I recently finished watching an old BBC serialization of Charles Dickens’s profound novel, Bleak House. It first aired in 2005 and to my eyes it has weathered two decades well (it’s streaming at Prime Video and Britbox). Gillian Anderson plays the tortured Lady Dedlock (you can learn a lot about his characters by their names—she’s caught in a no-win, deadlocked trap). The rest of the cast is appropriately bizarre, evil, or charming as needed.

It’s not easy to turn a 600-page book into an 8-episode TV script, but it’s been done well, with the complicated plot pretty clear and the characters vivid (the script was adapted from the novel by the very talented Andrew Davies).

A great deal of the wonder of the book lies not in what the characters say, or even what they do, but in the narrator’s resounding voice—and that doesn’t lend itself to the television. For example, the magnificent opening paragraphs show us a London mired in mud and fog—far beyond what a script writer could do for us. 32 chapters later (still in the middle of the book), it’s the narrator who leads us into the ghastly demise, the “spontaneous combustion” of the rag-and-bone man Krook. The TV can’t show it in its full horror as the narrator can.

At one key moment, the script allows the narrator a voice. Jo, the boy who earns a few tips by sweeping the mud away from the street crossing, has been caught up in the machinations of a ruthless lawyer (“Tulkinghorn”!), and forced to “move along”; finally, after nights on the road, homeless and harassed by the police, he collapses in fever and lies dying. It’s a great scene, with Dickens at his sentimental and emotional best; it was one of the author’s favorite passages to read aloud to weeping audiences.

The scene ends with the narrator’s passionate condemnation of the privileged and indifferent forces that have hounded him to death. I remembered this diatribe from the book and feared it wouldn’t be there. But it was. One character broke the “fourth wall” and turned to the camera, in close-up, and spoke the lines.

Almost 200 years after Dickens wrote, the accusation still needs to be made, though the language would have to change from majesties and reverends to a so-called democratic government tragically indifferent to the needs of its citizens and inhabitants.

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.