Early years Dickinson was born in London, the son of
Lowes Cato Dickinson (1819–1908), a portrait painter, by his marriage to Margaret Ellen Williams, a daughter of William Smith Williams who was a literary advisor to
Smith, Elder & Company and had discovered
Charlotte Brontë. When the boy was about one year old his family moved to the Spring Cottage in
Hanwell, then a country village. The family also included his brother, Arthur, three years older, an older sister, May, and two younger sisters, Hester and Janet. His education included attendance at a day school in Somerset Street,
Portman Square, when he was ten or eleven. At about the age of twelve, he was sent to Beomonds, a
boarding school in
Chertsey, and his teenage years from 14 to 19 were spent at
Charterhouse School in
Godalming, where his brother Arthur had preceded him. He was unhappy at Charterhouse, although he enjoyed seeing plays put on by visiting actors, and he played the violin in the school orchestra. While he was there, his family moved from Hanwell to a house behind
All Souls Church in Langham Place. In 1881 Dickinson went up to
King's College, Cambridge, as an
exhibitioner, where his brother, Arthur, had again preceded him. Near the end of his first year, he received a telegram informing him that his mother had died from
asthma. During his college years, his tutor,
Oscar Browning, was a strong influence on him, and Dickinson became a close friend of his fellow King's undergraduate
C. R. Ashbee. Dickinson won the chancellor's English medal in 1884 for a poem on
Savonarola, and in graduating that summer he was awarded a first-class degree in the
Classical Tripos. After travelling in the
Netherlands and Germany, Dickinson returned to Cambridge late that year and was elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the
Cambridge Apostles. In a year or two he was part of the circle that included
Roger Fry,
J. M. E. McTaggart, and
Nathaniel Wedd.
Career , London W8, Dickinson's London home In the summer of 1885, he worked at a co-operative farm, Craig Farm at
Tilford near
Farnham in Surrey. The farm had been started by
Harold Cox as an experiment in simple living. Dickinson was proud of his hoeing, digging, and ploughing. That autumn, and continuing to the spring of 1886, Dickinson joined the University Extension Scheme to give public lectures that covered
Carlyle,
Emerson,
Browning, and
Tennyson. He toured the country, living for a term at
Mansfield and for a second term at
Chester and
Southport. He spent a brief time in
Wales afterwards. With financial help from his father, Dickinson then began to study for a medical degree, beginning in October 1886 at Cambridge. Although he became dissatisfied with his new subject and nearly decided to drop out, he persevered and passed his M.B. examinations in 1887 and 1888. Yet he finally decided he was not interested in a career in medicine. In March 1887 a dissertation on
Plotinus helped his election to a fellowship at King's College. During
Roger Fry's last year at Cambridge (1887–1888), Dickinson, a homosexual, fell in love with him. After an initially intense relationship (which according to Dickinson's biography did not include sex with Fry, a heterosexual), the two established a long friendship. Through Fry, Dickinson soon met
Jack McTaggart and
F. C. S. Schiller. Dickinson then settled down at Cambridge, although he again lectured through the University Extension Scheme, travelling to
Newcastle,
Leicester, and
Norwich. His fellowship at King's College (as a historian) was permanently renewed in 1896. That year his book
The Greek View of Life was published. He later wrote a number of dialogues in the
Socratic tradition. Dickinson did not live the detached life of a stereotypical Cambridge academic. When
G. K. Chesterton chose contemporary thinkers with whom he disagreed for his book
Heretics (1905), the focus of Chapter 12 was "Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson". There Chesterton writes: Mr. Lowes Dickinson, the most pregnant and provocative of recent writers on this and similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have fallen into this old error of the mere anarchy of Paganism. To make hay of that Hellenic enthusiasm which has as its ideal mere appetite and egotism, it is not necessary to know much philosophy, but merely to know a little Greek. Mr. Lowes Dickinson knows a great deal of philosophy, and also a great deal of Greek, and his error, if error he has, is not that of the crude hedonist. But the contrast which he offers between Christianity and Paganism in the matter of moral ideals—a contrast which he states very ably in a paper called "How Long Halt Ye?" which appeared in the
Independent Review—does, I think, contain an error of a deeper kind. Dickinson was a lecturer in political science from 1886 to his retirement in 1920, and the college librarian from 1893 to 1896. Dickinson helped establish the Economics and Politics Tripos and taught political science within the University. For 15 years he also lectured at the
London School of Economics. In 1897 he made his first trip to
Greece, travelling with Nathaniel Wedd,
Robin Mayor, and
A. M. Daniel. He joined the
Society for Psychical Research in 1890, and served on its Council from 1904 to 1920. In 1903 he helped to found the
Independent Review.
Edward Jenks was editor, and members of its editorial board included Dickinson,
F. W. Hirst,
C. F. G. Masterman,
G. M. Trevelyan, and Nathaniel Wedd. Fry designed the front cover. Over the years Dickinson contributed a number of articles to it, some later reprinted in
Religion: A Criticism and a Forecast (1905) and
Religion and Immortality (1911).
First World War and after Within a fortnight of the start of the
First World War, Dickinson had drafted schemes for a "League of Nations", and together with
Lord Dickinson and
Lord Bryce he planned the ideas behind of the League of Nations and played a leading role in the founding of the group of internationalist pacifists known as the
Bryce Group. The organisation eventually became the nucleus of the
League of Nations Union. In his pamphlet
After the War (1915) he wrote of his "League of Peace" as being essentially an organisation for arbitration and conciliation. He felt that the secret diplomacy of the early twentieth century had brought about war and thus could write that, "the impossibility of war, I believe, would be increased in proportion as the issues of foreign policy should be known to and controlled by public opinion." Dickinson promoted his ideas with a large number of books and pamphlets, including his book
The International Anarchy. In 1929, the Talks Department of the
BBC invited him to give the first and last lectures in a series called "Points of View". He went on to give several series of BBC talks on various topics, including
Goethe and
Plato.
Death and legacy After a prostate operation in 1932, Dickinson appeared to be recovering, but he died on 3 August. Memorial services were held in
King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and in London.
E. M. Forster, by then a good friend, who had been influenced by Dickinson's books, accepted the appointment as Dickinson's literary executor. Dickinson's sisters then asked Forster to write their brother's biography, which was published as
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1934. Forster has been criticised for refraining from publishing details of Dickinson's sexual proclivities, including his
foot fetishism and unrequited love for young men. E. M. Forster stated (in "the Art of Fiction") that he used Dickinsons' sisters as his inspiration for Margaret and Helen Schlegel, the central characters in
Howards End. ==Works==