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Dickens doesn’t need to be given a darker twist

SIR – It was bad enough when Roald Dahl’s books were being torn to pieces, but then I read of the upcoming version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations by Steven Knight (Arts, March 18), best-known as the writer of Peaky

Blinders, which apparently features drugs, swearing and Empire bashing.

Who thinks they have the right to change so much in a story – not just words, but characters and happenings? There is so little good drama on any channel, and we could once count on the BBC to produce true-to-text versions. Instead, however, it is following the trend.

Louise Drummond

Lindal-in-furness, Cumbria

SIR – Call me old-fashioned – I am 62 years old – but I was bemused by your report (March 21), “Miss Havisham becomes addict in darker twist on Dickens”.

The stories and plots of Charles Dickens are some of the greatest ever written. Miss Havisham does not need to be rewritten as an opium addict – she is already deliciously creepy. And Mrs Gargery in S&M sessions with Mr Pumblechook – oh please!

Jayne Gray

Little Melton, Norfolk

SIR – We are told that Steven Knight’s adaptation of Great

Expectations will contain antiempire and anti-colonial messages.

As Mr Knight is a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, can we expect an absence of irony in this production?

Richard Hall

Belper, Derbyshire

SIR – Charles Dickens’s novels have always supported the little man. They need no tampering with. Anne Langley

Wolverhampton

SIR – I agree with Anita Singh (Arts, March 21), who asks of the latest “jazzed up” version of Great

Expectations: “Why make it at all?” At school in the late 1960s, this novel seemed to be on the syllabus every year, the only benefit being that I memorised so much of it that finding the appropriate quotes for essays was easy.

Dickens always struck me as a cinematic writer, as both his dialogue and scene setting are vivid. There is, however, a rich world of literature that could be brought to the screen without going over books that have been better filmed in the past. Making a classic into another

Peaky Blinders is also doing that series a disservice, putting one in mind of the various cinema franchise films categorised by numbers.

Great Expectations is not Peaky Blinders 2. Jeannette Meyers

Ashford, Kent

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