The new version of Great Expectations is the BBC’s seventh, while A Christmas Carol is the most adapted English classic ever. What is it about these stories that keeps us wanting more?
What is it about Great Expectations? Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s new dramatisation of Dickens’s novel is the seventh BBC adaptation – the first appearing on screens in 1954. Cinema has loved it too. David Lean’s 1946 film remains the most celebrated but there were three earlier film versions and have been five more since. The 1974 adaptation starred a youngish Michael York as Pip, Dickens’s self-deluding protagonist, obsessed with the unattainable Estella; the most recent was Mike Newell’s 2012 version, scripted by novelist and Dickens aficionado David Nicholls.
Dickens’s fiction has long proved irresistible to dramatisers. Armando Iannucci’s witty 2019 film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, was the 12th major screen adaptation of that novel, yet managed to do new justice to the zaniness of its humour. A Christmas Carol, meanwhile, is the most frequently adapted literary classic in the English language, entertaining exactly because we know it so well. Largely via adaptations, both these novels have come to seem like shared national stories, in which laughter triumphs over mean-mindedness.
