Dickens World: Not-so-great expectations

The first Dickens World theme park opens its doors today. From 10am, fans of the greatest-ever British novelist can stroll through picturesque approximations of his London streets, alleys, courtyards and docks, visit an Old Curiosity Shop, and take a "dark boat" ride past dingy wharves and the clapboard houses of Victorian desperadoes.

The £62m park, built on a 71,000 sq ft site at Chatham Maritime in Kent by the Continuum company, promises to let visitors "step back into Dickensian England" to become "immersed in the urban streets, sounds and smells of the 19th century". How exactly they will evoke the characteristic smells of mid-Victorian London (sewage, boiled cloth, rotting vegetables and chronically unwashed people,) in a way that will appeal to the park-going classes, is hard to guess.

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Visitors will find themselves stiffening, in a very English way, at the interactive approaches made by the 60-odd costumed Victorian "characters" who patrol the main courtyard, behaving in typically Dickensian ways. There's a rat-catcher, a schoolmaster and a policeman, but, sadly, no Beadle - presumably because his life would become a nightmare of small boys saying, "Please sir, I want some more."

Among the attractions is The Haunted House of Ebeneezer Scrooge, with its quartet of famous ghosts, Peggotty's Boat House (but not, presumably, the shipwreck which drowns Steerforth and Little Em'ly), and a long boat ride based on the escape of Magwitch the reformed convict in Great Expectations. Otherwise most of the "World" seems to deal in generic notions of what we think of as "Dickensian" - tragic orphans, heart-of-gold barmaids, burly ruffians, lovable-scamp pickpockets, looming authority figures, lovelorn spinsters and amiable, bald philanthropists.

The organisers are proud of the fact that they called in The Dickens Fellowship as consultants, to ensure the "authenticity of the time, characters and storylines," so that the School Room exhibit will carry the firm smack of Victorian discipline, and when you pass Newgate Prison on the boat ride, it will look broadly as it did in 1850, only smaller. But one suspects that the "multi-sensory animatronic experience" offered in the 250-seater theatre, and the "naughty delights" of the burlesque evening at the Free and Easy Victorian Music Hall will owe more to second-hand movie iconography than to Dickens's imagination. The four-hour "immersive experience" that's yours for just £12.50 (£7.50 for children) is an immersion not just in history-as-commodity, but literature-as-commodity too. I can't wait to see the gift shop with (I'm guessing) its Betsy Trotwood Greengage Jam and its Sam Weller Veal 'n' Ham Pie (As Eaten In Pickwick!)

It seems a shame (especially given what animatronic wizardry can do) that there are no dramatised scenes from the Dickens canon, to amaze audiences. The death by guillotine of Sidney Carton at the end of A Tale of Two Cities ("It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done") would wake up the most jaded scholar. Maudlin readers of The Old Curiosity Shop would flock to witness the death of Little Nell every hour. Children would surely enjoy Wackford Squeers's inept teaching at Dotheboys Hall ("C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-I-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book, he goes and does it") before he is attacked and thrashed by Nicholas Nickleby.

It is frankly distressing to find, in Dickens World, that "Fagin's Den" is the soft play area for tiny children. Play area? It should be a key learning zone, teaching avid delinquents the arts of successful pickpocketing. It also seems a little perverse to close down the attraction on 25 December, when they could offer a theme-park coup: Enjoy Your Christmas Lunch with the Reformed Ebeneezer Scrooge, a Giant Turkey and the Whole Cratchit Family!

It is, of course, no accident that the theme park was built in Chatham on the site of the old naval dockyard. This is where Dickens's father worked - he was a clerk in the Navy pay office - and where the young Charles grew up for some years. He always said he was happiest living in Chatham. He left under a terrible cloud: his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, and he himself (still only 12) was forced to work at a London bottle-blacking factory, the dismal low-point of his life. These terrible years inspired the early chapters of David Copperfield, his most autobiographical novel. It would have been imaginative of Disney World to incorporate this sorry episode into their theme park, given its importance to the author, but its misery might have spoilt the prevailing air of Hollywood-sound-stage positive thinking.

They might also have dealt, even glancingly, with Dickens's role as a social reformer, demanding proper education for all, and as radical thinker, especially in his paper, Daily News. But perhaps attempting to recreate the scenery of Hard Times, his most political book, with its belching industrial chimneys and its circus folk, perhaps proved beyond the sizeable pockets of Kevin Christie, the businessman behind Dickens World.

Its intentions are reasonable enough - the park will offer "a new way to understand Dickens and his characters, as well as understanding the times and conditions people experienced in the early 19th century". Only a hardened cynic would argue that neither writers nor their times can be better appreciated by walking around a mocked-up simulacrum of London in the Olden Days, or that the best way - "new" or old -- to understand Dickens and his characters is to read his books again. But just reading won't bring the crowds will it? Remember the advice of Mr Sleary, the circus-master in Hard Times? "People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a-learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a-working, they an't made for it."

Other places of literary pilgrimage

William Shakespeare Stratford-upon-Avon

The half-timbered house on Henley Street where the playwright was born in 1564 is still beautifully preserved and is the most visited of the six buildings in Stratford connected with him. The second most visited is the cottage in which Anne Hathaway lived until she married Shakespeare in 1582.

William Wordsworth Dove Cottage, Lake District

Tens of thousands of visitors flock to the picturesque village of Grasmere every year where the Romantic poet lived from 1799 to 1808 and wrote many of his most famous poems. The tiny 17th century whitewashed building is now a museum. Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's home from 1813 to 1850 and still owned by his descendants, is also a popular attraction.

Jane Austen Chawton House, Hampshire

The author's last home, she lived here with her mother and sister Cassandra from 1809 until 1817. It is where she revised Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It is now a museum and library.

Bronte Sisters Bradford and Haworth, Yorkshire

The dramatic moorland inspired the Brontës to write their many classics novels. The most famous attraction is their house in Haworth, The Parsonage, built in 1778-9, which was the lifelong home of the Brontë family. It was opened as a museum in 1928.and is set out with the Brontës' possessions.