10 KNOWING DICKENS
In a long letter to Lewes of 25 February 1853, he claimed to know every-
thing about the scientific views, but insisted that the numerous practical
accounts of the phenomenon—and he cited many more—took precedence
in his opinion. He made it clear that he had resented Lewes’s assumption
that “I knew nothing at all about the question—had no kind of sense of my
responsibility—and had taken no trouble to discriminate between truth and
falsehood.” Once he had had the idea for Krook’s death, he assured Lewes,
he had consulted numerous books to verify the truth. While Lewes’s argu-
ments were “ingenious,” Dickens was right to believe “testimony” rather
than “hypothetical explanation of the fact.” Two days later he wrote again,
trying to undo what he had clearly intended as a rebuke to Lewes for writ-
ing “not quite, I think in all good humour, with that consideration which
your knowledge of me might have justified” (7.28–31). He had realized that
Lewes retained the power to undermine him, and urged him not to publish
their correspondence: “I would infinitely rather be unheard in this regard”
(7.33). Lewes, for once as stubborn as Dickens himself, did so anyway.
The truth was that spontaneous combustion was just the metaphor Dick-
ens needed to express the quality of his death wish for the Court of Chancery
and British institutions in general. Had Lewes not gotten under Dickens’s skin
with a public questioning of his knowledge and his responsibility to readers,
Dickens might simply have appealed to his art as he had done fourteen years
earlier. Both Dickens and Lewes had experienced condescension from men
who rested secure in their classical educations; in this case they managed to act
out their sensitivities by sparring with each other about incomparable forms
of knowledge. Dickens was wrong about spontaneous combustion and his
sources were long out of date; yet he turned the controversy into a defense
of witnessed experience against scientific theory. Someone had believed it;
therefore it was worthy of belief, at least in an allegorical sense.
When it came to spiritualism, Dickens’s position appeared to be just the
reverse: he refused to believe that people could communicate with the dead
through séances, or that ghost sightings were plausible. In February 1848 he
reviewed Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost
Seers in John Forster’s paper The Examiner (Dent 2.80–91). Putting on his
best rational style, Dickens argued that experiences attributed to connec-
tions between the human and spiritual worlds could be explained by mental
delusions or illnesses in the human frame itself. His favorite state between
sleeping and waking now appears as an unreliable condition that encourages
ghost fantasies; the belief that the dead return is very sensibly explained as
an effect of “the universal mystery surrounding universal death” (84). He
makes fun of “the Doppelgänger, or Double, or Fetch” as a fantasy peculiar to