The novel has been adapted for stage, film or television at least seven times. The earliest theatrical version actually appeared before publication of the serialised novel was finished, with the resolution of the stage play wildly different from that of the eventual finished novel. Dickens's offence at this plagiarism prompted him to have Nicholas encounter a "literary gentleman" in chapter forty-eight of the novel. The gentleman brags that he has dramatised two hundred and forty-seven novels "as fast as they had come out – in some cases faster than they had come out", and claims to have thus bestowed fame on their authors. In response Nicholas delivers a lengthy and heated condemnation of the practice of adapting still-unfinished books without the author's permission, going so far as to say:
