Alphington's link with Charles Dickens
A plaque on Mile End Cottage states that Dickens' parents once lived there.
Photo by Roy Grove
Renting of Mile End Cottage
By Chris Jago
Dickens' association with Alphington began in February 1839 when he arranged for his parents to move in to Mile End Cottage. Dickens' enthusiasm for the cottage and indeed for Alphington itself, is well described in this short extract from Peter Ackroyd's recent biography. Ackroyd writes:
He travelled quickly down to Devon and, with his usual impatience and impetuosity, found a new house for them the same day; it was called Mile End Cottage, Alphington, just a mile outside Exeter, and to judge from Dickens' descriptions in his ecstatic letters to his wife you would think that it was a cottage constructed in his fiction. It was a 'jewel of a place...in the most beautiful, cheerful, delicious rural neighbourhood I was ever in...excellent parlour...a capital closet...a beautiful little drawing room...noble garden'. He found it by accident, simply by walking along the road, and at once decided that this was the place. Not only did he arrange for it to be rented by his parents, looked over and signed the necessary documents, but he also furnished it and purchased such things as the crockery, the glass and the stair-carpet. No detail was too small for his attention - just like the details of his fiction - and of course by the time he had finished '...the neatness and cleanliness of the place is beyond description'.
Peter Ackroyd; Dickens; p156-7