Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I had brought a friend to the park—another Dickens enthusiast—and, with sinking hearts,
we decided to try the Great Expectations boat ride. There were signs, at various points in
the line, announcing that it would be a 45-minute wait from here, a 30-minute wait from
there—but it was a zero-minute wait, and we walked to the end unobstructed. Instead of an
attendant, we found a black chair occupied by only a walkie-talkie and a Stephen King nov-
el. After a minute or two, someone came and put us on a boat. Halfway up a dark tunnel,
the chemical smell pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely
unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of
me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the ab-
surdity of this commodified experience—all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out
of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone
else's voice, for most of the ride. At some point the boat swiveled and shot backward down a
ramp, splashing us and soaking our winter coats, and an automated camera took our picture.
ItcaughtuslookinglikeaperfectlyDickensianpair:meinamaniaofwild-eyedlaughter,my
friend resigned and unhappy—comedy and tragedy side by side, “in as regular alternation,”
as Dickens put it in
Oliver Twist
, “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.”
Afterward, in the gift shop, I bought a copy of the picture, as well as a 59-page version of
Great Expectations
published byacompany called Snapshot Classics. “Inthetime ittakes to
readtheoriginal,”promisedthebook'scover,whichwasdesignedtolooksoiledandcreased,
“you can read this Snapshot Classic up to 20 times and know the story and characters off by
heart.”
All the Dickens World employees I talked to—the performers, the bartenders, the mar-
keting director—were unfailingly kind and seemed to be working hard. Many of them had
worked at the park since it opened (they called themselves “originals”), sticking with it even
when it could no longer guarantee them regular hours. They said they felt like a family
and seemed to genuinely mean it. I wanted them to succeed. But the whole project seemed
doomed. None of this was their fault. It was modernity's fault, capitalism's fault, Charles
Dickens'sfault.IfoundmyselffantasizingthatDickensWorldwouldbeadoptedbyawealth-
ierpark—maybetheWizardingWorldofHarryPotter,inOrlando,Florida—andthatitwould
manage to somehow vanquish its villains, overcome the odds, live happily ever after.
When the plan for Dickens World was announced in 2005, many people were predictably
horrified. The
New York Times
wrote an editorial full of earnest handwringing (“There is
a lot to fear here”) over the way that Literature, this sacred receptacle of Truth, was being
tainted by consumerism. But if Dickens World seems to violate certain unspoken treaties
about the commercial exploitation of literature, it's worth remembering that Charles Dickens
did so as well. His art was gleefully tangled with capitalism. The first printings of his nov-
els, in their monthly installments, often had more pages of ads than they did of fiction. His
