Literary snobs should stop reading now. The news will only confirm their worst fears about dumbed-down Britain. Nevertheless it must be reported. Charles Dickens is being turned into a theme-park.

Never mind that his 15 novels are closed books to most of 21st-century Britain. Never mind that, according to Kevin Christie, chief executive of Dickens World (as the theme park will be called), “you would be hard pressed to find anyone under 30 who can name five of them”. Never mind that the harsh Victorian world laid bare by Dickens — workhouses, slums, child abuse, corruption — will be Disneyfied into a cute travesty of history, with “ old curiosity shoppes” in mock-Victorian squares, a “haunted-house ride”, a “naughty burlesque show” to entertain adults in the evening, and a children’s play area called Fagin’s Den.

No, what seems to count is one startling statistic. Dickens World is predicted to attract no fewer than 300,000 punters a year. Duly impressed, the Bank of Scotland has financed the project to the tune of a staggering £62 million.

We won’t know for a year whether that decision makes Mr Micawber’s financial mishaps look like the epitome of prudence. The theme park doesn’t open until next summer, though a multiplex cinema (which, sadly, is not going to be called Bleak House) is up and running this week.

But there is one good reason for hoping that Dickens World succeeds — and that’s the economic revival of the Medway region. It is being built in the derelict naval dockyard at Chatham, where Dickens’s father was a clerk and Charles spent five years of his boyhood — Chatham and Rochester feature in several of his novels. When the dockyards closed 22 years ago, with the loss of 7,000 jobs, the effect on East Kent was as catastrophic as the closure of the mines on South Yorkshire. The area has struggled ever since.

Yet its ports are picturesque and its history rich and colourful. The Chatham Maritime development, which embraces two university campuses and 2,000 homes as well as Dickens World, could be a catalyst for the regeneration of the region.

So much for geography and economics. But what of literature? Will Dickens World inspire people, especially youngsters, to open his books and discover the joys of that inimitable, wonderfully entertaining prose? Or, as with so much of our heritage, will visitors imagine that they have “done Dickens” by simply whizzing round a few synthetic rides in half a day? “Anything that can introduce aspects of his work to a modern audience is going to be good,” says Thelma Grove, of the International Dickens Fellowship.

I’m not sure that I would go that far. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that Dickens himself might have approved of Dickens World. He was, after all, one of the first novelists to reach out to a mass audience. Whether he would have approved of Mr Christie is another matter. When asked what his favourite novel was, the chief executive of Dickens World replied: “Lord of the Rings.”