What the Dickens? Why biographers don't always tell the whole story

IN HER ENGAGING new biography of Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin writes about an encounter between two giants of 19th-century literature.

We are told it took place in 1862, in Dickens’s office on Wellington Street in London, when Fyodor Dostoevsky was in town and called in. The Russian was a fan, having read Dickens in prison, and years later, it is said, he wrote to a friend about their encounter.

Tomalin includes close to 20 lines of an English translation of Dostoevsky’s account. It is, as she notes, “an amazing report”, as Dickens relays his inner self with brutal honesty. According to Dostoevsky, “There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.”    Read Full