Was Dickens meeting a hoax?

Did one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Charles Dickens, meet one of Russia’s top writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, pictured below, in London?

Only days after I wrote a blog about literary biographer Claire Tomalin’s latest book, Charles Dickens: A Life, she now says that the historic meeting might never have taken place.

Dickens scholars have based the event on a story in The Dickensian journal following the discovery of a letter sent by Dostoevsky to a friend in 1878.

The letter was originally published in a Russian journal called Vedomosti but no one has found any proof that the publication ever existed.

Tomalin described the meeting in her latest book but said she would remove the passage from future editions as she may have been the victim of a hoax.

“It was of course irresistible,” she told the Sunday Times, “but everyone has probably been fooled actually.”

The story was queried by The New York Times, so Tomalin asked her husband, the writer and Russian expert Michael Frayn, to look into it but he couldn’t find any proof of the meeting.

Fortunately, no one has queried the story in my book, Four Centuries at The Lion Hotel, that Dickens visited Shrewsbury on at least three occasions – unless, of course, you know differently.