"When Dickens met Dostoevsky"

“All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, 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 toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, 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. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”
 — I just got around to reading this week’s Times Literary Supplement last night — why yes, I subscribe; I didn’t do five years of high school for nothing — and this piece, which, fortunately for you, is available online, captivated me in a way nothing has for a long time. Your mileage etc., but you should print it out for later and give it a shot. It is a nice counterpoint to all the terror and pop star monkey quarantine stories that are otherwise clogging up the information dispenser.