how the old man, who was last seen in his room untying a packet of letters to read by the fire, could have disappeared without a trace. His cat's strange behaviour suggests that something very unsettling has just taken place....
Now read on:
Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man's hairy cap and coat.
"Look!" whispers the lodger, pointing his friend's attention to these objects with a trembling finger. "I told you so. When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair—his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up—and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor."
Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No.
"See!" whispers Tony. "At the foot of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it fall."
"What's the matter with the cat?" says Mr. Guppy. "Look at her!"
"Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place."
They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.
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 log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, 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 this house for heaven's sake! Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. 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.
What we love about this passage...
It is horrifying and ridiculous at the same time; both grisly and utterly silly. How could a person spontaneously combust?!
We also love the way Dickens leaves Krook's combustion entirely to our imagination, only depicting what remains after the event, not the event itself--and only seen through the eyes of two young men and a very disconcerted cat.
Almost as outrageous as the passage itself is the controversy it caused, as many readers objected to this wholly implausible episode. George Henry Lewes (literary critic and partner of George Eliot) led the charge, denouncing Dickens publicly and initiating a lengthy back-and-forth in the press between them.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the author of many best-sellers of the Victorian period including A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield. He pioneered the practice of serial publication, whereby a novel would first appear in monthly installments in a magazine, and would subsequently be published as a book. This helps to explain why his chapters tend to conclude with great suspense and drama, and why his novels often have highly complex plots and dozens of characters.
To read alongside...
The combination of an inexplicable death and a tell-tale cat invokes Edgar Allan Poe's gruesome mysteries.
This infamous moment from Bleak House also points to the shrewdness of Dickens in recognizing the popularity of parascientific and pseudoscientific phenomena at the time. Many respectable writers, politicians, and other leading figures attended seances, for example, to try to communicate with deceased family members. Other Victorian writers besides Dickens who incorporated such ideas and practices in their works include Charlotte Bronte, who has a scene in Jane Eyre in which Rochester dresses as a gypsy woman who tells fortunes and relies in part on phrenology; and George Eliot, whose novel The Lifted Veil explores telepathy and galvanism, with a mind-reading narrator and a climactic scene in which a dead woman is briefly brought back to life, just long enough to reveal the truth about her employer's murderous schemes.
Finally, a note from one of our regular curators, Dr Daniel Abdalla: 'Dickens was also an enthusiastic fan of the English scientist Michael Faraday, whose Christmas day lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain theatrically brought the science of the day to a diverse public audience. The lectures given in the years around Bleak House's publication featured topics such as coal, electricity, and (of course) the chemistry of combustion. After writing to Faraday to procure these lecture notes, Dickens adapted them for short stories like "The Chemistry of a Candle" in his weekly magazine, Household Words.'
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