Bleak houses? Dickens World under construction at Chatham, Kent. Photograph: Linda Nylind.
Not to be outdone, the sardonic fansite, www.ballardian.com, announces "Ballard World". It will, we are told, open in 2008.
"According to our sources," the site reports, with the straightest of faces: "166 acres of a former B52 airbase near Cambridge are being turned into the first JG Ballard entertainment park." Little Jims will be able to play in overgrown, empty swimming pools, while Dad caresses "the dented side panel of Jayne Mansfield's crashed 1966 Buick Electra", his other hand stuck suspiciously down his trouser front. Mummy, meanwhile, is knocking back pina coladas in a cocktail party that's going orgy-wards very fast. And, down the line, there's "Burroughs World", with rumpus rooms where customers can hang out (literally) and experience the novel pleasures of autoerotic asphyxiation, before joining the mugwumps in the slime pool.
It's rarely comfortable to go too far into a great writer's world. But where there's an honest penny to be made, the tourist guide is always there. According to publicity reports, Dickens World will recreate "a dark, dirty and dank London". Does that, one has to wonder, mean a stinky London as well?
The park shop should, if it's true to its name, sell air-unfresheners; essence of three million horse droppings mixed with what Victorians called night soil (don't ask), all moistened with fresh sewage from the Fleet Ditch. Underarm odorisers and fragrance of three week-worn socks will also be available. Instead of Disney's dry ice, the park's boffins will have come up with the "London Peculiar", or "pea-soupers" which swirl around in Bleak House. Fog so thick, you could cut it with a knife and fork.
One must wait and see. And perhaps smell. But, sadly, it looks as if Dickens World is going to follow the anodyne example of Anaheim's Disneyland - with its sanitised Tom Sawyer's Island (no slaves, no n-words) and Mr Toad's Wild Ride (which, I confess, I love). We are promised, for example, the "Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge" (but not, one suspects, the mother and baby starved to death in the gutter outside), a "state-of-the-art animatronic show, a Victorian School Room, and Fagin's Den".
The last, presumably, without the underage whores like Nancy (underage by our standards: the age of consent was 12 in Dickens's real world). The "experience" will, we are told, include a Dickensian Shopping Mall together with a multitude of attractions and rides, "including a mix of themed restaurants, bars, and a multiplex cinema". Try as one can, it's hard to see a shopping mall and multiplex cinema as genuinely Dickensian.
One of the liveliest PhD students I ever supervised, an American named David Tucker, with a broad streak of Barnum in his Wisconsin makeup, decided, having completed his dissertation on Dickens, against an academic career. The best way he could serve his beloved author, Tucker resolved, was by conducting street-by-street tours around the sizeable fragments of Dickens's London that have survived the wrecking ball. He's made a good living out of it, and done some good practical education in the process.
Tucker's "Original Dickens Walks" do not shirk the filthy chimneys where apprentice sweeps like Oliver Twist would - after a year or two's clambering - contract cancer of the scrotum. Nor Newgate, where Fagin swung, tongue and penis protruding in the rictus of death, for the delectation of many of the same people who enjoyed a Dickens novel. Nor the Thames, where the Hexhams fished out suicide corpses for whatever money and jewellery they took with them in their drop off the bridge. Nor Hungerford Stairs on the South Bank, which Dickens, remembering his boyhood suffering as a child labourer in Warren's Blacking Factory, would, for the whole of his subsequent life, make long, shuddering, detours to avoid. Dickens did not always like Dickens's world.
There were, of course, sunlit regions. The Cheeryble Brothers are there alongside Bill Sykes. But there was always more dark than light. Dark won't, one suspects, be the theme on May 25 when Dickens's World throws its doors open to the public, in Chatham, Kent. None the less, it won't be entirely a bad thing if it encourages young readers.
The theme park has, one learns, been set up in consultation with the Dickens Fellowship - the keepers of the flame. Let's hope they get a cut. Charles Dickens would have wanted that.
