Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
two kids and a dog. (I have no idea.) The figures started talking, but I could hardly under-
stand anything they were saying because of the pop music blasting from Nando's, the Por-
tuguese chain restaurant next door, and also because the trailer for the new Muppets movie
was playing on a giant screen outside the Odeon. Compared to this ambient multimedia bar-
rage, Dickens and his crew seemed oddly lifeless. I gave up listening and went inside.
I recognized, immediately, many of the buildings I had seen in progress five years earlier:
landmarks from Dickens's life and work, all scaled down and crowded together. There were
rows of leaning houses with crooked chimneys, Warren's Blacking factory (where Dickens
worked as a boy), and the Marshalsea prison (where his father was imprisoned for debt). It
was all, still, technically impressive. But Dickens World, it quickly became clear, was an at-
traction very much down on its luck. This was the low season for park visitors—the num-
bers are highest around Christmas and over the summer—and only a smattering of families
wandered around. Dickens World had been closed, during recent weeks, for its annual main-
tenance session, and yet things still weren't quite running smoothly. Posts were abandoned;
displays were broken; animatronics failed to animate. In the schoolroom, the schoolmaster
wasconspicuouslyabsent,andsomeofthedesks'interactivetouchscreenswereoutoforder.
(I managed, on a functional one, to play a quiz game and earn 75 Dickens Points, although
there was no indication of how the scoring worked or what the points were good for.) The
giftshopwascalled—inblatantdisregardofbothVictorianspellingandthetitleofDickens's
novel—the Olde Curiosity Shoppe. One of the performers in the plaza was riding a unicycle,
a mode of transport that wasn't invented until after Dickens's death.
The visitor experience consisted mainly of listening to recorded speeches, many of which
wereeitherdullorunintelligible.ThismadeittheoppositeofaDickensnovel,inwhichyour
experience is expertly guided, your attention constantly engaged. Dickens's genius was to
unite all kinds of contradictory impulses: education and entertainment, misery and fun, viol-
ence and laughter, simplicity and sophistication. At Dickens World, these contradictions just
felt contradictory. The result was sad and funny, in a way that Dickens would have loved.
He was obsessed with grand plans that ended in failure, with the comic tragedy of provincial
ambition. In this way, Dickens World was a perfect tribute to Charles Dickens.
For a park that markets itself to children, Dickens World was surprisingly grisly. I saw at
least two severed heads, and when the performers lip-synched their way through a dramatiz-
ation of
Oliver Twist
in the courtyard, it ended as the novel ends: with Bill Sikes murdering
Nancy by beating her head in with a club, then being chased by a mob until he accidentally
hangs himself. The violence was suggested rather than shown, but still—I flinched slightly
for the kids who had been pulled in from the audience to play orphans. The gruesomeness
was admirable, in a way: you wouldn't want Dickens World to exclude the darker side of
things—that would be a misrepresentation. But it made me wonder, again, if the idea of this
place really made sense.
