This is the third in an occasional series highlighting local literary connections. The headline coordinates for this cache are for the appropriately named Dickens Drive in the Burnthouse Lane housing estate in Exeter (there is no physical container here). Most of the streets on this side of the estate are named after poets and writers.
To find the cache you need to answer the following questions and then work out the coordinates for the final hide which is a short distance away. The cache is now a micro so a pen will be needed and tweezers would be helpful.
The novelist and essayist Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) had various connections to Exeter and several of his characters are thought to have been inspired by people he met while living or visiting the area.
1. Dickens’ parents lived in Mile End Cottage in Alphington for about 4 years. He stayed with them for some of this time and supposedly wrote the opening chapters for his novel Nicholas Nickleby there. He wrote that “The place is clean beyond all description and the neighbourhood, I suppose, the most beautiful in the most beautiful of English counties.” An overweight boot boy spotted by Dickens in the Turks Head Inn, Exeter, was apparently the inspiration for The Fat Boy in his novel Pickwick Papers. Also, his character Pecksniff who appeared in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit was inspired by a resident of Topsham. The Dickens family lived at the cottage in Alphington from 18AB.
2. Dickens became friends with the radical campaigning journalist and editor of the Western Times, Thomas Latimer. A plaque was unveiled in August 2013 on behalf of the Exeter Civic Society on the frontage of Latimer’s home and printworks at number CDE Fore Street, Exeter, commemorating the fact that Dickens stayed here.
3. Dickens did a public reading of passages from his novel A Christmas Carol in the Royal Public Rooms in High St, Exeter (at the site now occupied by a well known pharmacy) on 4th August 18FG, and also did later readings from Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield.
4. Dickens’ wife Catherine was the daughter of George Hogarth, who was once a resident of Exeter and the editor of the Western Luminary newspaper in the early 18H0’s.
The numbers for A - H add up to a total of 36 and using them in the following formula you can calculate the coordinates for the cache hide:
N50 (B-F) (A-C) . (B-D) (Dx2) (H+C) W003 (G-F) (A-H) . (E-A) (D-H) (B-G)