The World of Charles Dickens, Complete with Pizza Hut

The New York Times travels to London to visit Dickens World.

From the article...

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its existence raised a number of questions. Who was the park’s target audience? (“Dickens-loving flume-ride enthusiasts” seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London — with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years — why would anyone want to visit? (“If a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,” Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, “he would be literally sick — sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”)

Well, despite its obvious absurdity, I wanted to go to Dickens World. I love Charles Dickens. I don’t mean “love” in the weak sense, the way people love frozen yogurt or casual Friday or the ’80s. I am — like probably millions of readers spread over many different eras — actively in love with Charles Dickens, or at least with the version of his mind that survives in his writing. (The man himself, as several new biographies remind us, was significantly harder to love.) Of all the mega-canonical writers, Dickens is the most charming. At a time of great formality in literature, he wrote irreverently, for everybody, from the perspective of orphans and outcasts. His best work — “Great Expectations,” “David Copperfield,” “Bleak House” — plays the entire xylophone of a reader’s value system, from high to low; you can almost feel the oxytocin dumping, sentence by sentence, in your brain. Taken together, his books add up to perhaps the most distinctively living literary world ever created. The chance to pay $20 to walk through a lovingly produced three-dimensional version of that world seemed (despite some nagging highbrow reservations) impossible to pass up.

And so I went to Dickens World.