Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Yorkin1842,Tiffany'ssoldcopiesofhisbust,abarberreportedlysoldscrapsofhishair,and
crowdsfollowedhimthroughthestreets;inBoston,ladieswithscissorstriedtocutoffpieces
ofhis coat.) Dickens'sworkseemed tolend itself especially well toliterary tourism. Its char-
acters walked on real English streets and spoke in real English accents, so—despite all of the
cartoonish exaggerations—its atmosphere felt strangely real. As G. K. Chesterton put it: “It
is well to be able to realize that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical con-
tact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse, or into the bleak smell
of the sea. We know that we are there.” During Dickens's lifetime, readers often visited the
settings of his stories, and in the decades after his death, a number of books were published
to guide Dickens readers to Dickens spots:
A Pickwickian Pilgrimage
,
About England with
Dickens
,
A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land
. By 1941, Dickens tourism was common enough
for Edmund Wilson to complain that “the typical Dickens expert is an old duffer who . . . is
primarily interested in proving that Mr. Pickwick stopped at a certain inn and slept in a cer-
tain bed.”
Dickens himself was a literary tourist. He once spent an entire day at Sir Walter Scott's
house, contemplating the dead writer's hat. He also partook, strangely enough, in Dickens
tourism. (Dickens was, in many ways, the world's biggest Dickens fan.) He commissioned
paintings of his characters, named his daughter after Dora in
David Copperfield
, and went
out of his way to visit a pub named after
Our Mutual Friend
. It's said that a few days before
he died, Dickens was seen standing in a park in Rochester, just a few miles from the future
site of Dickens World, gazing wistfully at a stout brick building across the street. It was the
actual house on which he modeled Miss Havisham's house in
Great Expectations
. Dickens
lived, and then he died, in his own Dickens World.
Last month, a few weeks before Dickens's 200th birthday, I went back to Dickens World. It
was the worst of times. In 2007, the plan was to create 200 jobs and attract 500,000 visitors a
year and help reignite the region's economy. But the attraction opened just before the global
economy tanked. The management company that had generated those early projections was
fired for failing to deliver anything even close to them. The park reduced performers' work
shifts, dropped managerial positions, and even turned off the Dickensian gas lamps. Today
Dickens World survives largely as a landlord, collecting rent from the Odeon movie theater
next door and the restaurants (Pizza Hut, Subway, Chimichanga) that surround it. Its market-
ing plan now focuses on attracting schoolchildren and retirees.
I arrived at Dickens World at noon on a gray and windy day. The most striking feature of
the building's exterior is a big clock on which the numbers run counterclockwise. (I wasn't
sure if this was supposed to signify some kind of mystical journey back in time or was just
an installation error.) As I approached, the clock started to chime the hour, which triggered a
little show: its face opened to reveal Charles Dickens sitting in a wooden rowboat along with
