Tilling (Sussex)

Tilling is a fictional coastal town, based on Rye, East Sussex, in the Mapp and Lucia novels of Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940).

Tilling takes it name from the River Tillingham which flows through Rye. Benson himself moved to Rye in 1918, where he lived in Lamb House, former home of the novelist, Henry James. Benson was mayor of Rye 1934-7 and was elected Speaker of the Cinque Ports in 1936.

Tilling first appeared in Miss Mapp (1922) and subsequently in The Male Impersonator and Desirable Residences (short stories of 1929), Mapp and Lucia (1931), set between June 1930 and the spring of 1931, in which Emmeline Lucas ("Lucia") and Elizabeth Mapp clashed for the first time, Lucia's Progress (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939). The novelist Susan Leg, the subject of Secret Lives (1932), re-appeared in Trouble for Lucia.

The first Lucia book, Queen Lucia, was published in 1920. It was followed in 1927 by Lucia in London. Benson's The Freaks of Mayfair (1916) provided the genesis of some of the characters of Tilling. Specifically, "Aunt Georgie", a bachelor with a penchant for embroidery, provided the model for George Pillson, who, as with Lucia, with whom he entered into a platonic marriage in Lucia's Progress, originally lived at Riseholme (thought to have been modelled on Broadway) in the Cotswolds.

In the final Benson Lucia book Trouble for Lucia Tilling seems to be no longer in Sussex but in Hampshire.

In the 1980s, following the adaptations by Gerald Savory (1909–96) of Benson's novels for London Weekend Television (1985–86), in which Tilling was referred to as "Tilling-on-Sea" (a form unknown in the books), two pastiches by Tom Holt (b. 1961), based in Tilling, were published by Macmillan: Lucia in Wartime (1985) and Lucia Triumphant (1986). Holt also produced a short story, Diplomatic Incident, for the former Tilling Society in 1998 and another called Great Minds for the Friends of Tilling in 2006. The Friends of Tilling organise an annual gathering in Rye each September for devotees of Mapp & Lucia and E F Benson's other comic novels. Two other Tilling books, Major Benjy and Au Reservoir, were written by Guy Fraser-Sampson and published by Troubador. In 2014 the BBC made a new three-part series adapted by Steve Pemberton (who also played Georgie Pillson) from the original Mapp and Lucia novel.

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