First impressions are not good. The new £62m theme park lies a couple of miles outside historic but unlovely Chatham, where Dickens lived between the ages of 5 and 10, while his father worked in the Navy Pay Office. But that was back in the days of stagecoaches, sailing ships and acres of bustling dockyards.

Today, Chatham is shrunk to a shabby high street of Poundland and Primark. You drive out to a large retail park, and there, sandwiched between an Odeon multiplex and a Marks & Spencer outlet, stands a vast aluminium hangar housing the latest monument to our second national author. Stuck high up on the front is a big white clock that chimes on the hour, then opens to disgorge a kind of gondola with the great man himself sitting in it.

So, this is a straightforward, predictable case of high culture being co-opted by brute, ugly commerce, yes? Hard-faced philistine businessmen travestying one of our best-loved writers for the sake of easy moolah, while the literary establishment looks on and mourns the loss of something delicate and beautiful, trampled beneath the hooves of the swinish multitude? You’d think so, to read some of the rumpus around it. “The horror! The horror!” one bookish observer writes allusively. But the reality is far more complicated and interesting.

For a start, by no means the entire literary establishment has turned up its dainty collective nose at the enterprise. The Dickens Fellowship is behind it all the way; and it shows. Thelma Grove, formerly joint secretary of the fellowship, points out the distinctly well-chosen quote around the walls, from the lisping Mr Sleary in Hard Times: “People mutht be amuthed, thomehow; they can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a learning. Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht.”

Go on in and you find yourself in a warren of dingy, gaslit cobbled streets and old inn yards, gloomy prison facades and sooty brick walls, each sooty brick hand-painted. In truth, they’re “sooty” “bricks”. Nothing is quite what it seems. Gaslight is not gaslight, bricks are not bricks and soot is not soot; but the fakery is expert, devoted and convincing for those who choose to go with their imaginations in tow.

We pass an advert, painted on a wall, for Whooping Cough Tincture Containing Syrup of Squills. Grove says an American journalist has already written this up as “Syrup of Squirrels”. She sighs. Squills are little blue flowers, whose dried bulbs can be used as an expectorant. Squirrels are small, bushy-tailed arboreal rodents. Ingesting any part of them, even in syrup form, has no effect on whooping cough. “Americans,” I sigh sympathetically. Grove marches on.

There’s an evocative schoolroom, with mouldy, crumbling plasterwork, grim little wooden desks and stern admonitions scrolling round the walls: Respect Thy Elders; Be Seen and Not Heard. There’s Fagin’s Den, actually a soft play area for younger children. No, don’t laugh. As Grove points out, what locale from Dickens would you choose? Mr Bumble’s workhouse? Dotheboys Hall, with Mrs Squeers force-feeding the boys brimstone and treacle? At least, in Fagin’s Den, they ate well, weren’t bullied and had fun.

Characters from Dickens’s books are brought to life by a mixture of old-fashioned actors and robotic wizardry. The animatronics look impressive, although, as they get more and more lifelike by the year, you can’t help thinking back anxiously to the movie Westworld. What if an animatronic Mrs Gamp should blow a fuse, or scorch a circuit board, and go berserk in the soft-play area? Or Quilp? My God, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Sounds like a novel by JG Ballard.

Back to reality. Sorry, “reality”. The high point of the theme park is surely the dark boat ride through the filthy backwaters of the Thames, complete with animatronic rats swimming in the dyed-brown water and a ragged boy glimpsed peeing in a darkened creek. The boat will then rise up through a sewer, as far as I could make out – “really quite splashy”, according to Grove – and emerge to fly over a nighttime cityscape of Victorian London.

One obvious objection to all this is the tastelessness of turning the very real poverty and squalor of early-Victorian London into 21st-century entertainment. It’s Dickens lite: anaemic, sterile, tamed. There will be no child actors with running sores dying of diphtheria. You’ll see no 12-year-old prostitute as Dickens saw her, “barely past her childhood, but born and bred in neglect and vice”. There’ll be the river, but no Jesse Hexam dredging corpses out of it. There’ll be no Jo the Crossing-Sweeper, nor Krook, in that spectacularly weird scene – even by Dickensian standards – being rendered by spontaneous combustion into a smoking puddle of human lard. There will be nothing, in short, to frighten the kiddies.

The unashamedly commercial side of the park will give some people the horrors, too: the Dickensian Shopping Mall, the nightly menu of “naughty delights” in the Free and Easy Victorian Music Hall, and the hard-sell Old Curiosity Shoppe, its medieval spelling bearing no relation to Dickens whatsoever. But will the shoppe at least sell Dickens’s books? Oh yes, says Kevin Christie, and DVDs of the movies, too.

Christie is the business brain behind it all, a veteran of money-raising from the film and televi-sion worlds. With his hearty laugh, longish hair sticking out from under his safety helmet, and cheerful dismissal of the puritan tendency, he’s an endearing character. His rejection of the idea of child actors is characteristic: “Too much like child labour!”

A journalist from Le Journal du Dimanche confides in me towards the end of our visit, wrinkling her delicate Gallic nose, “In France, we would not ’ave zis. A Zola’s World or a Flaubert’s World.” The idea of a Flaubert World made me laugh so much, it was a moment of epiphany. A huge aluminium hangar in a retail park on the outskirts of Le Havre, perhaps. Visit Homais’s chemist’s shop! Buy Emma Bovary arsenic as a souvenir! No, the French will never have a Flaubert World. They treat all culture with far more kid-gloved solemnity and respect than we do. But is that necessarily to culture’s advantage?

Besides, Flaubert is too adult to inspire boat rides and theme parks. Reading any of the other 19th-century greats – Thackeray, George Eliot, Tolstoy, you feel you are an adult being addressed by an adult. Reading Dickens, himself a perpetual child in many ways, you often feel you, too, are a child again, being entertained by a brilliant, very funny and slightly scary conjuror at a children’s party. A Dickens theme park makes perfect sense.

Perhaps the best argument in favour of Dickens World is that Dickens himself would have loved it. With his rows of fake books in the library at Gad’s Hill, he was no intellectual snob, insisting that his works must be taken pure and authentically, a kind of intellectual self-medication, like swallowing spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, because it’s good for you. “He was the ultimate showman,” Christie says. “He was the populist.” And, though some see this as a battle-field between art and commerce, between purists and tourists, other literary voices echo Christie’s view precisely.

“Highbrows may consider it all disgracefully low,” the literary critic John Carey says. “But that is how highbrows in Dickens’s day regarded Dickens. They sneered at him for not being a gentleman, and thought his novels melodramatic and sensational. For me, anything that draws people’s attention to Dickens is good, because it makes it likelier that they will try reading him. He was quite used to dramatised versions of his novels being put on at the popular theatres, even while they were still appearing in their serial parts. I think he would have written screamingly funny letters about Dickens World to his friends, and made sure that he got a hefty slice of the profits.”

Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Dickens’s wife, suggests not only that would he have approved of the project, but that, “given the chance, he would be in there performing for the crowds. He was an entertainer: he loved an audience, and he wanted his work to be accessible to everyone, so boat rides, Fagin’s Den and animatronic rats would have delighted him”. And, by coincidence, she quotes the lines that adorn the walls of the entrance to Dickens World: “People mutht be amuthed . . . ”

Dickens World opens on Friday; www.dickensworld.co.uk

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