The visitor experience consisted mainly of listening to recorded speeches, many of which were either dull or unintelligible. This made it the opposite of a Dickens novel, in which your experience is expertly guided, your attention constantly engaged. Dickens’s genius was to unite all kinds of contradictory impulses: education and entertainment, misery and fun, violence and laughter, simplicity and sophistication. At Dickens World, these contradictions just felt contradictory. The result was sad and funny, in a way that Dickens would have loved. He was obsessed with grand plans that ended in failure, with the comic tragedy of provincial ambition. In this way, Dickens World was a perfect tribute to Charles Dickens.

For a park that markets itself to children, Dickens World was surprisingly grisly. I saw at least two severed heads, and when the performers lip-synched their way through a dramatization of “Oliver Twist” in the courtyard, it ended as the novel ends: with Bill Sikes murdering Nancy by beating her head in with a club, then being chased by a mob until he accidentally hangs himself. The violence was suggested rather than shown, but still — I flinched slightly for the kids who had been pulled in from the audience to play orphans. The gruesomeness was admirable, in a way: you wouldn’t want Dickens World to exclude the darker side of things — that would be a misrepresentation. But it made me wonder, again, if the idea of this place really made sense.

I had brought a friend to the park — another Dickens enthusiast — and, with sinking hearts, we decided to try the Great Expectations boat ride. There were signs, at various points in the line, announcing that it would be a 45-minute wait from here, a 30-minute wait from there — but it was a zero-minute wait, and we walked to the end unobstructed. Instead of an attendant, we found a black chair occupied by only a walkie-talkie and a Stephen King novel. After a minute or two, someone came and put us on a boat. Halfway up a dark tunnel, the chemical smell-pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the absurdity of this commodified experience — all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone else’s voice, for most of the ride. At some point the boat swiveled and shot backward down a ramp, splashing us and soaking our winter coats, and an automated camera took our picture. It caught us looking like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, my friend resigned and unhappy — comedy and tragedy side by side, “in as regular alternation,” as Dickens put it in “Oliver Twist,” “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Afterward, in the gift shop, I bought a copy of the picture, as well as a 59-page version of “Great Expectations” published by a company called Snapshot Classics. “In the time it takes to read the original,” promised the book’s cover, which was designed to look soiled and creased, “you can read this Snapshot Classic up to 20 times and know the story and characters off by heart.”

All the Dickens World employees I talked to — the performers, the bartenders, the marketing director — were unfailingly kind and seemed to be working hard. Many of them had worked at the park since it opened (they called themselves “originals”), sticking with it even when it could no longer guarantee them regular hours. They said they felt like a family and seemed to genuinely mean it. I wanted them to succeed. But the whole project seemed doomed. None of this was their fault. It was modernity’s fault, capitalism’s fault, Charles Dickens’s fault. I found myself fantasizing that Dickens World would be adopted by a wealthier park — maybe the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in Orlando, Fla. — and that it would manage to somehow vanquish its villains, overcome the odds, live happily ever after.

When the plan for Dickens World was announced in 2005, many people were predictably horrified. The New York Times wrote an editorial full of earnest hand-wringing (“There is a lot to fear here”) over the way that Literature, this sacred receptacle of Truth, was being tainted by consumerism. But if Dickens World seems to violate certain unspoken treaties about the commercial exploitation of literature, it’s worth remembering that Charles Dickens did so as well. His art was gleefully tangled with capitalism. The first printings of his novels, in their monthly installments, often had more pages of ads than they did of fiction. His stories inspired endless adaptations, extensions and tributes, including hundreds of spinoff products: Dickens-themed hats, pens, cigars, songbooks, joke books, figurines, sheet music, ladles. Theater companies in London staged rival versions of his novels before he’d even finished writing them.

All of which is to say that paying tribute to Dickens gets very tricky very quickly. Homage and exploitation shade into each other. Dickens World is just the latest in a long line of attempts to profit by making Dickens’s fictional worlds concrete. The park doesn’t fail because it’s too commercial — it fails because it’s too reverent, and reverent about the wrong things. It treats Dickens as an institution, when what we want is what is gone, or what survives only in the texts: the energy, the aura, the spirit.

Which brings us back to religion. Dickens World sits in the center of Dickens territory, right on the River Medway — the young Dickens, confined to his attic bedroom with terrible pains in his side, might have been able to see the attraction from his window. My friend and I, looking for traces of whatever energy Dickens left behind in the actual world, made our own self-guided pilgrimage through Kent.