Dickens World

In a development begging for parody, perhaps even self parodying, the BBC reports that next month ‘a modern, aluminium-clad hangar on the Chatham Maritime estate in Kent’, will host the opening of the brainchild of deceased theme park designer, Gerry O'Sullivan-Beare. Dickens World!

Solvent aromas fill the nostrils as…Workmen are hard at it, creating the rickety backstreets and miasmatic waterways of urban, Victorian England. The overall effect is rather like Disney painted brown and plunged into twilight… its creators promise a flavour of "dark, smoky, moody London, full of smells and mist".

Its recreation of the world of Dickens is decked out in hand-painted, brick-effect plaster fascia and promises to smell just as his world would.

The debate around the project has focused on the ‘scepticism among those not ready for a theme-park tribute to one of the most popular novelists in the English language.’

Managing director Kevin Christie has a glint in his eye that only momentarily dims at suggestions that this experience is not 100% authentic Dickens.

"We think of the books as mostly about poverty and misery, but we tend to forget this was the great age of the Victorian supremacy - there were big things going on," he says.

Former Dickens Fellowship joint secretary Thelma Grove has worked as a consultant on the theme park. She is adamant it is the right path to take for an author who is as relevant today as he was 150 years ago.

"A lot of the social concerns are still a problem for us today, with these young people going around shooting each other," she says.

Just like they did in Dickens’s day. But is it authentic?

Dickens World is faithful to the London of the period in the same way that Disney's Cinderella Castle is faithful to gothic chateau architecture. Ish.

So for those who really want a taste of the world of the emerging working class of early to mid Nineteenth Century England evoked in Dickens’s and Engels’s work, you’ll just have to visit the slums of Karachi or Rio or Jakarta.

Apologies to Ellis, who seems to have found this story first.

Finally, the end of paper!

Do you ever find longer articles on the internet and wish you could take them with you to read on the bus or something? I used to print them out at work and do just that. Now I don’t have access to a laser printer, so that’s not a solution. Anyway, I usually ended up just throwing the paper out afterwards, unless I could find someone to pass the articles on to.

Well, the other day I did a little search and came up with a solution. You can download all that text, save it as a plain text file and put it on the iPod! This blogger provides full instructions, including a link to this site, which converts large text files into linked 4kb files that the iPod Notes facility will accept. The print on the iPod screen is awful small, but clear enough for even me to read.

One tip I can add is, if you are downloading http from the web, copy it and ‘Edit\Paste special’ as ‘Unformatted text’ into a Word document, then Save as Plain text. The paste special gets rid of all the http formatting junk. If you do this a lot, try downloading Steve Miller’s brilliant little PureText application, which lets you assign a key to accomplish the paste special in one keystroke.

And if you need sources of text to read, perhaps the most amazing resource on the web is the Marxist Internet Archive, a gigantic library of essential and not so essential reading, including, for example, the Helen Keller archive! It’s definitely worth spending some time exploring the site, which is also available on DVD.

Actually, this might be an opportune time to recommend ‘the four essential classic pamphlets’:

The Communist manifesto (of course!)

Socialism: utopian and scientific (extract from Engels’s Anti-Dühring)

Reform or revolution (Luxemburg’s comprehensive rebuttal of the whole reformist project)

State and revolution (Lenin’s explanation why we can’t turn the bourgeois state to our own purposes)

Project Gutenberg has been going for at least 20 years or so and claims 19,000 free books.

Most of it won’t save as plain text, so probably isn’t suitable for the iPod, but for the scholarly, almost all your favourite Greek and Latin authors, many in English translation , as well, along with such classic reference works as Liddell and Scott, and Slater’s Lexicon to Pindar. Sanskrit texts, along with Monier Williams…