Pride and Prejudice (1938)

On 22 May 1938, the BBC broadcast a 55-minute live television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from its Alexandra Palace studios — the first Jane Austen novel ever adapted for television, and one of the earliest literary adaptations of any kind made for the new medium. It was adapted and directed by Michael Barry, with Curigwen Lewis as Elizabeth Bennet and Andrew Osborn as Mr. Darcy. As was standard practice for the BBC’s small pre-war television service, the production was performed live a second time a few days later so that viewers who missed the first transmission had a chance to catch it.

A broadcast that no longer exists

Nothing of this production survives. In 1938, British television was transmitted live and watched live; videotape recording did not exist yet, and the “telerecording” process of filming a broadcast off a monitor was still years away from routine BBC use. What aired on 22 May 1938 was seen by the small number of households in range of the Alexandra Palace transmitter and then, in the most literal sense, was gone. No kinescope, no film print, no off-air recording of any kind was made.

What remains is the paper trail: Michael Barry’s script, contemporary listings in the Radio Times, and a scattering of newspaper notices — reportedly including a review in The Times that found the production “charming.” That’s the entire surviving record. There is no way to know how the performances actually looked or sounded, only that the broadcast happened, who was in it, and roughly how it was received at the time.

The cast

Alongside Lewis and Osborn, the production cast Allan Jeayes as Mr. Bennet, Barbara Everest as Mrs. Bennet, and Antoinette Cellier as Jane Bennet. Lewis Stringer played Charles Bingley and André Morell — later a familiar face in British film and television — played Mr. Wickham. Patrick Gover played Mr. Collins, Helen Horsey played Charlotte Lucas, Dorothy Green played Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Mervyn Johns, who went on to a long character-actor career in British cinema, played Sir William Lucas.

Why it still matters to the story of Austen on screen

A lost broadcast can’t be reviewed, streamed, or compared scene-for-scene with later versions — there is simply nothing left to watch. But its existence still matters as the starting point of a screen tradition that runs continuously through the 1995 Andrew Davies miniseries and beyond: the BBC returned to Pride and Prejudice repeatedly across the following decades (in 1952 and 1958, both also now lost, and then, with the earliest surviving version, in 1967), making this 1938 production the first entry in what would become the longest-running adaptation history of any Austen novel.