Dickens Quarterly

David Copperfield (1850–51) is a novel about memory and the power of memory to evoke reflections drawn from the past. In a series of strikingly visual images, events from the protagonist's early life and subsequent growth unfold in a manner critics have identified as precinematic. David Copperfield, writes Grahame Smith, anticipates specific filmic techniques; and this novel, as well as his works, have "played some part, however small, in the cultural and material movements that eventually made [cinema] possible" (Smith 10).¹ Not surprisingly, the novel has proved popular with adaptors, drawn to a work in which the protagonist reflects in nostalgic terms on his past, whose life also presents an opportunity for directors to dwell on the whole nation as well. Thus, despite obvious cultural differences between the novel and the film, the 1966 RAI Italian version of David Copperfield offered the director, Anton Giulio Majano, a chance to combine the hero's personal memories with reflections on the nation at a particular time in history.

The film considered as the cornerstone of all successive contemporary cinematic adaptations of David Copperfield is David O. Selznick's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, directed by George Cukor in 1935. It is emblematic that, on 16 May 1934, the producer, the director and the representatives of Hollywood's cinematographic empire met members of the board of the Dickens Fellowship in a room of London's Savoy Hotel. The purpose of the meeting was to find common ground between the necessities of the American market and the typically British spirit of Dickens's novel. The result was to have a Dickensian scholar, J. C. Fildes, play Wilkins Micawber as a replacement for Charles Laughton (who had been originally [End Page 318] selected for the role). Cukor's David Copperfield was the result of a deliberate project to produce an adaptation intended to introduce and educate the masses to "classical" literature and to David's "golden rules" of "the habits of punctuality, order and diligence" (511; ch. 42), eliminating, at the same time, any hint of morbidity or sexuality present in characters like Rosa Dartle, Martha Endell or even Annie Strong, none of whom appear in the movie.² As a consequence, Cukor's version of David Copperfield became a reference point for succeeding generations of television and cinema producers, directors and screenwriters.

With reference to public service television in Europe, the first names to come to mind are the BBC and Sir John Reith. Under Reith's influence, the corporation's first director (1923–37), who believed that radio "should inform, educate, and entertain" and so bring culture to a mass audience (Butt 160), the BBC set a high standard for subsequent televised broadcasting.³ At first, TV dramas followed the models of radio readings. Actors and directors worked with nineteenth-century novels such as Little Women (first adapted in 1950), The Warden (1951) and Pride and Prejudice (1952) with a sustained emphasis on the importance of reproducing the "educational" content of such classics. Notwithstanding the developments in technology and screening (initially, television dramas were shot in a studio, with heavy cameras; from the 1950s it became possible to shoot in open spaces, and to "cut and paste" outdoor scenes with live scenes), the aim of the so-called "Saturday Serial Drama" remained the same, creating a context well suited to Cukor's version of David Copperfield and readily "translatable" and "portable" to TV audiences.

As foreseeable, the BBC served as an important model for the newly born RAI (originally founded as a national radio company in 1924), whose transmissions began on 3 January 1954. It is indicative that the first evening transmission consisted of a classical literary piece: a drama based upon L'osteria della Posta (1762) by Carlo Goldoni. In 1958, almost 98% of Italians could watch the programs broadcast by the RAI, which became a fundamental medium by which a still partially illiterate audience was to be instructed and educated. As Italian television historians have remarked, [End Page 319] the "Reithian" style of the BBC had an enormous impact, first in the postwar radio schedules, and then in the...