User:Envylivion/Spontaneous human combustion

In popular culture

 * Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale features the death of the Wieland family's patriarch via spontaneous human combustion during prayer within his property’s temple. 
 * In the novel Redburn by Herman Melville published in 1849, a sailor, Miguel Saveda, is consumed by "animal combustion" while in a drunken stupor on the return voyage from Liverpool to New York.
 * In the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, the character Mr. Krook dies of spontaneous combustion at the end of Part X. Dickens researched the details of a number of contemporary accounts of spontaneous human combustion before writing that part of the novel and, after receiving criticism from a scientist friend suggesting he was perpetuating a "vulgar error", cites some of these cases in Part XI and again in the preface to the one-volume edition. The death of Mr. Krook has been described as "the most famous case in literature" of spontaneous human combustion.