Skip to content
Curated playlist

British novels adapted into television shows

  • James Bond13 minJames Bond was born from a very deliberate act of boredom management. On the 17th of February 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica, and began writing what he called "the spy story to end all spy…
  • 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…
  • The Borrowers (novel)8 minThe Borrowers won the Carnegie Medal in 1952, the same year Mary Norton published it through the London firm Dent. The award recognized it as the outstanding children's book by a British author that year. Norton's premise runs on a simple…
  • 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 Other Boleyn Girl8 minThe Other Boleyn Girl opens in 1521, when a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Boleyn is handed over to a king. Her father Thomas Boleyn and her uncle Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, have made a calculation: if Mary becomes Henry VIII's…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Pride and Prejudice15 minPride and Prejudice opens with one of the most debated sentences in English literary history: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen wrote those…
  • 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…
  • To the Lighthouse7 minTo the Lighthouse arrives with a question rather than a story: can a child's disappointment about a cancelled boat trip hold the whole weight of human longing? Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel stakes its reputation on that claim. Set against…
  • Gulliver's Travels12 minGulliver's Travels arrived in London bookshops on the 28th of October 1726, priced at 8 shillings and 6 pence, and within days it had become the talk of the city. Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman behind the work,…
  • 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 Lost World (Doyle novel)7 minSir Arthur Conan Doyle stood before the Royal Geographical Society on the 13th of February 1911. He listened intently as his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett spoke about a dangerous region in Bolivia known as the Huanchaca Plateau. Fawcett…

Queue