I am a great fan of Charles Dickens, and one of my favourite books is Bleak House. However, I have always had a problem with Mr Dickens in that many of his stories revolve around improbable events.
In the Tale of Two Cities, the similarity in appearance between Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton was such that on two occasions the courts, (one English and one French) could not determine who was who. It led to the famous execution of Carton under the blade of Madame Guillotine. (It is a far far better thing …)
In Oliver Twist, Oliver is rescued by Mr Brownlow who was an old friend of his father. The list goes on. All his novels depend on similarly outlandish coincidences or unlikely events to make them work.
In Bleak House, one of the villains, Krook dies of spontaneous combustion something that Dickens believed could happen, but which some critics of the novel such as the English essayist George Henry Lewes denounced as outlandish and implausible. I shared such sentiments and have always felt that it greatly damaged the credibility of Dickens and his otherwise wonderful book.
So I was delighted to read this article. Maybe Dickens was right after all.
Boadicea's Chariot 
I believe that it has been demonstrated that in such cases there is always a wick effect, which can, over a period of time, cause a human body to burn. No need of any accelerant.
Hi Sheona, I remain skeptical, but I am glad to hear that the phenomenon, real or imagined, attracts some interest.
Delighted… at reading about the misfortune and pain, however bizarre, of another…? rednecks indeed 😉
To return to your original idea, Sipu, it is true that there are many unlikely coincidences in Dickens. During the “Three-day-week” in Britain I remember having to use a torch to find documents in the muniment rooms and I thought at the time that all these lack-of-recognition incidents in literature could indeed have been attributed to bad lighting and of course to poor eyesight. No electricians, no opticians.
Yes, well, it was not so much his death that delighted me as the coroner’s verdict. But I suspect you knew that.
Sheona, you may well have a point. I imagine that urban myths held even more currency than they do today. Most communication was via word of mouth rather than the written word or even public broadcast. Rumours evolved and spread fast and superstitions were rife. One should not lose sight of the fact that Dickens was writing for a wide public, in serial form, and thus faced the same commercial needs and constraints as those encountered by modern soap-writers.
Sheona – Wiki tells us –
So that wasn’t Dicken’s problem. 🙂
Sipu: I know. Sorry; I dislike gory inquests, that’s all.
I guess you are not a fan of such programs as Silent Witness or CSI, then?
Bearsy, I expect eyeglasses were not widely available for a long time after 1286. My comment was meant to cover literature in general, not just Dickens. I read somewhere that maidens gazing dewy-eyed at things was possibly because they couldn’t see properly. Bit tough if you thought you were being married off to that tall, dark, handsome knight and then discovered you were looking at a hat stand.
Sorry Sheona, but even bifocals were invented back in the 18th Century – Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention although there is some evidence that they were around earlier. He died in 1790.
Thank you for all the historical info, Bearsy. There was a generation, my mother’s, where the females objected to wearing spectacles. This was before contact lenses of course. It was all the “men never make passes at girls with glasses” stuff. The mother of a friend always screwed her eyes up to try to see. I felt that even the worst pair of specs could not look worse than that.
Nah! That’s a furphy. As the old saying goes –
“Men like to have sex
With girls who wear specs”
😆
Afternoon, Sipu. I read recently of a kidnapped rape victim who still had the presence of mind (having seen various CSI and Silent Witness type programmes) to leave some strands of her hair pushed down the back seat of her attacker’s car. She also spat on the seat, thus leaving DNA evidence that connected her to the car and secured a successful prosecution.
The only trouble is, apparently, that criminals also watch CSI and are more aware of forensic techniques.
OZ