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Curated playlist

British novels adapted into plays

  • The Pickwick Papers9 minThe Pickwick Papers arrived in British readers' hands not as a novel but as a commission to explain a set of comic drawings. Charles Dickens was 24 years old, working as a parliamentary reporter and roving journalist, when publisher…
  • A Christmas Carol10 minA Christmas Carol was published on the 19th of December 1843, and by Christmas Eve the entire first run of 6,000 copies had sold out. Charles Dickens wrote it in six weeks, completing the final pages in early December, after taking…
  • Frankenstein14 minFrankenstein begins not with a monster but with a question whispered around a log fire. In the rainy summer of 1816, Mary Shelley sat at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, in the Swiss Alps. The weather was too cold and dreary for…
  • Jane Eyre10 minJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell. The author was Charlotte Bronte, and she had written something that reviewers struggled to place. One called…
  • The War of the Worlds8 minThe War of the Worlds, published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann, opens with a sentence that has unsettled readers for over a century: "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts…
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland13 minAlice's Adventures in Wonderland began not on a page, but on a river. On the 4th of July 1862, Lewis Carroll and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the river Isis with three girls: Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, daughters of…
  • The Hobbit11 minThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again begins with a sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank exam paper one day in the early 1930s: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He had no idea what the word meant. He would spend the rest of the…
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory7 minCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, began not in a writer's imagination but in a schoolboy's hands. Roald Dahl, attending Repton School in Derbyshire, received test packages from Cadbury, the…
  • Heart of Darkness10 min"The horror! The horror!" Those are the dying words of Kurtz, an ivory trader at the center of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad. The book follows a sailor named Charles Marlow. He takes a job as…
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde10 minStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins not with a monster, but with a lawyer on a Sunday walk. Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London solicitor, passes a battered door on a side street and hears a story that will haunt him for the…
  • The Fellowship of the Ring10 minThe Fellowship of the Ring arrived in British bookshops on the 29th of July 1954, the first of three volumes that together would become one of the most discussed works of the twentieth century. Its author, J. R. R. Tolkien, had conceived…

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