When Charles Met Fyodor

Until reading this review on yet another Charles Dickens bio I'd never known Dickens had once sat down and talked with Fyodor Dostoyevsky; later Dostoyevsky recounted Dickens saying this about himself:

"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)

I was rolling my eyes a bit re: faux humility (sort of but not really like an actor saying he likes playing assholes because "it's such a change!"), but the reviewer's comment that follows makes sense:

Dickens's fiction is filled with doubles and alternative outcomes: "Great Expectations" has two endings, one happy, one sad, while Scrooge is both given a glimpse of his lonely, miserable future and a chance to avoid this destiny by changing his miserly ways.

And of course his frequent use of naming his characters so that their initials would reflect his own, one way or the other vis-a-vis virtue of character.