• Text size
  • Send this article to a friend
  • Print this article

Great expectations

Like many writers, Charles Dickens – who, according to Tolstoy, was the greatest 19th-century novelist – was ambivalent on the subject of biography.

On the one hand he felt it pandered to the prurient. People, he reckoned, ought not to be interested in writers’ private lives and should content themselves with the books they produce.