Richard Watson Dixon
| Richard Watson Dixon | |
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from the Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon 1905
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| Born |
5 May 1833 Islington |
| Died | 23 January 1900 (aged 66) |
| Education | King Edward's School, Birmingham |
| Alma mater | Pembroke College, Oxford |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood |
Richard Watson Dixon (5 May 1833 – 23 January 1900), English poet and divine, son of Dr James Dixon, a Wesleyan minister.
He was the eldest son of Dr. James Dixon, a distinguished Wesleyan preacher, by Mary, only daughter of the Rev. Richard Watson. In the biography he wrote of his father, Dixon describes his mother as 'an excellent Latin and Greek scholar, a perfect French and a sufficient Italian linguist, and an exquisite musician;' and of his grandmother, Mrs. Watson, who made a home with her daughter, he retained an affectionate recollection as of a very good and clever woman. Both the Watsons and Dixons belonged to the early school of Methodists, who did not renounce their membership in the church of England, so that there was no feeling that Dixon had been disloyal to their communion when he prepared for orders in the church.
He was born on 5 May 1833 at Islington, and educated, under Dr. Gifford, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he had for school friends Edwin Hatch and Edward Burne-Jones. In June 1851, he matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when in the Christmas term of the same year Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris came up to Exeter College, they, with Fulford, Faulkner, Cormell Price, and a few more, formed a close brotherhood. An excellent account of these Oxford days was contributed by Dixon to Mr. J. W. Mackail's Life of Morris. He says ‘Jones and Morris were both meant for holy orders, and the same may be said of the rest of us except Faulkner; but the bond of alliance was poetry and indefinite artistic and literary aspirations. We all had the notion of doing great things for men according to our own will and bent.’ With Morris, Dixon projected the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,’ and had a hand, under Rossetti's direction, in the amateur distempering of the walls of Woodward's new debating hall at the Oxford Union with frescoes from the Arthurian Romances, now almost completely obliterated. Dixon did not in after life pursue painting as a study—a single canvas, a wedding-scene from Chaucer, is, it is believed, the only picture of his that survives —but he always retained his interest, and a visit to the old masters in the National Gallery was a regular incident of any visit to London. At Oxford Dixon read for the ordinary classical schools, and graduated B.A. in 1857. The next year he won the Arnold historical prize for an essay on ‘The Close of the Tenth Century of the Christian Era,’ and in 1863 Oxford's Sacred Poem Prize, the subject being ‘St. John in Patmos.’ The poem is in the heroic couplet, and is a very dignified and impressive piece of writing. His first published volume of poems, called ‘Christ's Company,’ had already appeared in 1861, and a second, ‘Historical Odes,’ followed in 1863. These early poems of Dixon were distinguished by not a little of the colour and imagination, and also by something of the eccentricity, that marked the early efforts of the Pre-Raphaelite school.
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