Great forebodings about Dickens World

As well as cuddly eccentrics, Dickens also depicts much deprivation and abuse. Will these be addressed at Chatham's dedicated theme park?

Insufficiently bleak housing? Dickens World under construction. Photograph: Linda Nylind

It's enough to make you spit. It's certainly beyond parody (although that doesn't mean I'm not going to try). "A New Themed Entertainment Visitor Attraction Based Upon the Life, Times, Books and Characters of Our Most Famous and Enduring Author" (take that, Shakespeare!). Or, more prosaically, a Dickens theme park is opening in Kent, on the site of the old Chatham naval yard where Dickens's father was briefly employed.

To Dickensians, Chatham and Kent say Great Expectationsr. Magwitch, the convict who escapes from the hulks moored nearby, is a creature "who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled". Later he returns (illegally) from transportation, and dies a miserable death, a hunted, haunted creature. Now, you can go on the Magwitch boat ride, following the path of his escape. Do we actually get to watch someone die, or would that be disruptive?

I am very torn about this. Novels are one of the best ways to get people interested in history - without an adolescence spent among the musketeers I'd be stumped to name the order of French kings and many other essentials. Jane Austen taught me about rules of precedence; Uncle Tom's Cabin told me about the underground railroad. Much of this has been entirely forgotten. But all of it taught me that there was a world before our world, and everybody was not just like us, only in different clothes. I'd like to believe that Dickens World will do the same.

Certainly, Dickens was a showman. He single-handedly made part-publication respectable, permitting thousands who couldn't afford books to read his novels in monthly parts. Later on, he specialised in readings from his works. But a Dickensian Shopping Mall? "The Old Curiosity Shoppe" (Even though Dickens spelt it "shop"?) Even more peculiarly, "Crime and Punishment"? (Complete with Raskolnikov, I imagine: Fyodor Dickens strikes again.)

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."