G. Lowes Dickinson

Artist Info

G. Lowes DickinsonLondon, 1862 - 1932, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50027266

Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes (1862–1932), scholar and advocate of a league of nations, was born on 6 August 1862 at Langham Chambers, near Oxford Circus, London, the third of the five children of Lowes Cato Dickinson (1819–1908) and his wife, Margaret Ellen (d. 1882), daughter of William Smith Williams. The accountant Sir Arthur Lowes Dickinson (1859–1935) was his elder brother. His father, the portrait painter, was a Christian socialist who taught at the Working Men's College; his mother was related to the inventor Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, after whom her son was named, though in his circle it was always shortened to Goldie. Dickinson's career was in keeping with these intellectual and high-minded associations, especially from 1881 when, after several unhappy years at a preparatory school and Charterhouse School, he entered King's College, Cambridge, as an exhibitioner. At Cambridge he was elected to the Society of Apostles and fell under the influence of Oscar Browning (he later wrote on him for the Dictionary of National Biography). He also became devoted to Shelley's poetry, the route by which he first approached politics. The visit to Cambridge of Henry George led him to read Progress and Poverty, and imbued by these ideas he spent the summer of 1885 working on a co-operative farm in Surrey. He had graduated in 1884 with first-class honours in classics, but returned to Cambridge in order, from idealistic motives, to study medicine—an idea he gave up after a dissertation on Plotinus, on which he had been working at the same time, had secured for him a fellowship at King's College in 1887. He also lectured, from 1896 to 1920, at the London School of Economics, offering the same courses on political science that he taught at Cambridge.

Among Dickinson's early books were Revolution and Reaction in Modern France (1892) and The Development of Parliament during the Nineteenth Century (1895), but he also wrote The Greek View of Life (1896) as well as some works of imagination. His Letters from John Chinaman (1901), which was widely noticed, might be included among the latter; purporting to be from a Chinese official (though Dickinson denied any attempt at deception), the letters were a means of criticizing Western society. Another form he used to explore ideas was the imaginary dialogue, most notably A Modern Symposium (1905) in which thirteen men discussed from different standpoints the ideas of the time. He also wrote for the progressive journals of the period, including the Independent Review which he had helped to set up in 1903. His academic standing led to two lecture tours in the United States, in 1901 and 1909. An Albert Kahn travelling fellowship enabled him to visit India (he was accompanied on this part of the journey by E. M. Forster), China, and Japan in 1912. With like-minded companions, he spent various holidays in several European countries.

The advent of war affected Dickinson's outlook and activities profoundly. Before 1914 his espousal of progressive causes had not drawn him far into the public sphere, for which he had little liking. Thereafter most of his writings were intended to influence opinion and, although not by nature a political activist, he began to work against what he regarded as the international anarchy that had led to war. In the first weeks of the war he called for the establishment of a league of nations (a term he is believed to have coined). He was prominent in the Bryce Group, known as such from the involvement of Lord Bryce, although his friend Forster considered it would more justly have been called the Lowes Dickinson Group. His involvement in the Union of Democratic Control, a body more critical of the government, brought some obloquy, although not to the extent experienced by his friend Bertrand Russell. When Russell was stripped of his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dickinson wrote in his defence. He also travelled to The Hague in 1915 and the United States in 1916 to promote his proposals. Inevitably, he was dissatisfied with the terms of the peace and in common with other critics of the war with whom he had been associated (such as J. A. Hobson, Arthur Ponsonby, and E. D. Morel) he moved towards the Labour Party; for a time he was a member of the party's advisory committee on international affairs. The war also resulted in his most substantial book, on which he worked for several years, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (1926).

Dickinson retired from lecturing in 1920, but retained his fellowship of King's College and continued to live in rooms there. Until the end of his life he wrote prolifically, especially on Goethe and Plato, both the subjects of several radio broadcasts in 1930–31. In 1931 he published a memoir of an old friend, the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart. In the same year ‘Edward Carpenter as a friend’ appeared, an essay that throws some light on his own socialism in the 1880s.

