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| Charles Dickens |
I am going to talk about three famous English writers, and their answers towards the pseudoscience of the time. One of them lived in the middle of the 19th century, another halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, and practically all the work of the third was written in the 20th century.
Charles Dickens: His
brush with pseudoscience appears in one of his best works (in my opinion the
best): Bleak House. One of the
characters, called Krook (who is really a crook), dies of spontaneous combustion.
The idea that the human body can ignite spontaneously arose from a series of anecdotal cases of people, often alcoholics, burning to death under dubious circumstances. Some argued that ingested alcohol could ignite spontaneously within the body, even though doctors claimed that the amount of alcohol needed to do so would have to be so large that the person would have died of alcohol poisoning long before igniting.
In an
article published in The Skeptical Inquirer,
Joe Nickell and John Fisher compiled information about a number of
historical cases of alleged spontaneous combustion and concluded
that in all of them a physical cause caused the combustion (a candle, a cigarette
or being too near the fireplace), the accident was caused in a typical way (such
as the inflammation of the victim’s clothing) and the duration of the
conflagration (sometimes many hours) was compatible with its final result.
Consequently, the phenomenon of
spontaneous combustion in humans probably does not exist, and Charles Dickens
was carried away by a popular belief without scientific basis. In this case he
was too gullible.
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| Arthur Conan Doyle |
Arthur Conan Doyle: He is famous for his character, the detective Sherlock Holmes, who has become the paradigm of criminal investigation. However, he later came to believe in the reality of spiritualism.
Apart from his Holmes-related works, he
wrote three science-fiction stories featuring Professor Challenger. The first
and most famous is The Lost World,
to which I dedicated a post
in this blog, which has been adapted to the movies and led to many imitations,
one of which, by Michael Crichton, has the same title as Conan Doyle’s novel.
In Professor Challenger’s third novel, The Land
of Mist, this character has converted (like its author) to the belief
in spiritualism, which he hails as about to succeed, as the science of
immediate future. And this, even though one of Conan Doyle’s favorite mediums
was caught cheating, which made the writer assert (the same as the medium) that cheating had been used only in that performance, while all the others were genuine.
While three of Conan Doyle’s novels are
among my favorites (The Lost World, The Hound of the Baskervilles,
and The Sign of Four), The Land of
Mist is, in my opinion, the worst of his works. And his credulity
regarding spiritualism seems to me unseemly for the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
Gilbert Keith Chesterton:
Unlike the two previous writers, Chesterton is famous for his incredulity, personified
in his best-known character, Father Brown. In one of his detective stories (The Miracle of Moon Crescent), the detective
priest says the following:
It is true enough that I believe in many things that you probably
don’t... I believe in miracles. I believe in man-eating tigers, but I don't see
them running about everywhere. If I want any miracles, I know where to get them...
But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these
things, these things really were only natural things.
The mere fact that Father Brown is a
Catholic priest makes criminals think that he will believe anything seemingly
supernatural that they put on his way. But what happens is precisely the opposite.
Hence the title of the collection of stories: The
incredulity of Father Brown.
Perhaps Chesterton took his incredulity too
far, for he had difficulties to accept the scientific nature of evolution.
Thematic Thread about Literature and Cinema: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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