17 - Dickens composed: film and television adaptations 1897–2001

Summary

The works of Charles Dickens have been, it goes without saying, much filmed, beginning in 1897 with The Death of Nancy Sykes and followed by nearly one hundred short versions before 1920. There were about fifty in the 1980s alone. It is, therefore, impossible to provide, here or, perhaps, anywhere, a genuinely complete Dickens filmography. We can only lay claim to having listed the adaptations our respondents commented on, supplemented by a number of “major” versions they omitted. We have also included, if only as an indication of Dickens's ubiquity, a small fraction of the earliest film versions and a handful of non-English-language versions.

We have arranged the adaptations by novel, in chronological order by the date of initial publication. Especially for early films, gaps often exist, but we have listed as much information as was available. For each novel, the first adaptation for which we have complete information provides the names of the characters after the actors who played them. For subsequent listings, the character names are omitted but the same order is followed, unless otherwise noted. When interesting casting was used for roles not otherwise listed in our credits, we have included those actors and their characters' names as well. In the case of modernizations, the character names have sometimes been so changed as to obscure their correspondence to the original, and in this case we have listed the most important or interesting actors and their character names.