Expecting a Dickens of an adaption (From The Northern Echo)

Expecting a Dickens of an adaption

2:57pm Wednesday 14th December 2011 in Harry Mead By Harry Mead, Columnist

WHAT is expected to be a year-long celebration of Charles Dickens, centred on the bicentenary of his birth next February, opens at Christmas with a BBC television adaptation of his novel Great Expectations.

It’s my favourite Dickens book which, by sheer chance, I happened to re-read earlier this year. Any return to a well-loved book brings new discoveries. Overlooked previously, in Great Expectations I came across what must be one of the earliest examples of texting language.

In a message to his blacksmith-guardian Joe Gargery, scrawled on a slate, young Pip uses the texting abbreviations UR, B and 2U.

Recalling the occasion as the book’s adult narrator, Pip even shows that the phenomenon of texting or emailing someone close by is not exactly new. He says: “There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone.”

An instant success and especially popular ever since, Great Expectations was conceived as a short Christmas story – what Dickens called “an odd idea” involving “some disappointed person who retires to an old, lonely house”.

But falling sales of his magazine All The Year Round, then carrying a serial by another writer, prompted him to extend its scope. And from that economic spur came the novel’s unforgettable dramatis personae – the fossilised Miss Havisham, the fearsome convict Magwitch, the punctilious lawyer Jaggers and all.

So much for “artistic” inspiration.

Throbbing through the novel, of course, is Pip’s yearning for Estella, the girl raised by Miss Havisham to break men’s hearts, especially Pip’s. But, for me, the core of the book is the contrast between the concept of a gentleman as perceived by Pip, all to do with rank and manners, and the genuine article, personified by the illiterate but noble Joe – and indeed Magwitch, rough and terrifying indeed but selfless in his devotion to Pip.

Fans of a particular book are usually irritated if an adaptation strays from the original. But in David Lean’s great film of 1946, famous for its opening churchyard scene in which Magwitch up-ends Pip, there is a brilliant deviation from the book. After Miss Havisham’s death, Pip is seen ripping down the curtains to let the light into her musty, time-stopped house. This never happens in the book, but I suspect Dickens would have used the idea had he thought of it.

If the BBC wishes its new adaptation to stand out from its four predecessors it could do worse than make another change – which actually is not a change at all.

The ending of the book, in which Pip and Estella are reunited in the old house, and Pip sees “no shadow of another parting from her”, is sharply different from what Dickens originally wrote. Far from reunited, Pip and Estella merely meet briefly in a London street, where Estella mistakes a young boy accompanying Pip – Joe’s son – for Pip’s son.

They go their respective ways.

Dickens was persuaded to sweeten the ending by his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who, said Dickens, had been “extraordinarily taken” by the book. The published ending certainly matches readers’ hopes. But the original is truer to the thrust of the whole book – which is of expectations dashed.

The Oxford Illustrated Dickens prints both endings. But it will take a bold adapter to adopt the unhappy one.