I’m sitting alone in Girvan, Scotland, on one of the longest days of the year, looking at the late sun and thinking about the women who all of a sudden caught fire.
There were a good number of them. Enough, in the 1700s, to constitute a chapter in the medical literature. The most-quoted British case is Grace Pitt, a 60ish female whose charred corpse was discovered one morning in 1744—like “a log of wood, consumed by a fire.” But there was no fire in the grate. And nothing else in the room had been singed. Pitt was caught, it seemed, in a strange flame that came from within.
Until recently, I knew of spontaneous combustion only from Krook in Bleak House, whose demise seemed ridiculous to me before I picked up the novel and unblinkingly terrifying when I got to the passage in question. But the eerie little tradition that Dickens extends makes a man like Krook exceptional as well as late. (Bleak House began publication in 1852.) In the eighteenth century, those who burn are often as mysterious as Krook; many are poor; many are single or widowed; almost all are old. As Dickens himself wrote in a letter, however, the real-life cases were “all of women.”
How did combustion happen? Of course it didn’t. But one cause was reasonable enough: gin. A dissembling liquid— sometimes clear as water, sometimes cloudy with dubious flavors. The newest, most dangerous of the hard liquors. Those who drank too much soaked their very flesh and blood in its treachery. Fire was the just consequence.
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