What the ...

This weekend I finished Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. I've written something of a review over at Goodreads, but my single favourite finding in 416 pages was discovering that no-one seems sure what colour Dickens' eyes were:

they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, 'not blue', distinct clear hazel, 'large effeminate eyes', clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue - with a little orange line surrounding the pupil - and even, by a cautious observer, as 'nondescript'.