The (in)credulity of English writers

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.

Conan Doyle’s mistake

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous as the author of the character Sherlock Holmes, the detective who relies on logic to solve the most abstruse cases, as in the famous quote from the story The adventure of the blanched soldier, included in the collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes:

When you have eliminated all that is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Apart from his mystery books, one of his science fiction novels is also very well known: The Lost World, published in 1912, whose protagonist is Professor Challenger, an unbearable scientist, who also appears in other stories by Doyle. This is the plot of The Lost World:

A group of explorers manages to reach an almost inaccessible mesa, lost in the Amazon rainforest, so isolated that dinosaurs and other extinct animals survive there, as well as two races of humans or primitive pre-humans (Pithecanthropus and Homo sapiens). After they manage to escape and return to England, Challenger gives a lecture about his findings, which nobody takes seriously until he exhibits a specimen of Pterosaur that he managed to take from the mesa in the form of an egg, later incubated.