I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!: Negotiating Nancy, hyperauthenticity and hyperfidelity in the 2007 BBC adaptation of Oliver Twist

Inspired by the fresh impetus given to debates about fidelity at the Cultures of Translation conference (June 2008, Cardiff), this essay looks at the BBC Oliver Twist in the wider context of adaptations of the novel, and of history on television. The essay suggests that there is no true Nancy to which adaptations can be faithful or otherwise, but rather a series of overlapping and sometimes contradictory discourses which we, in our assumptions of realism in Dickens' early novels, try to read as a rounded individual. Exploring the ways in which adaptations since the early years of cinema have tried to create Nancys with interiority, I consider the influence of Lionel Bart's Oliver! and argue that when adaptations such as the BBC's present a social-realist, historical Nancy, they are both reacting against, and drawing on, Bart's success as well as on contemporary televisual notions of history.