My Turn to Make the Tea is the third semi-autobiographical book by the British author Monica Dickens. First published in 1951 by Michael Joseph, the book relates Dickens' time working as a junior reporter on the Downingham Post [1] in the fictional town of Downingham.
The book is important for revealing the obstacles faced by many early women reporters in the world of journalism. [2] [3]
Set just after World War II, My Turn to Make the Tea relates the story of 'Poppy', the new and inexperienced junior reporter on the old-established provincial newspaper the Downingham Post in Downingham. She is nicknamed 'Poppy' by her co-workers “for no better reason than that a Sunday paper was running a crude cartoon about a blonde called Poppy Pink”. The book takes its title from the fact that, as the only female member of staff, it is always Poppy's turn to make the tea.
The book starts with Poppy finding a room in a boarding house with her irascible chain-smoking landlady Mrs Goff who seldom has a good word to say about anyone except Mr Goff and who tyrannically presides over her lodgers. Other boarders at No 5 Bury Road include the stage acrobat Maimie and her Japanese husband Tick Ling; Win and Connie who are looking for affluent husbands and who fill the bathroom with drying stockings and underwear; Margaret, who dies after a botched abortion, and Myra Nelson, an aspiring ballet dancer who tries to keep the fact she is married secret from her employer, dance instructor the Signora.
Initially keen to make changes to the newspaper by introducing innovative ideas such as a Woman's Column, Poppy soon discovers that the Downingham Post is deeply entrenched in the past and tradition, always including the same features and style of reporting the news because its readers don't like change and feel comfortable with the familiar format. Her attempts at court reporting were not wholly successful with the editor, the middle-aged bachelor Mr Pellet, who is convinced that he knows what the Post's readers want.
After a murder scare at No 5 Bury Road and a night at the fair with Mr Pellet, Poppy eventually has to leave the paper after removing a small article from the press to protect her fellow lodger, Myra, because it reveals she is secretly married to an army deserter. As she leaves the paper Poppy agrees with Mr Pellet that "women were a nuisance in an office, anyway."
The book is set in the fictional town of Downingham, but in real life Dickens worked for the Hertfordshire Express in Hitchin in Hertfordshire. [4] Dickens relates living in Bury Road in Downingham with a music school at the bottom of the road. In reality her lodgings were located in Highbury Road which still has the North Herts Music School at the end of the road.
The glass roofed shopping arcade, stepped war memorial and market square mentioned in the book can still be found in Hitchin. Nearby is the former Fairfield Hospital (now Fairfield) which appears as the Northgate Asylum in the book.
The real life editor of the Hertfordshire Express Ernest 'Hoddy' Hodson became Mr Pellet in the book. [4]
In 2004 My Turn to Make the Tea was adapted as a four-part radio serial for BBC Radio 4; the book was adapted for radio by Sheila Goff and was directed by David Hunter. It featured Alice Hart as Poppy, Joanne Froggatt as Myra, Keith Barron as Mr Pellet, Stephen Critchlow as Victor and Annabelle Dowler as Maimie. [5] [6]
The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery , commonly known as David Copperfield, is a novel in the bildungsroman genre by Charles Dickens, narrated by the eponymous David Copperfield, detailing his adventures in his journey from infancy to maturity. It was first published as a serial in 1849 and 1850, and as a book in 1850.
Hitchin is a market town in the North Hertfordshire district in Hertfordshire, England, with an estimated population of 33,350.
Claire Tomalin is an English journalist and biographer, known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Baldock is a historic market town in the local government district of North Hertfordshire in the ceremonial county of Hertfordshire, England, where the River Ivel rises. It lies 33 miles (53 km) north of London, 15 miles (24 km) southeast of Bedford, and 14 miles (23 km) north northwest of the county town of Hertford. Nearby towns include Royston to the northeast, Letchworth and Hitchin to the southwest and Stevenage to the south.
Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably the Thellusson v Woodford case in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.
Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting from the character Bella Wilfer in the book, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".
Hinxworth is a village and civil parish in North Hertfordshire, England. It sits just off the Great North Road between Baldock and Biggleswade. It has just over 100 inhabitants, a village hall, a park, a pub, a small church, a bus stop and a post box. The population at the 2011 Census was 313.
"The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" (1927), one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.
Monica Enid Dickens, MBE was an English writer, the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens.
A Tale of Two Cities is an 1859 historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, critic Don D'Ammassa argues that it is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed.
Joanne Froggatt is an English actress. From 2010 to 2015, she portrayed Anna Bates in the ITV period drama series Downton Abbey. For this role, she received three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress on Television in 2014. From 2017 to 2020, she starred in the ITV drama series Liar.
Angel Pavement is a novel by J. B. Priestley, published in 1930 after the enormous success of The Good Companions (1929).
Fairfield Hospital in Fairfield, Bedfordshire, England was a psychiatric hospital from 1860 to 1999. It is a Grade II listed building.
Hitchin Rural District was a rural district in Hertfordshire, England from 1894 to 1974, covering an area in the north of the county.
The Lodger is a novel by English author Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. The short story was first published in the January, 1911 edition of McClure's Magazine, in 1911. Belloc Lowndes wrote a longer version of the story, which was published as a series in the Daily Telegraph in 1913 with the same name. Later that year, the novel was published in its entirety by Methuen Publishing.
Mary Angela Dickens was an English novelist and journalist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and the oldest grandchild of the novelist Charles Dickens. She died on the 136th anniversary of her grandfather's birth.
Edward Chapman was a British publisher who, with William Hall founded Chapman & Hall, publishers for Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, Eadweard Muybridge and Evelyn Waugh among others.
Frederic Chapman was a publisher of the Victorian era who became a partner in Chapman & Hall, who published the works of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.
The Personal History of David Copperfield is a 2019 comedy-drama film written and directed by Armando Iannucci, based on the 1850 Victorian era novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It stars Dev Patel as the title character, along with Aneurin Barnard, Peter Capaldi, Morfydd Clark, Daisy May Cooper, Rosalind Eleazar, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw and Paul Whitehouse.
Mrs Martha Bardell is a fictional character in The Pickwick Papers (1836), the first novel by Charles Dickens. A widow and the landlady of Mr Pickwick, a romantic misunderstanding between the two results in one of the most famous legal cases in English literature, Bardell v. Pickwick, leading to them both being incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt.