Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
stories inspired endless adaptations, extensions, and tributes, including hundreds of spinoff
products: Dickens-themed hats, pens, cigars, songbooks, joke books, figurines, sheet music,
ladles.TheatercompaniesinLondonstagedrivalversionsofhisnovelsbeforehe'devenfin-
ished writing them.
Allofwhichistosaythatpayingtribute toDickensgetsverytrickyveryquickly.Homage
and exploitation shade into each other. Dickens World is just the latest in a long line of at-
temptstoprofitbymakingDickens'sfictionalworldsconcrete.Theparkdoesn'tfailbecause
it's too commercial—it fails because it's too reverent, and reverent about the wrong things. It
treats Dickens as an institution, when what we want is what is gone, or what survives only in
the texts: the energy, the aura, the spirit.
Which brings us back to religion. Dickens World sits in the center of Dickens territory,
right on the river Medway—the young Dickens, confined to his attic bedroom with terrible
painsinhisside,mighthavebeenabletoseetheattractionfromhiswindow.MyfriendandI,
looking for traces of whatever energy Dickens left behind in the actual world, made our own
self-guided pilgrimage through Kent.
We drove a tiny rented Hyundai between curving hedgerows into Cooling, a country vil-
lage that feels more like the absence of a village, a negative space defined by bird song and
horizon and wind. We parked next to Saint James, an 800-year-old church, to which Dickens
often walked, and which seemed to exist today in a pocket of such deep, eternal silence that
I felt immediately alienated from my iPhone. Its graveyard contains one particularly tragic
cluster of stones: 13 tiny markers, each of which represents a child killed, before Dickens's
time, in a malaria epidemic. Ten of those children belonged to a single family. Dickens gave
this tragedy (slightly downsized for plausibility) to Pip, who begins
Great Expectations
try-
ingtoimagine,basedonlyontheshapesoftheirgraves,whathisparentsandhisfivesiblings
were like.
Standing there, looking at these real stones that were also Pip's fictional stones, I felt
a powerful confluence: the lovely loneliness of the landscape, the sadness of that family's
tragedy, the old elegance of the graves (Pip thinks of them as “lozenges”), my affection for
Great Expectations
and this immediate physical connection to its author, whom I tried to
imagine standing on this same spot, his body touched by these same patterns of cold wind,
having some version of these same feelings. There was no parking garage, no admission fee,
no gift shop, no hidden camera taking my picture. I felt pinned between worlds.
We drove deeper into the country, to Dickens's old house, Gad's Hill Place. This was the
emblem of Dickens's success: as a child, he walked by it many times with his father and fan-
tasizedaboutsomedaybuyingit.Asanadult,hecamebackanddid.It'snowaprivateschool,
and on this day it was empty and locked. We stood outside its front gate for a while, looking.
My friend said, finally, that it looked exactly right: the kind of house a child would find im-
pressive but that's not actually great—drab, slightly pompous. I just kept trying to imagine
