This is Dickens World, a theme park like no other. Here the sights, sounds and even smells of Victorian England are recreated as homage to one of Britain’s best-loved authors. Since May 25, the park’s opening day, characters and scenes from novels such as “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” have been coming to life and offering an entirely new way to enjoy Dickens and his work. “It is a period of great romance and fascination for the British,” says Kevin Christie, managing director of Dickens World. “The attraction provides a backdrop for a period in history that overseas visitors often expect to discover when they visit our country but can no longer find.”
They’re probably not going to find it here either.
Dickens World lies not in London—the scene of his best-loved stories—but just outside of Chatham, Kent, where Dickens lived as a young boy while his father worked as a clerk in the paymaster’s office. First impressions are not great. The £62 million (about $122 million) theme park is housed in a huge aluminum hangar wedged between a cinema multiplex and an outlet mall. A Nando’s fast-food joint greets you as you enter the building. Literary purists are appalled by what they see as the dumbing-down of one of the world’s greatest storytellers. “Of course, Dickens wasn’t averse to showmanship and magic himself,” says Dr. Jennifer Wallace, a professor of English literature at Cambridge University. “But that fictional imagination was offset with some very grim confrontation of poverty and exploitation, which I suspect will be glossed over in the Disneyfied theme park.”
And if you visit Dickens World hoping for a high-tech, Disneyesque experience, you’re in for a letdown. The scenery and props are rather flimsy, and they don’t conjure the spirit of Dickens’s brooding, foggy London. Costumed characters (Dickensian generics) such as policemen, rat-catchers and Victorian gentlemen roam about. There’s a Victorian Schoolroom with bleak wooden desks, an admonishing schoolteacher and, scrawled on the walls, the stern words RESPECT THY ELDERS; BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD. There’s Fagin’s Den, a soft-play area for little kids. Yes, the grubby place—“its walls perfectly black with age and dirt” according to Dickens—where Oliver is taught how to pickpocket is now fitted out with neon-green climbing walls and bright yellow slides. There’s a 3-D animated feature on Dickens’s life, and, surprisingly, this is one of the most entertaining and educational attractions. The Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge is appealing, but don’t expect Jacob Marley with his ponderous load of chains and steel. The frights are tame and kid-friendly. And when you leave, don’t forget to pick up your Dickens World T shirt and mug from the Old Curiosity Shop, the park’s gift shop. Oh, and there are a couple of his books on sale there, too.
Dickens World is proud that the Dickens Fellowship, a worldwide association of Dickens devotees, acted as consultants for the project to ensure its authenticity. “Dickens loved to see people enjoying themselves, and the Dickens Fellowship works to spread his love of humanity and his mastery of comedy and pathos,” says Thelma Grove, Dickens Fellowship adviser for the theme park. So all things considered, what’s the worst that can happen? It might not inspire kids to discard their iPods and hit the books, but it still stimulates interest in one of Britain’s greatest authors. And as Mr. Sleary advises in “Hard Times,” “People mutht be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it.”
