Arnold Harvey is waiting for me outside his flat overlooking Clissold Park in north London. With beard, lank grey hair and a large stomach that may be the product of eating too many fry-ups at the greasy spoon next door, he looks like a bucolic version of William Golding. It is his first ever interview and he is nervous, expectant. After a lifetime of what he believes to be academic condescension – or worse, conspiracy – he sees me as a possible source of redemption. This could be tricky.

Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater's biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later.

It was only after a New York Times review of Tomalin's book that American specialists in Russian literature started to wonder about this meeting, Dostoevsky's account of which, according to Stephanie Harvey, had been documented in the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi (News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). "In what language did Dickens and Dostoevsky converse?" asked Russian scholars. Why had Dostoevsky's revealing portrait of Dickens – "There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite" – not been included in his collected works? And why had they never previously come across the distinguished journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi?

Doubts about the authenticity of the Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting spread, retractions were made, the Dickensian had egg on its face. But only recently did the full story of the deception emerge when Eric Naiman, a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an immensely detailed six-page article in the TLS ("three days' work", says Harvey dismissively when I praise Naiman for his industry) establishing Harvey's academic avatars – not just Stephanie Harvey, but Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham (author of Oxford: The Novel), Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra. Naiman traced the way in which, over the past 30 years, this group had been commenting on one another's work in scholarly journals and little magazines, sometimes praising one ano ther but occasionally finding fault too. "How comforting," Naiman commented drily, "to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticise each other's work."

AD Harvey doesn't deny he is the creator of that community. Indeed, he says there are several identities which even Naiman has failed to unearth: Stephen Harvey, author of an article titled The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of Italy, published in the journal History in 1985; the Latvian poet Janis Blodnieks ("I search but cannot find the key/ Which will unlock the glowing door/ To the life which runs parallel/ To the world in which I am trapped"); and a variety of internet personalities which he prefers not to disclose as he says they might not reflect well on his output and interests. So who is the real AD Harvey?

When we make it upstairs to his tatty, book-lined, file-infested rented flat, he begins to tell me his story. His style is insistent, combative, digressive, and the conversation occupies more than four hours. He says he doesn't get much intelligent conversation these days, and in any case we have a lifetime – a lifetime of being turned down for academic jobs and forced to live the impoverished life of the independent historian – to cover.

We talk across a table, placed next to a window that affords a pleasant view over the park. The late-afternoon light is beautiful. On the table stands a pile of books: Britain in the Early 19th Century; English Poetry in a Changing Society (1780-1825); English Literature in the Great War with France; Literature into History; Collision of Empires; Sex in Georgian England; Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War; Arnhem; The Body Politic. His life's work, assembled, I assume, for my benefit.

Harvey, who is 65, was born in Colchester just after the second world war. His mother was a Jew from Hungary who had fled from the Nazis; his father was a lumberjack – the Essex, rather than Canadian, variety. Perversely, as with everything with Harvey, he reckons his father was the clever one. His parents separated when he was one. He was a bright, inquisitive boy, went to what he calls a cheap fee-paying school on some special deal, won a scholarship to St John's, Oxford, and then did a PhD at Cambridge on Lord Grenville, briefly prime minister during the Napoleonic war.

He had intended to be a novelist and was already in negotiation to publish Oxford: The Novel, the first draft of which had been taken up by a literary agent, but says he fell in love with research, knocked off his PhD in less than three years, and in 1978 published a monograph – Britain in the Early 19th Century. He appeared to be on the fast track to academic stardom, but reckons these early triumphs sowed the seeds of his downfall. "Naturally enough, I thought the sooner I finished the PhD, the sooner I'd get an academic job," he says, "but the opposite is the case." He says the ease with which he had gained his doctorate was held against him, and that the universities to which he was applying in his 20s were suspicious that he was already published.

There may be a degree of paranoia in all this. It could be that Harvey was just unlucky. Also, he started writing to the Times Higher Education Supplement complaining about being frozen out, so was starting to be seen as a troublemaker. He was also restless. He briefly had a junior lecturer post at North East London Polytechnic in the early 80s, but gave it up after a couple of years to teach in Italy. By the time he came back in 1986, he was almost 40 and seen as too old to start again; the academic door had slammed shut.

In a 40-year writing life, he has been salaried for seven and a half years; he calculates that his books have earned him £45,000; he lived in a squat in Swiss Cottage in his 20s; he has sometimes had to rely on income support and housing benefit to get by. He rapidly disabuses me of my romantic notion of the independent scholar. "I'm not an independent scholar," he says, "I'm a scholar who couldn't get a job, a rejected scholar. I didn't choose to be independent. The fact that I was producing books and by 1979 had had half a dozen scholarly articles published, half of them in English literature, half of them in history, to anyone else that would look interesting, but to an academic it looks 'Why can't we do this? There's something wrong with this man.' What makes it look interesting to other people makes it look appalling to academics." Harvey reckons he made 700 unsuccessful applications for academic posts.

