Adapt and survive: why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen | Charles Dickens
What is it about Great Expectations? Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s new dramatisation of Dickens’s novel is the seventh BBC adaptation – the first appearing on screens in 1954. Cinema has loved it too. David Lean’s 1946 film remains the most celebrated but there were three earlier film versions and have been five more since. The 1974 adaptation starred a youngish Michael York as Pip, Dickens’s self-deluding protagonist, obsessed with the unattainable Estella; the most recent was Mike Newell’s 2012 version,…