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Curated category

British novels adapted into plays

  • The Pickwick PapersThe first issue of The Pickwick Papers appeared in March 1836. It contained two chapters and cost one shilling. Each subsequent number followed a strict…
  • A Christmas CarolA 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.
  • FrankensteinFrankenstein 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…
  • Jane EyreJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell.
  • The War of the WorldsThe 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…
  • Alice's Adventures in WonderlandAlice'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…
  • The HobbitThe 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…
  • Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryCharlie 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.
  • Heart of Darkness"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…
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStrange 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…
  • The Fellowship of the RingThe 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…