Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dyed pencil-eraser pink; they arrived in big rolled sheets that were bolted to the wooden
buildings, in thin layers toward the top (where no one would touch it) and thick layers be-
low—because, Phil said, kids tend to kick things. Later, professional scene painters came
along to make the pink bricks look grimy, adding highlights to signify texture and smoke.
The result looked so good that, when I got back to London, some of the actual Victorian-era
brick and moss and ivy struck me as unrealistic.
BeingatDickensWorld,atthemomentofitscreation, feltexactly likebeinginanepisode
of
The Office
. The manager told me that, when the park advertised for 50 jobs a few months
earlier, nearly 1,000 people had applied. (The job market in Chatham has been desperate
since the navy pulled out of the dockyard in the early '80s.) He also told me that he and his
staffnarrowedthepoolwith
American Idol
-styleauditions.“Wemadetheapplicantsdemon-
strate customer service,” he said. “What they'd do if somebody lost a child, or injured them-
selves. Or if there was a complaint, unfortunately. But then I said to them, 'The twist is,
you
have to do it in a Victorian manner
.'”
IleftDickensWorldafteracoupleofdays.Asaliteraryexperience, ithadbeenprettythin
gruel. But like Oliver Twist, I wanted more.
What is the best way to commune with an author, other than reading his books? Stand in his
childhoodbedroom?Retracetherouteheusedtowalktowork?Writehisname,inhishouse,
with his own quill pen, on a postcard of him?
Suchbehaviorshavebecomestaplesofliterarytourism,atraditionthathasbeenaroundfor
atleastacoupleofcenturies.Aliterarytouristhesecularechoofareligiouspilgrimage.The
hope is the same as with saints' relics: that some residue of genius will survive in the physic-
al objects an author has touched, that the secret to his mind will turn out to be hidden in the
places his body passed through—the proportions of a doorway, the smell of old stone. Liter-
ature, for all its power, is an abstract transaction: a reader gives time and attention, an author
gives patterns of words that call up vivid people and landscapes that—mystifyingly—are not
physically there (at least beyond the level of neurons firing). It seems like a natural human
response to try to plug that gap—to look for solid, real-world corollaries for those interi-
or landscapes, whether it's walking the route of
Ulysses
on Bloomsday, stuffing a bagpipe
withhaggisonBurnsDay,orwizard-spottingonPlatform9¾atKing'sCrossstation.It'sthe
brain'sattempttoanchoranabstraction,tomakethespiritworldandtheboringworldfinally
align. It is, in my experience, one of the cheapest forms of magic available.
InEngland,literarytourismtookoffattheendofthe18thcentury,justbeforeDickenswas
born. By the time his books exploded into popularity, in the 1830s, literary tourism was an
established tradition. Dickens was the first author to earn what we'd think of as a mass read-
ership, and visiting places from his fiction was a way for individual readers to make an in-
timate connection with a sometimes distressingly public figure. (When Dickens visited New
