What the Dickens?

As we await the umpteenth remake of Great Expectations later this year - co-starring Helena Bonham-Carter, Jeremy Irvine and Ralph Fiennes - the British Film Institute now proves conclusively that Dickens has been a cinema staple for more than 110 years.

In the 200th anniversary of the author's birth, the BFI has just discovered the oldest surviving film featuring a Dickens character.

The Death of Poor Joe, believed to derive from a character in Bleak House, dates back to March 1901, seven months before the previous winner in the "Dickens earliest" stakes, Scrooge or Marley's Ghost, released in November of the same year.

At 35 seconds long, the new footage as, according to BFI curator Bryony Dixon,  directed in Brighton by George Albert Smith and featuring the filmmaker's wife, Laura Bayley, as Joe, and Tom Green (also above) as the watchman.