Did you go to Dickens World before it closed? Between 2007 and 2016, an industrial hangar in Chatham hosted a theme park inspired by Charles Dickens’s London with animatronic rats, a Great Expectations flume ride and a children’s play area called Fagin’s Den. People who went give me differing assessments ranging from “actually so good” to “very, very strange”. Ultimately, money and visitors eluded it.
This was not the first reproduction of an ersatz Dickensian London. In this brisk book Lee Jackson uncovers a long and dubious tradition of previous Dickens Worlds. Take, for example, the Dickens Bazaar of 1888 that was erected inside Holborn Town Hall with stalls resembling locations from the great author’s works, from the Old Curiosity Shop to Peggotty’s boathouse. What is it about Dickens that makes people want to create his fictionalized city in three dimensions? And does historical accuracy matter?
