Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SAM ANDERSON
The Pippiest Place on Earth
FROM
The New York Times Magazine
F
IVE YEARS AGO
, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an
attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London
of Charles Dickens's novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, an-
imatronicDickenscharacters,andstrategicallyplacedchemical“smellpots”thatwould,when
heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations
boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a grave-
yard, and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body
language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian school-
teacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house, or set their
kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin's Den, after the filthy kid-
napper from
Oliver Twist
. The park's operating budget was $124 million.
DickensWorld,inotherwords,soundedlesslikeaviablebusinessthanitdidamockument-
ary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking
to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its ex-
istence raised a number of questions. Who was the park's target audience? (“Dickens-loving
flume-ride enthusiasts” seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desec-
ration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our
culture's relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum
of1850sLondon—withitstyphusandcholeraandcloudsoftoxiccorpsegas,itssewagepour-
ing into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years—why would anyone want to visit? (“If
a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,”
Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, “he would be literally sick—sick with the
smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”)
Well,despiteitsobviousabsurdity,
I
wantedtogotoDickensWorld.IloveCharlesDickens.
I don't mean “love” in the weak sense, the way people love frozen yogurt or casual Friday or
the '80s. I am—like probably millions of readers spread over many different eras—actively in
love with Charles Dickens, or at least with the version of his mind that survives in his writing.
(The man himself, as several new biographies remind us, was significantly harder to love.) Of
all the mega-canonical writers, Dickens is the most charming. At a time of great formality in
literature, he wrote irreverently, for everybody, from the perspective of orphans and outcasts.
His best work—
Great Expectations
,
David Copperfield
,
Bleak House
—plays the entire xylo-
phoneofareader'svaluesystem,fromhightolow;youcanalmostfeeltheoxytocindumping,
