Anna Castle has won a copy of Ten for Dying by Mary Reed. Congrats to Anna Castle!
Thanks to Mary Reed for the interesting look at spontaneous combustion. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes back Mary Reed. She and Eric Mayer contributed several stories to mystery anthologies and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine prior to 1999’s One For Sorrow, the first novel about their protagonist John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian I. Ten for Dying, the latest entry in a series Booklist Magazine named as one of its “Four Best Little Known Series,” will be published in March 2014 by Poisoned Pen Press. Find out more about the authors on their web site.
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As Two for Joy opens, our protagonist Lord Chamberlain John sees a remarkable sight during a thunderstorm in Constantinople: a stylite, one of those holy men who spend their lives perched atop a column, bursts into flames.
Argument about the cause of spontaneous human combustion has raged in scientific publications and the public prints for at least the past couple of centuries. In Familiar Letters On Chemistry, In its Relations To Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy (1861), Justus Liebig observed with some irritation that a cause not understood is used to explain an occurrence also not understood, the theory being disease causes accumulation of combustible gas in cellular tissue which “when kindled by an external cause, by a flame, or by the electric spark, effects the combustion of the body.”
Another “electric spark” theory was earlier advanced by F. J. A. Strubel in an 1848 work, The Spontaneous Combustion of the Human Body, With Especial Reference to its Medico-legal Significance, which speculates if electricity is accumulated in the body and subsequently discharged, spontaneous combustion may occur.
J. G. Millingen’s Curiosities of Medical Experience (1839) covers several of the better known cases, among them a priest whereby circumstances “…would seem to warrant the conclusion that the electric fluid was the chief agent in the combustion.” Millingen mentions hydrogen gas, which one expert notes can develop in those who suffer certain diseases, with combustion resulting from a uniting of hydrogen and electricity, presumably meaning static electricity as sometimes occurs when we disrobe.
Tipplers beware!
A remarkable letter to the editor from one A. Booth of Colchester in the September 15, 1832 issue of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction links drinking to spontaneous combustion via witchcraft.
Citing the 1744 case of Grace Pitt, an Ipswich fishmonger’s wife, Booth states Grace was said to be a witch, adding it was well-known witchcraft could only destroy certain parts of bodies and some members could be protected against such spells. That Grace’s hands and feet were not consumed when she caught fire was attributed by country people to just such a spell—did he mean dueling witches were involved? He further opines old ladies said to be witches were so-called from “…their excessive devotion to spirituous liquors, which…[in every case has] been found to predispose to spontaneous combustion…”
An unsigned article on Temperance and Teetotal Societies in the April 1853 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine relates John Anderson, a carrier, was found burnt to death in a roadside field. He was last seen in an extremely intoxicated state smoking a pipe. It is conjectured a spark from his pipe ignited alcohol fumes from his drinking and thus combustion occurred.
A letter in the October 6, 1832 issue of the same magazine from W.A.R. of St Pancras, London, argues calling such cases spontaneous is incorrect, mentioning Pierre Aimee Laire’s Essay on Human Consumption from the Abuse of Spirituous Liquors, which states such cases occur when an imbibing individual’s breath came into contact with a flame. W.A.R’s theory is since Grace enjoyed an evening pipe and having lately consumed spirits, while lighting her pipe her breath caught fire and set fire to her spirit impregnated body.
The connection between death by burning and drinking, leading to carelessness with lamps and so forth, is so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning, but what about someone known to eschew all spirituous liquors? The insinuation given is the victim was probably a secret tippler.
Used as defense in murder trial
In possibly the most inventive pleading heard in a criminal case, spontaneous combustion was advanced as causing the death of a countess in June 1847. A household servant eventually confessed to strangling her when discovered stealing her jewels, surrounding her with inflammable material, and setting it alight. Convicted of robbery, murder, and arson, he later obtained a free pardon—on condition he emigrated to America, according to Sabine Baring-Gould’s Historic Oddities and Strange Events (1889).
An anonymous article in the April 1861 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine points out actual evidence of the phenomenon was not known because all cases occurred when the person was alone and therefore nobody could know what had happened. However, attempts to explain the phenomenon continue.
The debate continues
In 2012 Professor Brian J. Ford of Cambridge University suggested acetone as a feasible cause of spontaneous combustion. It seems under some conditions such as diabetes, alcoholism, certain diets, or teething, the body creates the highly inflammable substance. He reports acetone-soaked pork tissue was used to make scale models of humans that were dressed and set alight, being reduced to ashes within thirty minutes.
Another explanation was advanced by Dr Matthew Ponting of the University of Liverpool in a TV documentary last year. He investigated Tutankhamun’s mummification, and it appears those carrying out the process did not follow the correct procedure or else made a mistake. Examination of the pharaoh’s skin under a scanning electron microscope showed carbonization, thought to be the result of a combination of oxygen, the linen used in the process, and embalming oils. As a result, he said, Tutankhamun’s body appears to have “cooked” soon after it was mummified.
Moving from science and crime to spontaneous human combustion as a plot device, the best known instance is the fiery death of the tippler Krook, collector of rags, papers, etc., as described in Dickens’ Bleak House. Given our stylite was unlikely to be drinking spirituous liquors, we provided a different explanation for his terrible death in keeping with the limitations of the era.
