A tale of 3,000 adaptations

Few writers have seen their work adapted to the stage and screen more than Charles Dickens. By some estimates, Dickens's 15 novels have been adapted more than 3,000 times.

This holiday season, in addition to the regular crop of "A Christmas Carol" productions, a new version of "Nicholas Nickleby," with a cast that includes Christopher Plummer, Tom Courtenay, and Alan Cumming, will hit movie theaters.

It's probably safe to say that most people first meet Scrooge or Oliver Twist through an adaptation and not the original.

The urge to retell these stories has a long history, as a current exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, "Best of Times: The Theatre of Charles Dickens," reveals. As soon as he wrote his first novel, "The Pickwick Papers," Dickens was transformed into Victorian England's first literary celebrity. The young author chose to publish his debut novel in serial form, as he did with all of his tales, and the story quickly inspired pirated dramatizations around London.

One play, "The Pickwickians," opened seven months before Dickens finished writing the novel. Several versions quickly followed, with characters, plots, and endings quite different from the author's own.

This process repeated itself with each of his subsequent novels. "There were few copyright laws at the time, and the ones that existed were unenforceable," says Bob Taylor, curator of the NYPL's Billy Rose Theatre Collection. "Dickens made no money from the adaptations, and some were very bad." Although the author occasionally asked trusted friends to adapt his work, the pirates remained beyond his control.

These proliferating adaptations never dampened Dickens's enthusiasm for the stage. An avid theatergoer, he attended several of the pirated performances, offering his own opinions and criticisms of the playwrights' efforts. He also spent countless hours working as an amateur actor, director, stage manager, and playwright.

Although he rarely translated his own work to the stage, he "eventually found a way to adapt his writings" through public readings, says Michael Slater, professor emeritus at the University of London and author of a coming biography on Dickens. Beginning in 1858, these performances enabled the theater-loving novelist to be "author, director, sole actor, and sole financial beneficiary of the production," Mr. Slater explains.

The NYPL exhibit displays several of the reading copies that Dickens used for these events. The author made careful notations by hand, adding arrows and marks to indicate his own gestures and voice inflections. He invested so much emotion and energy into these performances that many people believe they contributed to his untimely demise in 1870.

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