Recap - Bodily Fire

Simon's marvellous evocation of the spontaneous combustion scene in Bleak House, as photographed by Charissa.

Thankfully the signs were reassuring as we entered the Newnham Grange Seminar Room for the third meeting of term: no smoke, little soot, a lack of greasy residue, and only the smallest heaps of ash. Despite the subject-matter of our selected readings, we could be fairly sure that no spontaneous combustion had occurred. Thus emboldened, and joined by some two-dimensional Dickensian colleagues, we embarked on a lively (and largely politics-free…) debate on the fact, fiction, history, and mystery, of this strange manifestation of bodily fire.

Charissa introduced the chosen extracts from the Philosophical Transactions, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, and Bleak House, detailing the specific connections they drew upon: medicine and chemistry; science and the law; certain kinds of people and particularly fiery fates. These lines of approach opened up rewarding topics of discussion, from the set of clues or symptoms (see Huxley's 'Method of Zadig') of spontaneous human combustion, to varying explanations for its supposed occurrence, internal and external (lightning, gin, internal gases?), to whether or not a realist novel had to include realistic science.

An evocative reading by Simon of the opening pages of Bleak House reminded us of the atmosphere and wider preoccupations of the work, including its general preoccupation with combustion, energy and entropy (for more on this, see Barri Gold's Thermopoetics), driving the engine of its plot. This led us on to a perennial topic of interest for the group: the role of models, analogies, and lived experiences more generally in scientific writings and conceptualisations.

Expertise was another key area of interest: Liebig's setting-up of hierarchies in his piece of chemical (and chemists') advocacy, and his connections to training a generation of research chemists; how links to industry, agriculture, and the state, helped affirm the role of the scientific expert. We thought about the relationships between scientific experts and the public (would people no longer send in 'curious observations' directly to the Royal Society?), between scientific experts and expert witnesses (are mathematicians no longer permitted as expert witnesses?)

We discussed how different this type of fire was, compared with its incarnations in our earlier sessions: no longer as pure, generative, creative, as in Heraclitus, nor as subtle as in Barrett and Tyndall; however, in its associations with fate ('The Appointed Time') and hell-fire it retained a spiritualised or divine element. Finally, we also thought about the more recent examples of 'SHC', as it has become known; its occurrence in recent sci-fi and fantasy works, including Buffy, X-Files, and Red Dwarf, and whether it is now more usually found in the province of conspiracy theorists than serious scientific enquiry. But the question remains: is spontaneous human combustion impossible, or just very very improbable?

Thanks, as ever, to all who contributed to a particularly enjoyable evening!