Novel into Film: The Case of 'Little Dorrit'

Abstract

A major cinematic adaptation of one of Dickens's greatest novels is an event of some importance in British cultural life. Literary and film theory, the sociology of artistic production, and the current role of the media in our national life might all usefully be focused by the appearance of Christine Edzard's six-hour version of Little Dorrit, made in 1987 and divided into two parts, 'Nobody's Fault' and 'Little Dorrit's Story'. That Dickens should be adapted into any medium whatsoever has long ceased to be a matter of surprise. From almost its earliest appearance his work was 'translated' into myriad forms. The immense popular success of Pickwick led to instant commercial exploitation in the form of Boz cabs, Weller corduroys, and Pickwick cigars, and the novels were endlessly pirated for the stage, frequently as they were appearing in their serial parts, an impertinence for which their perpetrators were punished by having to work out for themselves how, say, Nicholas Nickleby was going to end. Such invasions of his creative privacy did occasionally drive Dickens to frenzies of irritation, but his general attitude to these activities might best be described as benign indifference. If nothing else, they testified to the breadth of his popular appeal and might well lead the customer ignorant of the original to read, and therefore perhaps purchase, Dickens's work for himself. This stress on the economic makes a satisfying link from the Dickens world to the commercial and industrial base of feature film-making, an emphasis which the sociology of literary production has helped to make more acceptable to us than to earlier generations of readers and perhaps even viewers. The origins of cinema as a mass popular entertainment led to rejections of it, especially in British culture, on grounds more rooted in the ideology of class than in an objective assessment of the limitations inseparable from the creation of a new medium of communication. This response was then complicated, for those who succumbed to filmic pleasure, into a rejection of the commercial vulgarities of Hollywood in favour of the supposedly untainted purity of European art cinema. But such dichotomies are fundamentally unreal, both in their unawareness of the possibility of art being produced from within the studio system (John Ford comes to mind) and their ignorance of the commercial underpinning of all feature-film production. Little Dorrit, for example, cost some ?5m to make, a small amount by the standards of commercial blockbusters and yet on a totally different scale from the costs involved in the production of any other art form apart from architecture. But the provision of even this relatively modest sum was shot