Entropy of Sense Perception and the Issue of Observation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: The Strange Case of Spontaneous Human Combustion

Abstract

This paper deals with the narrative treatment of the naturally impossible phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). Taking the popularity of scientific issues such as the sudden exchange of heat energy and notions of entropy in Dickens’s own life time as a point of departure, it traces and seeks to explain an extraordinary visual bias in Dickens’s approach to the matter of SHC, which seems in disaccord with (allegedly) accurate reports of such deaths where an eye witness is almost never present. While Dickens’s well-known statement of his belief in the real possibility of SHC is read as an attempt to forestall criticism of his idiosyncratically constructed notion of reality, the narrative procedure he adopted is discussed as a captivating rhetoric of visual as well as physical proximity and distance, and related to the most persistent metaphor of Bleak House : that of impaired and distorted, entropic vision.