Was going to add this one as well. A comet of that size, that close, would have raised questions in other places. The point that we didn't have nearly the observational capacity a couple of hundred years ago that we have today is well made, we certainly might have dodged a bullet, we have seen two comments hit the bigger planets (Jupiter and Saturn) but we only noticed because we were looking.
So I share the skepticism that this was a Comet in 1883 but I don't doubt for a moment comets have come that close to the planet.
In the long run cometary impact is pretty much a certainty and close passes are a lot more likely than impact.
So even if this particular observation is probably attributable to something else there is a good chance that something like it did happen at another point in time in the last 2,000 years or so.
2400M / 183 gives a probability of 7.6x10-8, but that's for impacts, and near misses don't leave any evidence other than people that happened to be looking in that direction. The question then is how many near misses before you get a 'hit', probably a fairly large number depending on how you classify a near miss. Anything closer than the earth moon orbit would be fine with me as a 'near miss' (according to George Carlin an accident is a near miss, but never mind that). The exposed target of the earth-moon bounded sphere is substantially larger (~2000 times or so?) and would increase the chance of a near miss from the impact figure to about 0.000167 for any given year, or about once every 6,000 years. And the base figure here is craters that we know about, which means they're likely on the land, that misses 2/3rd of the planet.
I'm sceptical about this but I would not rule it out entirely.
There is a really interesting question which I posed to the NASA near earth team at one of their talks at Ames which was "what sort of evidence would an intra-atmospheric near miss produce?" Which is to say a comet that missed by 50,000 to 125,000' rather than further out. The speculation is that it would result in wide spread fires (the compressive heating of the air in front of it would ignite things). Basically it could transfer a lot of energy to the atmosphere. But most felt that a comet that close would be in pieces and at least some of it would leave a crater trail.
So I share the skepticism that this was a Comet in 1883 but I don't doubt for a moment comets have come that close to the planet.