THE NOVELS

Adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House. For Bohemian-born actress Francesca (Fanny) Janauschek, the dual roles of Lady Dedlock and Hortense kept her busy for over 20 years. Her version was called Chesney Wold! and, although no playwright was credited, some scholars have detected the hand of Madame Janauschek herself. She first played the parts in 1871.

At one time or another, every one of Charles Dickens’s novels, as well as many of his shorter works, has been brought to the stage. They have been met with varying levels of applause. Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son to name only a few, never enjoyed the critical or popular esteem onstage of, say, Oliver Twist or The Cricket on the Hearth. Some of them, A Christmas Carol, for example, have become standard stage fare. Others, such as Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby, enjoy extraordinary bursts of theatrical popularity, fade temporarily, then reappear. Novels like The Pickwick Papers or David Copperfield find a stage here and there, now and again, sometimes catching the public’s fancy, sometimes not. Charles Dickens reveled in all aspects of the theatre. He was passionate about it. He tried his hand at acting, at playwriting, at stage-managing, at directing and at public readings. In the end, though, it is the dramatizations of his novels on stages from Sydney to Reykjavik and Hong Kong to Allentown that have given him universal fame and a permanent place in the theatre that he loved so much.