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Curated playlist

British novels adapted into television shows

  • James BondJames Bond got his name from a field guide to Caribbean birds. Ian Fleming wanted the dullest name he could find.
  • The Pickwick PapersCharles Dickens, then 24, was hired to write captions for comic sporting drawings. He knew nothing of sport.
  • A Christmas CarolDickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks, walking 15 to 20 miles at night around London.
  • The Borrowers (novel)In the novel The Borrowers, tiny people take household items that vanish. It won the 1952 Carnegie Medal.
  • FrankensteinBoris Karloff's lightning-jolted monster is not what Mary Shelley wrote. That image came largely from a 1931 film.
  • Jane EyreOne reviewer declared that no woman could possibly have written Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte wrote as Currer Bell.
  • The Other Boleyn GirlThe Other Boleyn Girl, a 2001 novel, opens with a thirteen-year-old handed to a king by her own family.
  • The War of the WorldsIn The War of the Worlds, the Martians are beaten by germs. Earthly bacteria kill them, since they had no immunity.
  • The HobbitA publisher let his 10-year-old son decide whether to print The Hobbit.
  • Pride and PrejudiceJane Austen sold Pride and Prejudice outright for £110 and came to regret it. She had hoped for £150.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryDahl's early drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had nine golden tickets, not five.
  • Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness grew from a river trip he really took.
  • To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse builds a whole novel on a boy's cancelled boat trip. Virginia Woolf's 1927 book has almost no action.
  • Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels gave computer science the terms big-endian and little-endian.
  • Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights is the only novel Emily Brontë ever published, and it first appeared in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. One early review, in Graham's Lady Magazine, reacted with open horror. The critic asked how a human being could…
  • The Chronicles of NarniaThe Chronicles of Narnia began as a single picture in the mind of C. S. Lewis: a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. Lewis said the image had been with him since he was about sixteen. Then, around the age of forty,…
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeA dream gave Stevenson the idea for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His wife woke him mid-transformation.
  • The Lost World (Doyle novel)The Lost World, a 1912 adventure novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, began with a startlingly bold ambition. While writing it, Doyle told his editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith: "My ambition is to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did…
  • Animal FarmAnimal Farm, George Orwell's short political fable, nearly ended in June 1944. A German V-1 flying bomb destroyed his London flat in Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn. Orwell spent hours sifting through the rubble and found the pages intact. He…
  • Brave New WorldBrave New World is a dystopian novel by the English author Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. It is set in the year 2540. Its London has no mothers and no fathers. Citizens are produced in bottles, sorted into ranks before birth, and kept…

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