Watching the opening of the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, I had to check that I was on the right channel. I was expecting to be transported to the foggy marshes of Kent — instead, I saw what seemed to be a suicide attempt, set seven years after the novel’s opening. For those of you trying to remember the moment in the novel where Pip lobs himself into the Thames, I’ll save you the trouble: this is a scene plucked entirely from the imagination of the show’s creator and writer, Steven Knight. 

The world is already full of Great Expectations adaptations. Fortunately, there already exist two near-perfect versions, from 1946 and 1999. How, then, was Knight to differentiate himself? Well, he answers this conundrum: through a hard rewrite. Despite Dickens being famous for his immersive setting, compelling characterisation and his ability to weave a gripping narrative, Knight has done away with all of this. He thinks he can do better. 

To justify his extensive literary vandalism, Knight says he is “reading between the lines”, boldly saying what Dickens never could. “You couldn’t write about certain things in Dickens’ time,” he claims:

certain elements of sexuality, crime, disobedience against the crown and state. What I tried to do was imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about

I beg Knight to read just one Victorian novel — perhaps even the one he’s trying to adapt. To say something is “Dickensian”, after all, is to evoke images of awful social conditions, repulsive characters and “darker places”. If Knight truly believes that it falls upon him to add a suicide, that the Victorian novel would never allow for one, then he ought to consult Jude the Obscure, Wuthering Heights or Dickens’ own Nicholas Nickleby. If he’s not sure whether Dickens would have dared to write about an opium-addict — which is how Knight presents Miss Havisham — then he ought to read Dickens’ “Lazarus Lotus Eating”.

The piano-leg-coverers of the 19th century are a myth

To say something is “Victorian”, meanwhile, is to evoke images of prudishness and repression. Presumably this is what Knight was thinking about whilst delineating what it was that Dickens “wasn’t allowed to write about”. In fact, the Victorians were not immune to hedonism: the Cremorne Gardens were notorious for their debauchery, at the Burlington Arcade you could find transvestite boys, and at your local chemist, you could easily pick up psychedelics. The piano-leg-coverers of the 19th century are a myth — a myth that Knight has swallowed whole. 

Knight, moreover, doesn’t go to the “darker places” which are already present in Great Expectations: he erases them. The book famously opens with the terrifying Abel Magwitch holding down seven-year-old Pip and uttering the threat:

A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. 

I remember reading this description when I was just a few years older than Pip and finding myself frozen with fear. We are made to wait thirty minutes before this scene appears in the first episode of the BBC adaptation. Knight’s Magwitch offers a saccharine, for less chilling threat: announcing “I’m an animal and my belly’s empty” and making vague claims he might send Pip to hell.

The cruel Mrs. Joe, in Knight’s retelling, comes across as a relatively reasonable (albeit exhausted) housewife. When Pip first comes home, he insolently tells her there’s no need for him to take his boots off because there’s no mud in winter. Knight hopes that we’ll believe that this Pip is so terrified of his sister that he’d rather run away than face her wrath over a missing pork pie. In this adaptation I found myself on Mrs. Joe’s side. It’s hard to see how money would further corrupt this impertinent teenager, who is already not lacking in arrogance. 

Even the setting is sanitised. Steven Knight’s North-Kent Marshes seem more like an advert for a Thames Estuary holiday than the setting of a chilling, life-altering encounter. Dickens’ dark, desolate, “black” mires stretch on for miles. The flat marshland is broken up only by the occasional ship and a huge, domineering gibbet — gallows for pirates. This is a gothic, arresting image in the novel, and so naturally it is omitted from Knight’s adaptation. 

We must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes

Dickens’ Satis House is similarly chilling. Miss Havisham has not been in sunlight since she was jilted. She still wears her wedding dress. Her wedding breakfast and cake have sat out for ten years. Imagine the maggots and beetles, the smell of rot and the suffocating dust. Olivia Colman gives her usual brilliant performance, but she is constrained by an unimpressive set and a disappointing script. The room is dark and somewhat dusty, but it isn’t the rot-infested crypt of Dickens’ superior imagination. To round off the underwhelming image, Estella announces “welcome to eternal winter”, better conjuring up images of Elsa hiding in her ice castle than a woman decaying in her wedding dress, a “skeleton” with “dark eyes”.

Unsurprisingly, the first episode of BBC’s Great Expectations has been reviewed badly. Many commentators have pointed to “wokeness” as the problem. The rot actually runs deeper: it is simply bad, and it’s bad because Steven Knight doesn’t understand Dickens. To junk Dickens’ striking dialogue, captivating plots and nuanced characters is to entirely miss the magic and meaning of the original. Knight isn’t alone in his hubris. Netflix recently took a sledgehammer to Persuasion, replacing Austen’s profound meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with lines like: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Despite its popularity, nothing incenses me quite as much as the glossy makeover Baz Luhrmann gave to The Great Gatsby. I’ve no doubt that we must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes, as director after director imagine themselves better placed to explore the human conditions than artists of old, artists whose works have endured centuries longer than any of these adaptations will. 

Great Expectations tells the compelling story of an ambitious young man forced to question exactly what depths he is prepared to sink to in order to achieve success. The more opportunities he’s given, the worse he’s prepared to do. Knight might do well to reflect on this.