Bleak House and Spontaneous Human Combustion?🔥💀

Charles Dickens:
A Brain on Fire! 🔥

Charles Dickens' book 'Bleak House' is one of the 1001 books I'm told I must read before I die ... or spontaneously combust ... and I had never heard of the book until coming across the entry in my book '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die':-)

'1001 Books You Must Read 
Before You Die'

I'll pass on reading ... or even listening to it being read to me on a podcast reading, but I would have like to watch Gillian Anderson play Lady Deadlock in the 15-episode BBC series of the book -

"In 2005, the third Bleak House was broadcast in fifteen episodes starring Anna Maxwell Martin, Gillian Anderson, Denis Lawson, Charles Dance, and Carey Mulligan."

Bleak House TV Mini Series (2005)

"One character, Krook, smells of brimstone and eventually dies of spontaneous human combustion. This was highly controversial. The nineteenth century saw the increasing triumph of the scientific worldview. Scientifically inclined writers, as well as doctors and scientists, rejected spontaneous human combustion as legend or superstition. When the instalment of Bleak House containing Krook's demise appeared, the literary critic George Henry Lewes accused Dickens of "giving currency to a vulgar error". Dickens vigorously defended the reality of spontaneous human combustion and cited many documented cases, as well as his own memories of coroners' inquests that he had attended when he had been a reporter. In the preface of the book edition of Bleak House, Dickens wrote: "I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.""

Dickens on Screen:
with Andrew Davies

I think my temperature may go dangerously high if I ever watch Gillian in 'Bleak House':-)

"Welcome to Bleak House," a guided tour of Guillermo del Toro's "man cave" in Los Angeles, CA.

Dickens and Christmas: The Founder of the Feast? 🦃🍗🎄🍷🍟🍔🍻