The 1999 film of Great Expectations was edited after previews to make Estella more likeable

The ongoing “Dickens on Screen” season at the British Film Institute celebrates over a hundred years of screen adaptations of Dickens’s novels, to mark the author’s bicentenary year. Daniel Tyler looks back at four striking adaptations of Great Expectations and asks, why have filmmakers swapped Dickens’s equivocal ending for a happy reunion?

Although Dickens revised his novel so that it ends less dismally than originally intended, his final version is not the “happy ending” that some critics mistakenly suppose it to be. Estella’s final words to Pip are “we shall continue friends apart.” Pip’s response—“I saw the shadow of no future parting from her”—may contain a glimmer of hope amid the oblique wording, but it hardly constitutes an entirely upbeat conclusion.

David Aylott (dir.), The Boy and the Convict (1909)

Dickens proved attractive to the