JOSS MARSHDickens and film

If cinema, born 1895, was the child of Victorian visual technology and the

entrancement of the eye, then the Victorian novel stood it god-parent. Its

direct ancestors were the photograph, the panorama, and the magic lantern;

the circus and the melodramatic theatre; the railway, which turned the world

into moving pictures and opened up touristic pleasures; the ghoulish

waxwork and the tableau vivant; and the overwhelming, kinetic city. But it

was from fiction that film inherited its mass audience, its social function, its

plots, and its techniques of narration. And from no other author did film

inherit so much as from the Victorian writer who most imaginatively

absorbed the influences of those other ancestors: Charles Dickens.

Since 1897, when the Mutoscope Company put the Death of Nancy Sykes

[sic] on the screen, more films have been made of works by Dickens than of

any other authors: there are 130 Dickens films on record1 and only Dracula

and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde beat out Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol

(of which there are 30-plus versions each) for the status of most-filmed single

fiction in history. Part of Dickenss lure is the childhood appeal of his fiction,

along with the Inimitables proto-modern celebrity status, and the sheer

familiarity of the texts, reinforced by frequent theatrical adaptation; part

derives from the mythic characters who like the film stars of

Hollywoods golden age seem larger than the stories that contain them. The

attraction is partly economic: all of Dickenss fictions were out of copyright

by 1920. It speaks both of national identity and of international appeal and

interpretive openness. For although Dickens figures as large in the history of

Britains cinema as he does on its ten-pound note, Dickens films have been

produced in movie-making cultures as diverse as the silent-era Scandinavian

(a reflective and shadowy Little Dorrit of 1924, for example) and the contemporary

Portuguese (an updated Hard Times of 1988, that bares the texts

social-critical agenda in documentary black and white).2