Earliest adaptations
While it was being published, David Copperfield was the object, according to Philip Bolton's survey, of six initial dramatisations, followed by a further twenty when the public's interest was at its peak in the 1850s.[203] The first adaptation, Born with a Caul by George Almar, was staged while the serial issues were not yet completed, with some changes from Dickens's plot, having Steerforth live and marry Emily, and inventing a character to kill Mr Murdstone.[204] The most spectacular dramatisation, however, were those of Dickens himself. Although he waited more than ten years to prepare a version for his public readings, it soon became one of his favourite performances, especially the storm scene, which he kept for the finale, "the most sublime moment in all the readings".[205]
Fiction
- Barbara Kingsolver's 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead, closely parallels the events, characters, and moral trajectory of Dickens' novel but is set in late-twentieth-century/early-twenty-first-century Appalachia.[206]
Radio
- Favourite Story, hosted by Ronald Colman – 25 October 1947
- Theater Guild on the Air – 24 December 1950 with Richard Burton, Boris Karloff, Flora Robson and Cyril Ritchard
- The Personal History of David Copperfield – BBC Radio 4, 1991 – a ten-part series adapted by Betty Davies[207] with Gary Cady as David Copperfield, Miriam Margolyes, John Moffatt, Timothy Spall and Sheila Hancock
- Performed unabridged on Audible by Richard Armitage 2018
Film and TV
David Copperfield has been filmed on several occasions:
David Copperfield (1935)- 1911: David Copperfield, silent film directed by Theodore Marston
- 1913: David Copperfield, silent film directed by Thomas Bentley
- 1922: David Copperfield, silent film directed by A. W. Sandberg
- 1935: David Copperfield, a film directed by George Cukor, featuring W. C. Fields
- 1956: David Copperfield, a 13-part TV serial shown on BBC. No recordings are known to exist.[208]
- 1966: David Copperfield, a 13-part TV serial. Only four of the thirteen episodes are known to exist.[209]
- 1969: David Copperfield, a TV film directed by Delbert Mann
- 1974: David Copperfield, a 6-part TV serial directed by Joan Craft
- 1983: David Copperfield, an animated film by Burbank Films Australia
- 1986: David Copperfield, a 10-part TV serial directed by Barry Letts, shown on BBC
- 1993: David Copperfield, animated TV film, shown on NBC
- 1999: David Copperfield, a 2-part TV serial shown on BBC
- 2000: David Copperfield, a TV film directed by Peter Medak
- 2019: The Personal History of David Copperfield, a film directed by Armando Iannucci
