The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (23 page)

Being at Dickens World, at the moment of its creation, felt exactly like being in an episode of
The Office
. The manager told me that, when the park advertised for 50 jobs a few months earlier, nearly 1,000 people had applied. (The job market in Chatham has been desperate since the navy pulled out of the dockyard in the early ’80s.) He also told me that he and his staff narrowed the pool with
American Idol
–style auditions. “We made the applicants demonstrate customer service,” he said. “What they’d do if somebody lost a child, or injured themselves. Or if there was a complaint, unfortunately. But then I said to them, ‘The twist is,
you have to do it in a Victorian manner
.’”

I left Dickens World after a couple of days. As a literary experience, it had been pretty thin gruel. But like Oliver Twist, I wanted more.

What is the best way to commune with an author, other than reading his books? Stand in his childhood bedroom? Retrace the route he used to walk to work? Write his name, in his house, with his own quill pen, on a postcard of him?

Such behaviors have become staples of literary tourism, a tradition that has been around for at least a couple of centuries. A literary tour is the secular echo of a religious pilgrimage. The hope is the same as with saints’ relics: that some residue of genius will survive in the physical objects an author has touched, that the secret to his mind will turn out to be hidden in the places his body passed through—the proportions of a doorway, the smell of old stone. Literature, for all its power, is an abstract transaction: a reader gives time and attention, an author gives patterns of words that call up vivid people and landscapes that—mystifyingly—are not physically there (at least beyond the level of neurons firing). It seems like a natural human response to try to plug that gap—to look for solid, real-world corollaries for those interior landscapes, whether it’s walking the route of
Ulysses
on Bloomsday, stuffing a bagpipe with haggis on Burns Day, or wizard-spotting on Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station. It’s the brain’s attempt to anchor an abstraction, to make the spirit world and the boring world finally align. It is, in my experience, one of the cheapest forms of magic available.

In England, literary tourism took off at the end of the 18th century, just before Dickens was born. By the time his books exploded into popularity, in the 1830s, literary tourism was an established tradition. Dickens was the first author to earn what we’d think of as a mass readership, and visiting places from his fiction was a way for individual readers to make an intimate connection with a sometimes distressingly public figure. (When Dickens visited New York in 1842, Tiffany’s sold copies of his bust, a barber reportedly sold scraps of his hair, and crowds followed him through the streets; in Boston, ladies with scissors tried to cut off pieces of his coat.) Dickens’s work seemed to lend itself especially well to literary tourism. Its characters 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 contact; 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 certain 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 marketing 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 two kids and a dog. (I have no idea.) The figures started talking, but I could hardly understand anything they were saying because of the pop music blasting from Nando’s, the Portuguese 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 barrage, 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 attraction very much down on its luck. This was the low season for park visitors—the numbers 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 maintenance 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 was conspicuously absent, and some of the desks’ interactive touch screens were out of order. (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 gift shop was called—in blatant disregard of both Victorian spelling and the title of Dickens’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 were either dull or unintelligible. This made it the opposite of a Dickens novel, in which your 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, violence 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 dramatization 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.

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 novel. 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 absurdity 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. It caught us looking like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, 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 by a company called Snapshot Classics. “In the time it takes to read the original,” promised the book’s cover, which was designed to look soiled and creased, “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 marketing 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’s fault. I found myself fantasizing that Dickens World would be adopted by a wealthier park—maybe the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in Orlando, Florida—and that it would 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 novels, in their monthly installments, often had more pages of ads than they did of fiction. His stories inspired endless adaptations, extensions, and tributes, including hundreds of spinoff products: Dickens-themed hats, pens, cigars, songbooks, joke books, figurines, sheet music, ladles. Theater companies in London staged rival versions of his novels before he’d even finished writing them.

All of which is to say that paying tribute to Dickens gets very tricky very quickly. Homage and exploitation shade into each other. Dickens World is just the latest in a long line of attempts to profit by making Dickens’s fictional worlds concrete. The park doesn’t fail because 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 pains in his side, might have been able to see the attraction from his window. My friend and I, 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 village 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
trying to imagine, based only on the shapes of their graves, what his parents and his five siblings were like.