Dickens that inspired movie pioneers like D. W. Griffith, who 
carried a copy of a Dickens novel on location. The realistic 
novel, that arose with the newspaper form of communal cross-
section and human-interest coverage in the eighteenth century, 
was a complete anticipation of film form. Even the poets took 
up the same panoramic style, with human interest vignettes 
and close-ups as variant. Gray’s Elegy , Burns’ The Cotter’s  
Saturday Night , Wordsworth’s Michael , and Byron’s Childe  
Harold  are all like shooting scripts for some contemporary 
documentary film.

      “The kettle began it. . . .” Such is the opening of Dickens’ 
Cricket and the Hearth . If the modern novel came out of Gogol’s 
The Overcoat , the modern movie, says Eisenstein, boiled up out 
of that kettle. It should be plain that the American and even 
British approach to film is much lacking in that free interplay