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Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
(August 6, 1862 - August 3, 1932) U.K.

Dickinson Goldsworthy

Historian and academic

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Dickinson was born in London, the son of Lowes Cato Dickinson, a portrait painter, by his marriage to Margaret Ellen Williams. When the boy was about one year old his family moved to the Spring Cottage in Hanwell, then a country village. 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.

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 an historian) was permanently renewed in 1896. That year his 1896 masterpiece The Greek Way of Life - dealt openly with love between people of the same sex, which lead gay British novelist E. M. Forster to write "all his deepest emotions were towards men."

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 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.

After a prostate operation in 1932, Dickinson appeared to be recovering, but he died.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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