So is his web of academic avatars and his invention of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky a revenge against the world that shunned him? "No," he says emphatically. In condensed form, what he alleges is a conspiracy by history academics to turn him into a non-person. As evidence, he cites the way in which the Historical Association's annual bulletin stopped including references to his publications. He also says he got the impression that the association's quarterly journal, History, was turning down articles he submitted because they were by him. As a test, he sent them his article on the Italian war effort, researched while he was working in Italy, under the name Stephen Harvey. "I think I was perfectly entitled to do this," he says. "If I was having work rejected because it had my name on it, I was entitled to send in a perfectly decent piece of work with another name." It duly appeared, feeding Harvey's suspicion that he was being singled out.

A few years later, Harvey did something even more incendiary. He sent History an article under the demotic name Trevor McGovern (who, as Naiman points out, has also published online erotica), which in reality was chapter seven from Harvey's first book, Britain in the Early 19th Century, with just the first and last sentence changed. Once again, History put it in – "What happened to expert peer reviewing?" asks Harvey. When the (self)plagiarism was eventually exposed, the editor of the journal, WA Speck, now emeritus professor of history at Leeds University, offered to resign. His offer was rejected, but the journal did send out a supplementary article with a request that subscribers paste it over McGovern's abomination.

The McGovern incident, I suggest, surely meant he had burned his boats with academe. But he claims not, and says many universities would not even have been aware of the games-playing and score-settling. But his name must have been tarnished in some quarters, and succeeding Roger Scruton as editor of the rightwing Salisbury Review in 2000 is likely to have further marginalised him.

Assessing his politics is difficult. He says he was a Labour voter in his squatting years, but became obsessed with what he saw as harassment by Camden and Hackney councils and started to vent his spleen on council officers (another self-serving elite in his view) in the pages of the Salisbury Review. When Scruton was looking for a successor, he settled on Harvey, but he only lasted a couple of years until falling out with the magazine's managing editor, Merrie Cave.

Harvey was still producing ambitious books – Collision of Empires, Sex in Georgian England, A Muse of Fire – but the historical establishment now felt no compunction about ignoring them. Planting the Dickens-Dostoevsky landmine looks like payback, but again he insists not. "You have failed to detect two things about me," he says. "Yes, I have some of the instincts of the troublemaker. But the other thing is I am creative and inventive. You might have been like this if you hadn't gone into daily journalism. [I try not to take this personally.] It was a jeu d'esprit. Yes, I was misleading the editor of the Dickensian, but it's caveat emptor."

When Stephanie Harvey was eventually rumbled, years after the article had appeared in the Dickensian, the editor Malcolm Andrews started pursuing Ms Harvey to discover how she could have got it so wrong. Her originator now had another idea. He wrote back as her sister, telling Andrews that the unfortunate Stephanie had had a serious car accident and suffered brain damage. This made Andrews reluctant to pursue the matter too forcibly, though Naiman has proved less understanding. "What I hadn't bargained for," admits Harvey, "was how much interest there would be in the Dickens and Dostoevsky thing in America. It wouldn't have been noticed if it hadn't been for the Americans."

Harvey doubts whether he will publish any more big books. He says that, at 65, he is slowing down, and is likely now to concentrate on articles. It doesn't help that he has no computer at home, has to go to libraries to get online, writes everything longhand and pays a typist to type it up. Having spent time with him, it is hard not to reflect on those evocative lines of Janis Blodnieks. "I search but cannot find the key/ Which will unlock the glowing door/ To the life which runs parallel/ To the world in which I am trapped." Harvey must have spent a good deal of time dwelling on those parallel lives, but his combativeness and belief that he was right and his academic enemies cowardly or corrupt mean he refuses to be downcast or self-pitying.

"How does the life we live relate to the lives we might have lived or ought to have lived?" he asks rhetorically. "If I'd had the life I ought to have lived, I would have had a junior research fellowship, a fellowship, marriage, marital breakdown, boredom, frustration, might have gone into politics, might have risen to minister of state, then more boredom and frustration. The pattern wouldn't have been that much different in my view." Once, when he lived in Italy, he fell down a cliff while hiking, injured his leg and was lost in the woods for three days. "I didn't think I would survive," he says. "Ever since I've thought, 'I've had my life', and everything since then was extra."

For a disappointed would-be university historian who feels he is the victim of an academic conspiracy, he is the happiest man alive. He hopes the large pile of books on his living-room table will guarantee his posthumous reputation. But even if they don't, it now seems likely that the combined efforts of Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay, Ludovico Parra and of course Janis Blodnieks will.