Why not improve works by Gaskell or Dickens?

WE'RE BLESSED, as I've said before in these columns, to live through a golden age of literary adaptation. Its masters (currently Alan Bleasdale and Andrew Davies, arm-wrestling it out on Sunday evenings) are - in their chosen field - the equals of the great television dramatists of the Sixties and Seventies (Dennis Potter, Simon Gray, David Mercer), of the Victorian novelists or the Jacobean dramatists.

Masters of adaptation such as Bleasdale and Davies do not regard themselves as slaves to the text. They reserve to themselves artistic licence at least equal to that of the writers whose work they adapt.

I recently presumed to ask Andrew Davies why he had taken it on himself to alter the end of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Because, he replied with the most amiable of smiles, it improved the novel.

All this is apropos the ending which, perforce, Davies will add to Wives and Daughters, Mrs Gaskell having died before she could get the last pages down; and the full-scale "back-narrative" that Bleasdale prepends to Oliver Twist.

In this paper yesterday, Laura Tennant tore into Bleasdale in her Monday TV review. "I just lost patience... lurid melodrama... unconvincing Gothic horror". Bleasdale "stole" from Lionel Bart(!). Worst of all, it didn't work as melodrama: "I did not shed a single tear during the whole hour and a half" (a nice Victorian test of literary quality).

I have to say my hankie also remained dry. But I did find Bleasdale's novel before the novel effective. I'd go so far as to say I found it fascinatingly speculative. There is, I agree, some borrowing (not, surely, a "theft"). But it is less from Bart's saccharine travesty than from the montage prelude that David Lean attached to his 1948 film of Oliver Twist. This shows, as I recall, a clearly middle-class woman - an outcast - arriving at the workhouse hospital to give birth to a baby and promptly die. In Dickens's novel, nothing is known of Oliver's mother, other than that she had no wedding ring and was a victim of "the old story".

Lean felt it necessary to condition the Forties audience for one of the troubling anomalies in Dickens's narratives. Obviously, children brought up in an 1830s workhouse were paupers. They received no education, other than blows and floggings when they spoke out of turn. They did not speak good English - how could they? A child like Oliver, raised in the squalid surroundings of Bumble's baby-farm, would not say "Please, sir, I want some more"; he would grunt like a starved savage.

For Dickens's readers, with their eugenic prejudices, the fact that Oliver speaks so well is the clearest of signs that he is middle class, decent, like them. He is no guttersnipe, no Artful Dodger. We need different signals to alert us to Oliver's middle-class pedigree. Hence Lean's and Bleasdale's preludes showing how a "respectable" woman came to this sorry plight.

There are other defences of Bleasdale's back-narrative. For readers of the novel, the denouement is clearly contrived. Why would Monks go to the incredible trouble of destroying his half-brother by first having him incarcerated in a workhouse, then recruited into Fagin's criminal gang?

Monks is an enigma in the novel. There is a vague hint that he has syphilis: "vice has made your face an index to your mind". However is it, as Alan Bleasdale suggested in his prelude, an inherited condition? From Edward Leeford, that is. One of the most intriguing innovations in Bleasdale's narrative is the suggestion that Monks is as much a victim as Oliver.

One looks forward with eagerness to how Bleasdale will handle the other villains in the novel - Fagin and Sikes. I hope he lets his imagination rip. Why not improve Dickens?

The writer is professor of English literature at University College, London