I came across this fascinating morsel recently:
"[Dickens] gave an interview in 1862 to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoevsky which Slater [Dickens's biographer] guesses Dickens thought would never see the light of day:
"'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for, being used up in what he wrote. 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.'"
This is indeed a disturbingly revealing passage, describing a character worthy of... well, Dostoevsky. No Google search of mine has turned up this interview, if it still exists, and Sam Schulman, the author of the article from which I took this excerpt, offers no attribution, apart from the Slater bio--which I now have to read.
