Lecture Abstract
Over the past five years or so, Dickens has once again become hot televisual property. Adaptations and reworkings of his fictional worlds have proliferated. Viewers have been able to engage with the first instalments of Steven Knight’s so-called ‘Dickens box-set’ with BBC-FX co-productions of A Christmas Carol (2019) and Great Expectations (2023). Both A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations emphasise a dark and frequently Gothicised interpretation of their well-known and frequently-adapted source texts. Intriguingly, at almost the same cultural moment a different way of doing Dickens seems to have emerged in two concurrent neo-Dickensian interpretations of Oliver Twist: the Children’s BBC production Dodger (2022- ) and Disney+ and Star’s The Artful Dodger (2023- ). My lecture reads both series as interventions in the ever-expanding Dickensian and Twistian universes, and as successful examples of neo-Victorian television that take this genre in new directions by blending characters, scenes and themes from Dickens’s second novel together with Victorian historical figures, settings and events from outside of the Dickensian fictional universe.They both, I argue, represent a marked shift away from the ‘Dark Dickens’ mood that has dominated adaptations of the author’s work through much of the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Speaker: Chris Louttit
Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is a past President of the Dickens Society, the current Editor-in-Chief of English Studies and has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of Adaptation. His research focuses on mid-Victorian fiction and its afterlives in popular visual culture and in film and television adaptations. He is the author of Dickens’s Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality (Routledge, 2009), and has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals including Adaptation, Book History, European Journal of English Studies, Gothic Studies and Philological Quarterly. He has a chapter on web series adaptations of North and South in The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2026) and is at work on several projects including the Dickens and Mayhew chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Literature of London and a study of Victorian Bohemian fictions.