Classic Novels on Screen: Fifty-Four Filmed Books

Fifty-four books on the site have been filmed, and the distribution is instructive: a handful of nineteenth-century novels carry dozens of adaptations each, while most of the shelf has one. Three Musketeers and Romeo and Juliet lead; Alice, Dracula, Frankenstein and Treasure Island follow.

The list is generated from the adaptation data behind the Filmed classics pages, where thirteen novels have full comparison tables with cast, director, runtime and IMDb links. The rest have a table of versions on their own book page, checked against Wikipedia and IMDb.

Every filmed classic on this shelf

Fifty-four titles with at least one verifiable screen version, oldest first.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1600	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1600	Hamlet	William Shakespeare	Play	35,005	2 h
1605	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	Novel	423,624	24 h
1623	Macbeth	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1719	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	Novel	121,000	7 h
1726	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	Novel	104,000	6 h
1811	Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen	Novel	119,000	7 h
1813	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	Novel	122,000	7 h
1815	Emma	Jane Austen	Novel	161,000	9 h
1820	Ivanhoe	Walter Scott	Novel	192,000	11 h
1826	The Last of the Mohicans	James Fenimore Cooper	Novel	149,000	8 h
1831	The Hunchback of Notre-Dame	Victor Hugo	Novel	184,000	10 h
1838	Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens	Novel	161,010	9 h
1843	A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	Novel	29,000	2 h
1844	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	466,000	26 h
1844	The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	226,061	13 h
1847	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Brontë	Novel	185,000	10 h
1847	Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë	Novel	116,000	6 h
1848	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	Novel	301,000	17 h
1850	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	Novel	357,000	20 h
1850	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Novel	83,000	5 h
1851	Moby-Dick; or, The Whale	Herman Melville	Novel	211,000	12 h
1853	Bleak House	Charles Dickens	Novel	351,226	20 h
1857	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	Novel	116,000	6 h
1860	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	Novel	247,000	14 h
1861	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	Novel	184,000	10 h
1862	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	Novel	551,000	31 h
1865	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Novel	27,000	2 h
1868	Little Women	Louisa May Alcott	Novel	201,000	11 h
1868	The Moonstone	Wilkie Collins	Novel	197,000	11 h
1869	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	Novel	562,000	31 h
1870	Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea	Jules Verne	Novel	104,016	6 h
1873	Around the World in Eighty Days	Jules Verne	Novel	63,000	4 h
1874	Far from the Madding Crowd	Thomas Hardy	Novel	136,000	8 h
1876	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain	Novel	70,000	4 h
1878	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	Novel	349,000	19 h
1883	Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson	Novel	68,000	4 h
1884	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	Novel	116,000	6 h
1886	Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	Novel	26,000	1 h
1889	Three Men in a Boat	Jerome K. Jerome	Novel	67,000	4 h
1890	The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	Novel	79,000	4 h
1891	Tess of the d’Urbervilles	Thomas Hardy	Novel	149,000	8 h
1894	The Jungle Book	Rudyard Kipling	Novel	54,000	3 h
1895	The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	Novel	32,223	2 h
1897	The Invisible Man	H. G. Wells	Novel	49,000	3 h
1898	The War of the Worlds	H. G. Wells	Novel	61,000	3 h
1899	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	Novel	38,000	2 h
1900	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	Novel	39,409	2 h
1902	The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	59,000	3 h
1903	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	Novel	32,000	2 h
1905	A Little Princess	Frances Hodgson Burnett	Novel	67,000	4 h
1906	White Fang	Jack London	Novel	75,212	4 h
1910	The Phantom of the Opera	Gaston Leroux	Novel	84,181	5 h
1911	The Secret Garden	Frances Hodgson Burnett	Novel	81,000	5 h

How this list was made

A book is listed when the adaptation data records at least one screen version with an IMDb id and a matching year. Uncredited or unproduced adaptations are excluded, which is why some famous page-to-screen stories are missing.

Thirteen of the fifty-four have a dedicated comparison page under Filmed classics; the rest link to the version table on the book page.

The fifty-four titles behind these pages total 8,116,967 words, which is 451 hours of reading at the 300 words a minute used across the site. thirty-four authors are represented. The longest is War and Peace at 562,000 words, the shortest Macbeth at 18,000: an 18,000-word story and a 562,000-word novel are adapted in the same spirit and at very different cost, which is why the film pages give the running time of every version next to the length of the book.

Questions readers ask

Which book has the most adaptations?

The Three Musketeers, with dozens of films and serials since 1909. The comparison page lists the earliest four and the latest four of the fifty-five verifiable versions.

Why is my favourite adaptation missing?

Because the data source is Wikidata’s ‘based on’ relation plus an IMDb check. An adaptation that is not catalogued there cannot be verified, so the pages say ‘we can verify’ rather than ‘all’.

Do the pages say which film is best?

No. They give year, director, cast and runtime, and leave the judgement to you; there is no ranking anywhere on the site.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.