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A big thanks to Mary Reed. She’ll give away a .pdf copy of Ten for Dying to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET.
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JJ Toner has won a copy of The Long Shadow by Loretta Proctor. Congrats to JJ Toner!
Thanks to Loretta Proctor for the sad story about Victorian artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History last week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
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Lynn Demsky, Mary Ann, and M.E. Kemp have won copies of The Executioner’s Heir by Susanne Alleyn. Congrats to all!
Note: For a limited time, The Executioner’s Heir is available for only 99 cents. Look for it in Kindle format, or for other formats, use the code “YB49W” at Smashwords. Hurry. This offer expires within a few days!
Thanks to Susanne Alleyn for a look inside the souls of historical executioners. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
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Read Part 1 of Susanne Alleyn’s post here.
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In the midst of the Terror in 1794, why, consumed by guilt, didn’t executioner Charles-Henri Sanson simply quit his job and honorably retire, as he did do a year later, well after the Terror had ended?
The easy answer was that, as he himself seemed to believe, he had grown hardened to horrors by decades in the profession—or that if he had given up his title, he would have found no other work or income elsewhere. And during the Terror, the revolutionary government found it all too convenient to “forget” to pay a civil servant who had no choice but to stay in his job. If Sanson had quit, he would have had neither a job nor any hopes of reclaiming his back pay.
But I felt that the answer was not that easy. The honorable and conscientious Charles Sanson I had come to know through his diary and through others’ opinions of him—the Charles Sanson whose obvious shame and self-loathing during the worst of the Terror was making him physically ill—would have been guided by something far more than a desire to recover his back wages.
I had already often considered these issues when I read British hangman Albert Pierrepoint’s autobiography and discovered statements in it that explained his own attitude toward his role in the twentieth-century British system of capital punishment. The British prided themselves on making judicial hanging a decorous, humane, quite painless procedure, streamlined to reduce the duration of the actual process—from condemned cell to noose and drop—to no more than twenty seconds. Pierrepoint took this swift process to its height, usually managing to trim the time down to eight or ten seconds while offering a reassuring word or two, if necessary, to the prisoner. To Pierrepoint, his hangman’s craft was about professional detachment and expertise, always “getting it right” and getting it over with quickly so that the victim didn’t suffer mentally or physically—and this attitude, he stated, was always combined with respect toward the victim, even after death.
Albert Pierrepoint, probably 1950s
“As the executioner,” Pierrepoint wrote, “it has fallen to me to make the last confrontation with all the condemned. . . . And it is at that moment, with their eyes on mine . . . that I have known that any previous emotional involvement I may have had with them [from reading about the criminal case in the newspapers] is to be regretted. There is only a final relationship which matters: in Christianity this is my brother or sister to whom something dreadful must be done, and I have tried always to be gentle with them, and to give them what dignity I could in their death.”
Later in his autobiography he added: “I have gone on record and been many times quoted with apparent irony as saying that my job was sacred to me. That sanctity must be most apparent at the hour of death. A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman, who, the Church says, still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and in death. The gentleness must remain.”
Pierrepoint’s views on his “craft”—which clearly became very important to him as a task he could perform swiftly and expertly every time—exactly represented how I thought Charles Sanson had managed to cope with his always distasteful and sometimes horrible duties. During the ancien régime when criminal justice was often subjective and brutal, and even during the Terror, he must have relied on maintaining the same professional detachment, mingled with compassion, toward the condemned as Albert Pierrepoint would exhibit a century and a half later. And I came to the conclusion that Sanson, in the end, remained in his position as public executioner throughout the Terror because he, just like Pierrepoint, felt it was his duty—not to the law but to the victims, and even more so if they were the victims of injustice.
Pierre-Antoine Demachy, Une exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, detail (1793). The master executioner, respectably dressed in a cutaway coat, knee breeches, and white stockings—presumably Charles Sanson, or one of his brothers, who sometimes filled in for him—is at far right on the scaffold.
Sanson could not save the men and women—whether guilty or innocent—whom he was ordered to execute by both royal and revolutionary authorities, any more than Pierrepoint, by refusing to carry out an execution, could have saved a prisoner sentenced to death for a murder he or she might not have committed. Sanson knew that if he resigned his title, another of France’s many professional executioners would have swiftly taken his coveted place, and that the newcomer might not have been as considerate as he toward the dying. And because he could not save the victims, he must have felt strongly that it was, at the very least, his lifelong duty to offer them some final kindnesses: to carry out any last wishes; to be sure that the guillotine always worked without a hitch; to ensure that his assistants always treated the condemned with respect; to keep their last hours or moments from being any more dreadful than they had to be.
“I see [the condemned prisoner] as a person who has a fixed and stony path decreed before him from which I cannot divert him, and therefore all I can do is to help him tread it as gently as possible.”
The words are Pierrepoint’s, but they could just as easily have been Charles Sanson’s.
