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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Dickens World
Nearly every far-out idea Salman Rushdie came up with in The Satanic Verses (pp. 422-430) has come to pass.
The latest is the Dickens World theme park planned for Chatham (via Shashwati):
Construction of the Dickens World entertainment complex will begin shortly and it is expected to attract up to 300,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2007.
Its backers hope it will introduce characters such as Mr Micawber, Fagin, Magwitch and Uriah Heep to a generation that has grown up knowing little of his classic Victorian texts.
Kevin Christie, who is masterminding the project, said: ‘For a man who wrote 15 books and 23 short stories, you would be hard pressed to find anybody under 30 who can name five of them.’
Yes, that’s probably true. So who exactly are the 300,000 people who would be in line for tickets again?
What they need to do to drum up interest is some kind of Dickens mash-up literature, which would take his stock characters and place them in 150 page long Walmart friendly action-adventure thrillers and/or Oriental romances along the lines of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Think: Gaffer Hexam, Super-Spy. Or perhaps, a crime-courtroom drama franchise: Our Mutual Friend: Special Victims Unit.
Comments
My god! Will there by undersized college students, (under)paid to dress as street urchins, pose for pictures, and winsomely beg the tourists for money? And what will be served in the restaurants? Gruel and underdone potatoes?
Um… be: will there be undersized college students, etc.
Funnily enough, last year I visited the “Dickens Centre” in Chatham, which I presume the theme park supercedes, I presume. It was shutting down. The only good thing was that the shop had every Dickens book for £2 or less. Other than that is was all the flashy gimmickry, actors, bad sub-TVM movies, and generally uninteresting exhibition. And you know why they were shutting down? It’s a shocker kids…
They weren’t getting enough visitors!
This thread appears to be typo-cursed. Ignore the second “I presume”
I’m hoping for a Christmas Carol ride: you’d pay your coin, clamber into a four poster bed in a nightcap, and then a ghost would fly you in the air, enabling you to revisit you past, see what your present-day acquaintances are saying about you when you’re not around, and look into the future, before returning to the bed with a ‘thank you for experiencing the Christmas Carol ride, please leave by the left side of the mattress’.
Awesome, meet me on the Jane Austen Jungle Gym.
What next a restaurant chain called Trollepes?
I’ve got the perfect ride. The Dancing Coffins. Some sort of wild, bucking thing - based on young Jerry Cruncher, jr.’s visions as he runs home, after having spied on dear old dad plying the Resurrection trade.