Understanding the Literary Theme Park: Dickens World as Adaptation

How to make sense of Dickens World, an “indoor visitor attraction” which resists the conventions defining similar enterprises? Though it promises to “take visitors on a journey of Dickens lifetime,” transporting them “to Dickensian England,” it is not precisely a Disney-style theme park, a site of literary tourism, or a site of historical significance. Bringing to life the worlds of Dickens’s novels – wherein physical environments, events, and characters are inextricable – depends upon a process of adaptation analogous, we argue, to cinematic or literary adaptation. This article considers Dickens World as a case study in adaptation; we suggest that its attractions demonstrate fundamental adaptive concerns: structure, nostalgia, spectacle, narrative, and commodification. Approaching Dickens World as the spectacularisation of the dynamics of literary encounter, the resulting analysis expands the boundaries of adaptation theory while delineating the aspects of Dickens’s work which make its adaptation compelling but ultimately – as Dickens World shows – challenging.