Like his mentor Oscar Browning, Dickinson believed that fellows of colleges should encourage close friendships with undergraduates, and many were drawn by his charm and humour. Those who knew him well noticed a melancholy side to his outlook, in part a consequence of disappointed hopes for a higher diplomacy but also the result of personal circumstances. He candidly discussed the latter in some recollections, drawn on by E. M. Forster, his biographer, but not published until 1973. It was his intention in these, he noted, ‘to tell what is usually not told’, though he did so ‘with the feeling that those who read, if they are what is called normal men, will not understand, and if they are homosexual, likely enough will find it absurd’ (Autobiography, 43, 89). Not only was Dickinson drawn to young heterosexual men, but his friendships were also coloured by a boot fetish. It was a side of his nature he expressed in verse form:

We're alone,

I and the youth I dream of as my own.

He sits and at his feet I take my place,

He plants them firmly on my neck and face,

Both pleasing me and pleased himself at heart,

Because he loves the domineering part.

I snuff the scent of leather at my nose

And squirm and wriggle as the pressure grows,

While he, more masterful the more I gulp,

Cries ‘Quiet! or I'll tread you into pulp!’

(ibid., 273)

Roger Fry was the first of five young men to whom Dickinson was particularly drawn. The last was Dennis Proctor, the editor of his recollections and the author of the Dictionary of National Biography article on Dickinson, who wrote that each of the five ‘did his best in his own way to assuage his physical desires’ (ibid., 7).

Most who knew Dickinson admired his passionate desire for the improvement of mankind and the sense of service that impelled him into the public sphere. Friends of all ages found him lovable, for the unhappiness brought by personal and political disappointments did not sour his gaiety and compassion. Even his foibles, such as his complaints that he always felt cold and what Kingsley Martin called ‘the spite of “so-called inanimate objects” which pestered him from the moment in the morning when he could not find his collar stud until the final discomfort of undressing at night’ (Martin, 121), endeared him to others. Occasionally he exasperated, as when Virginia Woolf recalled Dickinson as ‘Always alone on a mountain top asking himself how to live, theorising about life; never living ... always Shelley and Goethe, and then he loses his hot water bottle’. In quoting these remarks, Leonard Woolf suggested Dickinson's ‘thin vapour of gentle high-mindedness sometimes irritated her’ (L. Woolf, Beginning Again: an Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918, 1964, 190–91). However, such strictures were untypical of his associates who saw in his thinking a wish to deal fairly with all points of view. This approach characterized too his religious beliefs: he was neither a Christian nor an atheist, but has been compared to a pilgrim who passed through phases of mysticism and religion. His short book The Magic Flute: a Fantasia (1920) explored in allegorical form an idea that always attracted him, how to combine reason and faith.

When in 1956 Forster gave a radio talk on Dickinson he suggested he was no longer much read or talked about even in King's College. This he regretted, ‘not for his sake but because he has so much to offer’—challenges and correctives that were still relevant (Forster, 212). Though gradually his reputation as a scholar lessened, a few of his books remained in print, including The Greek View of Life, issued as a University Paperback in 1962, and A Modern Symposium. His ability to gain the friendship of the young meant he was remembered for many years after his death. Those who were drawn to his personality acknowledged that his appearance was unprepossessing—bald, thin-featured, and rather shabby, as Roger Fry showed him in a portrait of 1925. His lasting importance perhaps lies in his position as a member of the liberal-socialist intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least for his response to, and desire to learn from, the First World War. Dickinson died in Guy's Hospital, London, on 3 August 1932, following a prostate operation, and was cremated at Golders Green on 8 August.

D. E. Martin

Sources

E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and related writings (1973) · The autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson and other unpublished writings, ed. D. Proctor (1973) · The Times (4 Aug 1932) · The Times (9 Aug 1932) · K. Martin, Father figures: a first volume of autobiography, 1897–1931 (1966) · G. W. Egerton, Great Britain and the creation of the League of Nations: strategy, politics, and international organisation, 1914–1919 (1979) · H. R. Winkler, The League of Nations movement in Great Britain, 1914–1919 (1952) · K. Robbins, The abolition of war: the ‘peace movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919 (1976) · M. Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British politics during the First World War (1971)