Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation By Abigail Burnham Bloo ...

project their tastes and values not only forward onto their students but also backward onto previous generations.

Not even Dickens, the central and most unexceptionable Victorian novelist, is immune to change. As Natalie Neill points out, A Christmas Carol, the single Victorian classic that is most often subjected to adaptation, is the perfect text to adapt repeatedly for several reasons that considerably complicate its claims to classic status. These include its susceptibility to such free adaptations as It’s a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!; its status as a sure-fire holiday moneymaker, every theatrical troupe’s answer to The Nutcracker; the importance of a resurrection and reanimation play in its own parable; its justification of generous gift giving through its own original packaging as a gift volume; its repeated readaptation by its author in hundreds of public readings; and a process of ritualizing that, far from being imposed only by later adapters, “begins in the text itself,” which, “like a carol…is meant to be performed over and over again” (Neill, p. 81). Neill reminds readers that the stability of the Dickens they know and love as a classic, or revere as an unread classic, is only an illusion. The 1925 student edition of A Tale of Two Cities my grandmother gave me as a child, whose editorial apparatus emphasizes Dickens’s sentimentality and his unmatched skill in drawing memorably comic characters, places at the head of his achievements Oliver Twist (“one of the greatest of Dickens’ novels”; 19), The Old Curiosity Shop (“almost unsurpassed for its pathos and its humor”; 19), David Copperfield (“deserves to rank with A Tale of Two Cities”; 20), and A Tale of Two Cities.Dickens’s most searching anatomies of English society are dismissed as marginal. According to the editor of the volume, Bleak House is “less fiction than…criticism of the English system of laws and courts” (20), Little Dorrit is a criticism of “the debtors’ prisons and the ‘red tape’ of government offices” (20), Great Expectations is a “great romance” (21), and Our Mutual Friend is a “story of London life; loose in plot, but interesting in details” (21). Readers who are tempted to plume themselves on their superior insight would do well to prepare for the inevi-table revaluation of particular Dickens novels and of Dickens in general