ABSTRACT
Lewes had protested in the Leader (11 December 1852, 1189) against Dickens’s killing off Krook by Spontaneous Combustion (ch. xxxii, in No. X, published that month), and thus giving currency to an unscientific theory. In No. XI, Dickens replied to Lewes, with heavy irony about the ‘men of science and philosophy’ who held that ‘the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner’ (ch. xxxiii). Lewes came back at him in the Leader (15 January, 64; 5 February, 137–8; 12 February, 161–3), and there was also an exchange of private letters between him and Dickens, who firmly maintained the scientific feasibility of this cause of death. Dickens reverted to the controversy, unrepentant, in the Preface. See Gordon S. Haight, ‘Dickens and Lewes on Spontaneous Combustion’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, x (1955), 53–63.
