Reading adaptations provides an original introduction to the widespread and popular practice of stage adaptation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through a series of specific case studies, the book offers readings of stage versions of works by writers such as William Godwin, Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and establishes important new contexts within which to view the production and reception of the period's canonical literature. The plays engage with the original texts' treatment of issues such as social and political justice, the construction of individual and...