Thomas de Quincey confessed to fearing that his addictions might lead to such "anomalous symptoms," including spontaneous combustion. "Might I not myself take leave of the literary world in that fashion?" he wondered. A drunk explodes in Melville’s Redburn, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland also features spontaneous human combustion (though, in a rarity, the victim there is not an alcoholic). And then there is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a novel notable not just for being one of the towering masterpieces of Victorian fiction, but because of its thirtieth chapter, in which the minor character—the alcoholic landlord Mr. Krook—spontaneously bursts into flames.

Amazingly, "the belief in spontaneous human combustion ... outlasted the temperance movement, not the other way around":]]>