Some birthday parties never end, do they?
The current Dickens bicentennial beano for one. True, it may now be the end of the evening – the wine has been drunk, the lemonade's flat, the bunting's sagging and there's only a crust of icing left of the cake – but there's time for one more flourish. After the BBC's Dickensathon over Christmas we have a new film version of Great Expectations to look forward to later this year, directed by Mike Newell and adapted by novelist David Nicholls, with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch.
I reckon you could argue the party's been going on for some time. British fiction has been assiduously walking in Dickens's footsteps since Sarah Walters first put a sapphic twist on the Victorian thriller at the end of the 1990s. She was swiftly followed by Michel Faber in 2002 with The Crimson Petal And The White, and nowadays you can't move in a bookstore for stumbling over a neo-Victorian novel that mines the same seams as Dickens – urban poverty, class, the scale of London and the extremities of experience to be had within – with maybe an extra dollop of sex and gruel to spice up the recipe.
The Victorian world reflected back to us in fiction is Dickens's world. This year alone we've already had Kate Williams's The Pleasures Of Men, Kate Darby's The Whore's Asylum, Tom-All-Alone's by Lynn Sheperd and the paperback of Essie Fox's The Somnabulist, all stalking the gaslit streets Dickens immortalised in print.
There are obvious reasons for this. First and foremost, Dickens is a city novelist – perhaps the first (it's a toss-up between him and Thackeray) – and so he makes sense in an increasingly urbanised country. In effect he laid the foundations of the urban novel. As a result the Victorian age is seen through his literary prism.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it does mean we are getting a rather partial vision of history and literature reflected and refracted back at us. The cultural historian Matthew Sweet was arguing in a recent issue of Sight & Sound that Dickens has not been adapted for the screen enough. It seemed a curious argument given that, Jane Austen apart, I can't think of another classic author who has been adapted more.
Certainly, he's much more visible than his almost-contemporary Thomas Hardy. There's been roughly one major Hardy adaptation each decade for the past 50 years. In the 1960s, John Schlesinger gave us Far From The Madding Crowd, Dennis Potter adapted The Wessex Tales for television in the 1970s, Polanski's Tess came out at the start of the 1980s, we had a TV version starring Gemma Arterton in 2008 and Michael Winterbottom's Indian version, Trishna, screened at last month's Glasgow Film Festival. Compared to Dickens, though, Hardy is in the slow lane.
It's curious, in a way, because Hardy is such a visual writer. In the days when I fantasised about becoming a film director I often imagined the beginning of my version of Return Of The Native, opening in longshot on the overpowering brownness of Egdon Heath as a cart winds its way from top right to middle front with a man with glowing red skin – the reddleman – walking alongside it. After that you've got bonfires and a Gothy heroine in Eustacia Vye. What else could you want for a movie? (There was a TV version by Jack Gold a few years back starring Catherine Zeta-Jones but it was unforgiveably chocolate-boxy. Hardy was never chocolate-boxy.)
I think it comes down to the fact Hardy is a rural novelist and, as a whole, we've given up on being interested in the country. Dickens may be the older man but he seems to speak to us more because he is a writer of the city. Because of that, his books inevitably look forward. We can feel them reaching out to us across the intervening years. Hardy, though, looks backwards. Tess meets her end at Stonehenge, after all. For him, human nature is eternal. And bleak. Possibly not much of a party animal then, anyway.
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