stop this boat ride, i wanna get off

may of 2007 will see the opening of the dickens theme park currently being built in london. as you can imagine, as a victorianist, i'm all over this one. to quote a colleague: "this is so much more than charlotte brontë dishtowels and jane austen tea cozies" -- it's the commercialization of the victorian period for mass consumption on a mammoth scale. it's neo-victoriana for those who can't wait for the next masterpiece theatre adaptation, sarah waters book, or league of extraordinary gentlemen comic (all of which i confess i heartily enjoy!), complete with a boat ride down an artificially muddy river, based on magwitch's escape in great expectations.

while the kitschy part of me was gleefully rubbing my hands a la uriah heep and scheming to find a way over the pond for the may opening, i was kindly reminded by fellow victorianist judith flanders (check out her most recent book consuming passions) of the socio-political implications of watering down dickens's messages of social reform for commerical consumption. today, in the guardian unlimited arts blog she writes:

It is the trivialising of the social issues Dickens cared so passionately about that is the most disturbing. A representative of the Dickens Fellowship, which has been acting in an advisory capacity to the project, defends its integrity by saying, "A lot of the social concerns are still a problem for us today, with these young people going around shooting each other". But how are these "social concerns" being addressed? With Magwitch's boat-ride, do we learn about the Bloody Code and penal reform? In Ebeneezer Scrooge's Haunted House, is the oppression of workers and lack of employment rights a feature? Or the desperate poverty that caused the (probable) rickets that lamed Tiny Tim? Are there going to be crossing-sweepers always being "moved on" until they die of exhaustion? Dust heaps? Parish orphans?

Somehow I don't think that will happen. I know, I'm a killjoy. But it is the domestication, the taming of the wildness and fierceness of Dickens that I object to. Yes, there were the benevolent Cheeryble brothers; Scrooge is reformed; even Magwitch turns out to be a fairy convict godfather. But that doesn't stop the realism of Dickens: Magwitch doesn't get to enjoy his good deeds: he still dies a hunted man, and that is what I'm willing to bet Dickens World will not show.

It will be Disney-on-Sea instead, a nice, safe, cosy world where nothing bad occurs. It is hardly as though this has never happened before. Peter Pan was originally one of the weirdest, spookiest stories - the only children who never grow up, after all, are dead children. By the time Disney got its hands on it, it was all "Clap your hands and Tinkerbell won't die". It's a long way to Tinkerbell from Miss Flite's birds in Bleak House - "Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach."

(you can read the full blog entry here).

no judith, you're not a killjoy. rather, you are just pointing out, as dickens does in our mutual friend via the veneerings, the dangers of skimming along the artificially muddy surface.