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Bemusement park: Where Dickens meets Disney
Can the kids put down their iPods to relive Pip's hardships – in grim and smelly fashion?
from the May 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
In a dingy prison cell off the square, there was a most surreal sight: a workman attaching a hand to a astonishingly lifelike animatronic man – a pathetic, sullen creature – who will live in this damp, cramped cell for the foreseeable future. He's only plastic and electronics, but something in the pretend prisoner's face causes a sympathetic twinge.
If ever words did not belong together, surely they're "Dickensian" and "theme park." "Dickensian" has become a byword for grime and poverty, sludge and disease; for cities overhung with smog and inhabited by poor women in head scarves selling handmade soap on misty bridges. A "theme park" is a place to kick back and relax, where, according to the great American amusement park pioneer, George C. Tilyou, "What attracts the crowd is the wearied mind's demand for relief in unconsidered muscular action." And yet, here, Dickens has been crossbred with Disney, and the end result isn't so much amusement park as bemusement park. It's like Disney World dipped in rust-colored paint and starved of the Florida sunlight and with slightly cheaper prices – $25 for adults, $15 for kids – and significantly less than Disney World admission.
Can today's iPod generation – more into P. Diddy than Pip, and whose "Please sir, may I have some more?" is aimed at snazzy cellphones or sneakers – be drawn to a dark, brooding park intended to transport them to a poorer time?
When the city-block-size indoor park opens today, it will be serviced by 200 staff – the majority of whom will be dressed as dandies or washerwomen or some other class of Dickensian character. The main attraction, and only traditional theme-park ride, is "Great Expectations." The sewer-to-skyline-to-graveyard boat ride based on the enduring story of orphan Pip and escaped convict Magwitch, the heroes of one of Dickens's "Great Expectations." It's one of the longest theme-park boat rides in Europe (210 meters), and the only one in the world, boasts the park, that combines a "water ride" (the sewer experience) with a "dry ride" (the flight over rooftops).
Trevor Lupton, a retired civil servant, was my guide. Dressed in a burgundy waistcoat, breeches, and shiny-buckle shoes, he looked like a Victorian town crier, but spoke in hushed, polite tones. He applied for a job here, he told me, because "I love reading about that old world – and now I get a chance to live in it! Well, at least from 9 to 5."
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