Filmography › Charles Dickens
All the books by Charles Dickens adapted to cinema and television, ranked
The longstanding estate battle of Jarndyce v Jarndyce hangs over the heads of many conflicting heirs, confused by multiple wills. Honoria, Lady Dedlock, the wife of the imperious baronet Sir Leicester, is also a possible beneficiary of the estate. Esther and the young doctor Allan Woodcourt are attracted to each other, but Esther feels unworthy and Allan accepts a commission as a navy physician.
Since her birth in 1805, twenty-one years prior, Amy Dorrit has lived in the Marshalsea Prison for Debt, caring for her father, William, who now enjoys a position of privileged seniority as the Father of the Marshalsea. To help her family, Amy works as a seamstress for Mrs. Clennam, a cranky, cold and forbidding semi-invalid living in a crumbling home with servants, the sinister Jeremiah Flintwinch and his bumbling wife, Affery.
Ebenezer Scrooge malcontentedly shuffles through life as a cruel miserly businessman until one fateful Christmas Eve when he is visited by three spirits, sent show him how his unhappy childhood and maladaptive adult behavior over has let him a selfish, lonely, bitter old man.
John Harmon, a young man whose inheritance depends on his marrying a woman he has never met, is found dead in the River Thames. The fortune passes into the hands of the working-class Boffins, who take into their new home both Bella Wilfer and a mysterious secretary known as Rokesmith. Meanwhile, Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of the boatman suspected of Harmon’s murder, is pursued by two suitors.
Elderly, wealthy Martin Chuzzlewit is constantly hounded by his money-grubbing relations, a fact that depresses and embitters him. However, Martin disowns his grandson, also called Martin, after he falls in love with Mary. Young Martin decides to pursue a career as an architect, studying with dishonest architect Seth Pecksniff, who lives with his two daughters Charity and Mercy and good, kind-hearted apprentice Tom Pinch, whom he is exploiting as a servant.
On Christmas Eve in 19th-century London, Ebenezer Scrooge is a surly money-lender who objects to the merriment of Christmas. His loyal employee Bob Cratchit (Mickey) requests to have half of Christmas Day off, to which Scrooge reluctantly accepts, but says Cratchit would be docked half a day’s pay. In his house, Scrooge encounters the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley (Goofy).
Ebenezer Blackadder, the Victorian proprietor of a moustache shop, is the nicest man in England. He is everything that Ebenezer Scrooge was by the end of the original story: generous and kind to everybody, and sensitive to the misery of others. As a result, people take advantage of his kindness – Mrs. Scratchit and an orphan take all his money, and a beadle takes his food.
On Christmas Eve of 1843, Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly London commodities trader, does not share the merriment of Christmas. Scrooge declines his nephew Fred Hollywell’s invitation for Christmas dinner and reluctantly accepts his loyal employee Bob Cratchit’s request to have Christmas off since there will be no business for Scrooge during the day.
Orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.
A young woman in labour makes her way to a parish workhouse and dies after giving birth to a boy, who is systematically named Oliver Twist by the workhouse authorities. As the years go by, Oliver and the rest of the child inmates suffer from the callous indifference of the officials in charge: beadle Mr. Bumble and matron Mrs. Corney.
The exciting story of Dr. Manette, who escapes the horrors of the infamous Bastille prison in Paris. The action switches between London and Paris on the eve of the revolution where we witness ‘the best of times and the worst of times’ – love, hope, the uncaring French Aristocrats and the terror of a revolutionary citizen’s army intent on exacting revenge.
Little Oliver Twist, already abused, starved, and overworked, is apprenticed to an undertaker and runs away to London after being bullied by an older apprentice. There, he is taken in by Fagin, a fence and thief-trainer, and his gang of pickpockets. He is befriended by Nancy, a good-hearted prostitute, and meets her lover, the brutal housebreaker Bill Sikes.