Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in – she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform into the Thames before she was presented at court as a debutante – she decided to go into domestic service despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair of Hands in 1939.

She was also a regular columnist for the British women's magazine Woman's Own for twenty years (without admitting to being an expatriate).

Dickens had strong humanitarian interests which were manifested in her work with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (reflected in her 1953 book No More Meadows and her 1964 work Kate and Emma), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (coming to the fore in her 1963 book Cobbler's Dream), and the Samaritans, the subject of her 1970 novel The Listeners – she helped to found the first American branch of the Samaritans in Massachusetts in 1974.

[3] From 1970 onwards she wrote a number of children's books; the Follyfoot series of books followed on from her earlier adult novel Cobbler's Dream, and were the basis of a children's TV series, also called Follyfoot, produced by Yorkshire Television for the UK's ITV network between 1971 and 1973 (and popular around the world for many years thereafter).

Dickens reportedly misheard this as an instruction as to the name which she should include in the inscription ("Emma Chisit") and thus was born the phenomenon of "Strine" which filled the newspaper's letter columns and subsequently was the subject of a separate weekly article and, later, a series of humorous books by Afferbeck Lauder (pseudonym of Alastair Morrison).