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Monica (Enid) Dickens (1915-1992) |
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English writer, whose light
and witty novels became hugely popular and were translated into several
languages, including Finnish and Swedish. Monica Dickens, the
great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, gained
first fame with books based on her own on experiences in working life.
In 1970 she started to write the popular Follyfoot series for
children. The man shook his head. 'I've been abroad. Egypt, South America, India. I've seen how they treat horses. But this poor fellow . . . I can't take him, so I thought of you. When I couldn't get an answer on the phone, I pushed him into the truck and brought him over. I know there is always room here for a horse in trouble.' Monica Dickens was born in London, in a dignified Victorian house in Kensington. Her father was Henry
Charles Dickens, a barrister-at-law; he was the son of Sir Henry
Fielding Dickens, a judge, Charles Dickens' eight child. Fanny (née
Runge), her mother, was of German origin; her father Charles Herman Runge was a sugar baron. Dickens had a very sheltered childhood. Due to
her rebellious
spirit she was expelled from a private girls' school in London: she
wouldn't wear the school uniform. After
studies at St. Paul's School for Girls, she traveled abroad. Writing
was not her first calling. Dickens went to a theatre
school, from
where she was kicked out after convincing everybody that she was not
able to act. Then she took lessons at a school of French cookery.
Shocking her
family, Dickens abandoned high society and took manual jobs, she was an
extra cook, house-parlomaid, nanny, coctail and banquet waitress, and
so on. She had twenty jobs in two years, occasionally working 14 hours
a day. Dickens started her career as novelist with several autobiographical works. Her first book, One Pair of Hands (1939), Dickens wrote in three weeks. The idea for the work was suggested by Charles Pick, who was employed by a London publisher. It was based on her experiences as a cook and general servant. With humor and pointed commentary, Dickens portrayed the delicate and ongoing war between the wealthy and their servants. Also autobiographical Mariana (1940) was a story of a young woman, whose husband is at war, and who looks back over her past. The Sunday Telegraph described the book as "funny, poignant and a perfect period piece." Upon
the outbreak of World War II Monica Dickens joined a
hospital in Windsor, Berkshire, as a student nurse. A short story she
wrote about a doctor who had fallen in love with a nurse was considered
a breach of etiquette by the Matron. "In the 1940s a nurse was half
nun, half slave, and a probationer was about as low in the pecking
order as it was possible to be, despite the fact that more of them were
now needed because of the war . . . " (Monica: A Life of Monica Dickens by Anne Wellman, 2018, p. 65) Dickens decided to quit from the job. Before going back
to a hospital, she repaired for a year Rolls-Royce Spitfire engines for
fighter planes. "Factory life, like hospital life, did not seem to have much to do with the war," she
recalled in her autobiography. "In the relentless monotony of the work, any sense of
purpose gradually dwindled in focus down to the weekly pay packet." (An Open Book, New York: Mayflower Books, 1978, p. 78) One
Pair of Feet
(1942) was an account of her
learning to be a hospital nurse during the war. The story, set in the
Queen Adelaide Hospital in the fictional town of Redwood, concludes
with
Dickens's announcement that she will leave nursing to go and make
tanks. The film adaptation of the book, entitled The Lamp Still Burns (1943), was produced by Leslie Howard. Dickens had been with him in 1941 on a radio broadast, Answering You, responding to questions from America. The Happy Prisoner (1946), which was made into a
play by John McNair, dealt with the relationship between a nurse, Elizabeth, and
Oliver, a former officer who lost his leg in Arnheim in a battle and
has a serious heart trouble. Oliver lives with his mother. Other
members of the family include his sisters Violet and Heather with her
son David. From the small details of their everyday life Dickens draws
an optimistic picture of post-war England. Her experiences as a reporter on a local newspaper were recorded in the novel My Turn to Make the Tea (1951). From 1947 to 1951 she lived in Hinxworth, a village in Hertfordshire. "The four years I spent at the cottage in Hinxworth seem like much more. I wrote two books while I was there, had ten horses and ponies at various times and experienced all the emotions and events of discovering how to live alone. I was usually by myself during the week. People came at weekends, and a lot of children." (An Open Book, p. 112)To the magazine Woman's Own she contributed the column 'The Way I See It' for twenty years. After
marrying in 1951 Roy Stratton, an US-Marine officer who wrote
two detective novels, Dickens moved to the United States. Thye had two adopted daughters. When
her husband retired from the navy in 1953, she moved with him to Cape
Cod, Massachusetts. ". . . it was horse shows, long rides on the
beaches and the sandy trails through the scrub oaks of Cape Cod,
village gymkhanas in our field, bridles on door knobs, someone watching
television in pyjamas and a riding hat, always children round the
kitchen table, endlessly, obsessively talking about horses." (An Open Book, p. 198) They also had a flat in Kensington, London. Dickens
continued
to incorporate first-hand experiences into her novels with No More Meadows (1953) and Kate and Emma (1964), which arouse
directly from her involvement with the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The Room Upstairs (1964) depicted the life of an old woman, Sybil, who becomes the prey of vacillating loyalties and bewilderments of modern society. A six-line highway slices through her farm, leaving a farmhouse on the other side and the barn on the other. Sybil, a widow of eighty, fractures her thigh after the wedding of her grandson. Dorothy Grue, a housekeeper, is hired to look after Sybil. Dorothy starts to rule the house and keeps Sybil under control by every possible means. But when Dorothy becomes interested in the herb recipes written down by Sybil's father, she will finally taste her own medicine. Dickens worked with a number of charitable organizations and founded the first American branch of Samaritans (the suicide prevention organization) in Massachusetts in 1974. One of her projects was the erection of suicide barriers on the Bourne and Sagamore bridges across the Cape Cod canal. Cobbler's Dread (1963) emerged from her work with the RSPA and The Listeners (1970) from work with Samaritans. Around the human tragedy Dickens builds a story of human crisis, depicting the various persons, with all sorts of backgrounds, working for the organization. "But the main thing of the Samaritans is – the Samaritans. People like you. Ordinary people. That's where the need is. Ordinary people who know about love and tolerance and friendship. It's the reaching out of one human being to another. A sharing of – well, love is what it is if you want it in one word." (The Listeners, London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2011) The central characters include Tim Shaw, a lonely young man who is unemployed, Andrew, an university student, Paul, a teacher, who can save a man who has swallowed too many sleeping pills, Sarah, a childish young wife, and Victoria, a journalist. Dickens's 'Follyfoot' juvenile books, which centered on tales
of horses and farming communities, were based on the Yorkshire
Television series, which ran from 1971-1973. Dickens's lifetime
experience of riding and knowledge of everything to do with horses
pervade these books, which depict people who live at Follyfoot, a
Home of Rest for Horses, and their attempts to right injustices done to horses. The enemy of
Follyfoot is Sidney Hammond, whose own riding stables will not bear
inspection and whose loutish son makes Callie's life at school a
misery. Carrie Fielding, a horse-mad dreamer, was the heroine in the
World's End series, The House at the
World's End (1970), Summer at
the World's End (1971), World's
End in Winter (1972), and Spring
Comes to World's End (1973).
Carrie lives in an old inn and
rescued and cares for ill-treated animals. "They are the kind of
children's books that, when you are reminded of them as an adult, you
want to reread." (Alison Flood, The Guardian, 27 May 2011) "I want to entertain, to tell the truth, to try to help people understand other people," Dickens once said. (World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: The T. H. Wilson Company, 1975. p. 391) Until the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens he lived in Cape Cod. After selling the house in North Falmouth, she returned to England, settling in Brightwalton, Berkshire. Her later works include Closed at Dusk (1990), a story of revenge, and Scarred (1991), about a man who believes that plastic surgery can solve all of his problems. In late 1990 Dickens fell ill with cancer of the colon. Her final novel was One of the Family, which appeared posthumously in 1993. Dickens died on December 25, 1992, at the age of 77, at a hospital in Reading, England. For further reading: Monica: A Life of Monica Dickens by Anne Wellman (2018); Monica Dickens: A Chronological List of Her Writings with Brief Biographical Notes, compiled by David Green (2000); 'Introduction' by Carlton Jackson, in Befriending by Monica Dickens (1996); 'Dickens, Monica (Edid)' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); 'Monica Dickens. Writer,' in Women and the World Today by Peggy Chambers (1963); Author by Profession by James Leasor (1952) Selected works:
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