Spell-bound by the character of Little Nell
diary in 1852. When he had earlier listed
the books he had read between the ages of
fourteen and twenty he annotated items on
the list with the comments 'great influen
ce' and 'very great influence'. Beside St
Matthew's gospel, Rousseau's Confessions
and David Copperfield, however, he wrote
'immense influence'. As an old man he
insisted that 'Dickens interests me more
and more', adding that he had instructed
two of his literary disciples to translate A
Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorrit. 'I
would undertake Our Mutual Friend my
self, he somewhat off-handedly noted,
'were it not that I have something else to
attend to'. In 1903 Aylmer Maude quoted
Tolstoy as saying that 'the first condition
of an author's popularity is the love
with which he treats his characters. That is
why Dickens's characters are the friends
of all mankind; they are a bond of union
between man in America and man in St
Petersburg'. It is perhaps this internationa
list sentiment which tells us most about the
sympathetic relationship between the two
novelists. There are what look like direct
borrowings from Dickens in Tolstoy's
works (the Dombey railway train in Anna
Karenina for example). We also know of
Tolstoy's vast admiration for the storm-
scene in Copperfield and we might recog
nize important ramifications of the idea of
Nature as a reflector of human needs,
demands and emotions in Prince Andrei's
musings in War and Peace and in Levin's
rural sympathies in Anna Karenina. We
might also contrast Dickens's use of a
storm with Shakespeare's in the King Lear
that Tolstoy so hated. But, above all, it is
in a sense of mutuality and in a shared
love of the characters (the 'favourite chil
dren') that the two novelists created and
cherished they most seem to resemble one
another. This mutuality and love make
both for a (perhaps illusory) sense of
fellowship between reader and writer and
for the impression we receive from Dic
kens and Tolstoy that all created things co
operate, both for good and ill (though
ultimately and Christianly for good).
22
