By using adaptation theory and Linda Hutcheon’s depiction of adapters in the process of adaptation as “first interpreters and then creators” (18), this article argues how the original Sherlock Holmes illustrations, penciled most notably by Sidney Paget, are both a canonical element of the Holmes legacy and themselves an adaptation. This creates a means of exploring why and how the television show Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994), developed by Granada Television, uses the original Holmes illustrations as a source of adaptation to create the appearance of fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Being faithful to the Holmes stories is not a common adaptation practice. Granada’s Holmes chooses to be faithful to the original illustrations and to the Victorian era, not so much to be unique among Holmes adaptations but to be similar to the 1980s heritage cinema trend of faithfully adapting English literature. Heritage cinema, as Andrew Higson states, is a “potent marketing of the past” (1), and through its propensity to adapt literature faithfully to a past time period, heritage cinema reflects a cultural desire for national nostalgia in 1980s Britain. In the case of Granada’s Holmes, this tactic turns Sherlock Holmes into both financial and cultural capital. By being seemingly faithful to the original illustrations, Granada’s Holmes is left vulnerable to the kinds of fidelity or comparative criticisms that adaptation scholars often denounce. Adaptation studies criticizes efforts to compare the source text to the adaptation, saying it will inevitably lead to privileging the source text. Through my investigation, however, I argue that there is a need to use forms of fidelity criticism in order to more fully explore the reasons why Granada’s Holmes hinges its success around fidelity to the original Holmes illustrations.

The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.