“The whole court, adult as well as boy, is sleep­less for the night, and can do noth­ing but wrap up its many heads, and talk of the ill-​fated house, and look at it. Miss Flite has been bravely res­cued from her cham­ber, as if it were in flames, and accom­mo­dated with a bed at the Sol’s Arms. The Sol nei­ther turns off its gas nor shuts its door all night, for any kind of excite­ment makes good for the Sol and causes the court to stand in need of com­fort. The house has not done so much in in the stom­achic arti­cle of cloves of in brandy-and-water warm since the inquest.”

The author is Dick­ens, the novel is Bleak House, the chap­ter is the thirty-​third. The pas­sage above comes a page after the dis­cov­ery, by Guppy and Weevle, that Mr. Krook, the keeper of a rag-and-bottle shop near the Chancery Court, has died by spon­ta­neous combustion.

Read­ing it, as when read­ing the pas­sage that describes the scene of Krook’s death—”here is a small burnt patch of floor­ing; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper…and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprin­kled with white ashes, or is it coal?”—you can’t help but laugh that laugh of his­tor­i­cal con­de­scen­sion that you know is a bad intel­lec­tual habit but which some­times, well, his­tory itself just comes beg­ging for.

Bleak House’s pref­ace, which takes on con­tem­po­rary skep­tics of spon­ta­neous com­bus­tion, doesn’t help the temp­ta­tion any. You want Dick­ens to be pulling your chain when he cites the “famous” case of the Count­ess Cor­nelia de Baudi Cese­n­ate, which was “minutely inves­ti­gated and described by Giuseppe Bian­chini, a prebendary of Verona, oth­er­wise dis­tin­guished in let­ters”; or the case in Rheims described by the sur­geon Le Cat; or the case of the German in Colum­bus, Ohio “who kept a liquor-​shop and was an invet­er­ate drunk­ard.” But you know Dick­ens isn’t joking; in fact he’s as seri­ous as Keanu Reeves, and just as silly.

So you put it behind you and return to this mag­nif­i­cent art­work wherein the author has “pur­posely dwelt upon the roman­tic side of famil­iar things,” mut­ter­ing, per­haps, as you go: “Spontaneous com­bus­tion, huh, well, at least there’s one thing Obama won’t have to break a cam­paign promise about.” And a few pages in, you sud­denly remem­ber a few unro­man­tic but all-too-familiar things, and you wonder, who’s laugh­ing now?