The thing about Dickens is that he isn’t short on characters, plot, dramatic tension or human interest. You may find the characters overblown – though that says more about you than about them – or the plots too convoluted or the dramatic tension too melodramatic or the sentimentality too overdone; what you can’t say is that he needs a bit more of these things.
But to say as much is to reckon without Steven Knight, who has written the screenplay for the BBC’s new take on Great Expectations. And he appears to have taken one look at this remarkable account of the way snobbishness can corrupt character, and decided that it’s the merest starting point, a springboard, for his own exploration of the repulsive side of human nature.