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A big thanks to Susanne Alleyn. Remember, she’ll give away three electronic copies of The Executioner’s Heir to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Margaret Dean has won a copy of Whispers of Vivaldi by Beverle Graves Myers. Congrats to Margaret Dean!
Thanks to Beverle Graves Myers for a provocative look at castrati, Casanova, and gender-bender opera stars of 18th century Italy. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Sunny Frazier has won a copy of Voyage of Strangers by Elizabeth Zelvin plus a copy of the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that includes Zelvin’s Agatha award-nominated short story “The Green Cross.” Congrats to Sunny Frazier!
Thanks to Elizabeth Zelvin for showing us the dark underbelly of greed and ethnic cleansing that fueled Ferdinand and Isabella’s desire to claim and conquer the New World. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Zelvin’s Relevant History post. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
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Ashley McConnell has won a copy of The Hell Screen by I. J. Parker. The author also sent Ashley an ARC of Death of a Doll Maker. Congrats to Ashley McConnell!
Thanks to I. J. Parker for showing us what Japan was like before “Shogun.” Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on her Relevant History post back in November. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
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Michele Drier has won a copy of Shadow of the Alchemist by Jeri Westerson. Congrats to Michele Drier!
Thanks to Jeri Westerson for offering insight on the contribution of alchemists to modern science. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.
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Relevant History welcomes Lloyd Lofthouse, award-winning historical fiction author of My Splendid Concubine, the love story of Sir Robert Hart and a Chinese woman. For more information, check out Lloyd’s web site and author blog, and read the first chapter of his latest novel, multi-award winner Running with the Enemy.
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It could be argued that the British Empire and the United States are responsible for World War II in the Pacific and Mao Zedong winning China’s Civil War in 1949.
Before my wife told me in 1999 about Sir Robert Hart, I knew little about Japan and China. My knowledge of Japan, for instance, was the bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (April 18, 1942) and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.
I knew less about China, but that changed after my wife introduced me to Robert Hart. First, I read his journals and letters that had been published by Harvard. It was while researching for several years and writing My Splendid Concubine—based on Robert Hart’s real-life love story with a Chinese concubine named Ayaou—that I discovered the horrors that had been forced upon Asia in the 19th century by countries like Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.
The British and the French fired the first salvo starting the Opium Wars in 1839–1842 and then again in 1856–1860. The reason: China’s emperor refused to allow the British and merchants of other western countries—including the U.S.—to sell opium without restrictions to the Chinese people. In addition, the treaties allowed Christian missionaries the freedom to go anywhere in China and convert and save the souls of heathen Chinese.
As Christian missionaries were saving these souls, they converted a failed Confucian Scholar, Hong Xiuquan, who soon claimed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ; he published a Bible in Chinese after writing and including his own gospel. Then he led the 19-year Taiping rebellion that’s considered the bloodiest rebellion in human history with 20–100 million Chinese killed by the time he was defeated. And because God’s Chinese son was against the opium trade, Christian British and French troops joined in the fight, including American mercenaries, to defeat the Taipings. As for Japan, in 1846, America made its first attempt to open Japan for trade. Commander James Biddle anchored in Tokyo Bay with two ships, including one warship armed with 72 cannons, but his requests for a trade agreement were unsuccessful.
The Japanese, similar to the Chinese, didn’t want anything to do with the Western barbarians, but those barbarians weren’t about to accept no for an answer and miss an opportunity to find new markets for their growing consumer-based economies. Customers were to be gained; cheap labor was to be had, and this would lead to increased profits for European and American companies.
A few years later in 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry returned to Japan and turned his canons on the town of Uraga. The Japanese demanded he leave. In answer, Perry ordered some buildings in the harbor shelled. When Perry returned in February 1854 with twice as many ships, the Japanese agreed to virtually all of President Fillmore’s demands for trade with America.
It would take Japan almost a century to transition from a primitive, feudal agricultural-based economy to an imperial industrial power ready to wage war in 1937 with a goal to take Asia back from the Western powers that were exploiting and colonizing the region. To achieve this objective, Japan attacked China because it needed China’s resources.
If America had left Japan alone, Japan may have stayed an agricultural-based economy, and there would have never been the invasion of China in 1937.
It was Japan’s invasion of China that eventually caused the defeat of the Nationalist Chinese led by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong won the civil war that had raged from April 1927 to December 1937—with a break during World War II as both the Nationalist (KMT) and the Communists fought Japan. The Chinese Civil War resumed in March 1946.
Fighting Japan cost the KMT 1.3-million KIA; 1.8-million WIA and the CCP 500,000 KIA/MIA. The KMT fought a traditional war while the Communists practiced guerrilla warfare. During World War II, most Chinese lost trust in the Nationalists who clearly wanted to return China to the way it had been before the Civil War when the average life span was age 35, and more than 95% of Chinese lived in extreme poverty and were often treated worse than animals by those at the top of the economic pyramid.
By June of 1949, the Red Army had four million troops fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s 1.5 million. What would have happened to China and Japan in the 20th century if the United States and Great Britain had not forced both countries to open markets to unwanted products and religions in the 19th century?
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A big thanks to Lloyd Lofthouse. He discusses his research for My Splendid Concubine in this video and presents a timeline of China’s history here.
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