Richard Watson Dixon

Richard Watson Dixon (1833-1900) in Poems, 1909. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Rev. Richard Watson Dixon (5 May 1833 - 23 January 1900) was an English poet and divine.

Life

Overview

Dison was the son of a well-known Wesleyan minister and historian of Methodism. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Oxford, took Anglican orders, was Second Master at Carlisle School, Vicar of Hayton and Warkworth, and Canon of Carlisle. He published 7 volumes of poetry, but is best known for his History of the Church of England from the Abolition of Roman Jurisdiction (1877-1900).

Youth and education

Dixon was the eldest son of Dr. James Dixon, a distinguished Wesleyan preacher, by Mary, only daughter of Rev. Richard Watson (1781–1833). 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 at Islington, and educated, under Dr. Giffard, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he had for school friends Edwin Hatch and (Sir) Edward Burne-Jones. In June 1851 he matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when in the Christmas term of the same year 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 J.W. Mackail's Life of Morris (i. 42 sqq.) 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 earned a 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 the Cramer prize for a sacred poem, the subject being St. John in Patmos. The poem is in the heroic couplet, and is a very dignified and impressive piece of writing.

Career

Dixon in The Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon, 1905. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

His 1st published volume of poems, called Christ's Company, had already appeared in 1861, and a 2nd, Historical Odes, followed in 1863.

After leaving Oxford Dixon lodged for a time with Morris and Burne-Jones in Red Lion Square. In 1858 he was ordained to the curacy of St. Mary-the-Less, Lambeth, Mr. Gregory, the present dean of St. Paul's, giving him his title. On 9 April 1861 he married the widow of William Thomson of Haddingtonshire (née Maria Sturgeon), in the same year removing to the curacy of St. Mary, Newington Butts.

From 1863 to 1868 he was 2nd master at Carlisle High School, and from 1868 to 1875 minor canon and honorary librarian of Carlisle Cathedral. After that he was for 8 years vicar of Hayton, in Cumberland, and was then presented by the bishop of Carlisle to the vicarage of Warkworth in Northumberland, which he held till his death. Besides these small livings Dixon received no preferment in the church, although the best years of his life were devoted to writing a church history, which took rank from the moment of its appearance as a standard authority.

In manner Dixon rather appeared than was shy and melancholy, qualities which he notes in his father, whose portrait in middle life, as given in the biography, his son not a little resembled. It was often remarked that Dixon had a great look of Chaucer as he appears in Hoccleve's portrait; and the resemblance was more than external, reaching to a characteristic and humorous interest in all sorts and conditions of people. At the same time he was a zealous and devoted parish priest.

His friends would have greatly valued for him the increase of leisure and opportunities for study which a cathedral stall would have afforded; but it was not to be. The distinctions which he received after the appearance of the 1st volume of his history, in 1877, were such as to reduce the already scanty leisure of a hard-worked parish clergyman. In 1874 he had been made honorary canon of Carlisle; in 1879 he became rural dean of Brampton; in 1884 rural dean of Alnwick; and in 1891 examining chaplain to the bishop of Newcastle. He was chaplain to the high sheriff of Cumberland in 1883, and from 1890 to 1894 was a proctor in convocation.

After his 2 volumes of verse in the 1860's, Dixon produced nothing for the next 20 years. In 1878 Gerard Manley Hopkins, an admirer of Dixon's poetry, made his acquaintance and introduced him to Robert Bridges, which inspired Dixon to begin writing again. The result was what H.C. Beeching called "a series of fine odes, dealing chiefly with the thoughts and experiences of age, which remain Dixon’s most original and effective contribution to poetry." It was not until 1883 that he attracted conspicuous notice with Mano, an historical poem in terza rima, which was enthusiastically praised by Swinburne. This success he followed up by 3 privately printed volumes, Odes and Eclogues (1884), Lyrical Poems (1886), and The Story of Eudocia (1888).

Last years

His 1st wife having died in 1876, Dixon married in 1882 Matilda, eldest daughter of George Routledge. He had no children by either marriage; but he proved an affectionate step-father to the daughters of his first wife.

He was always singularly modest as to his claims upon recognition; but it gave him genuine pleasure when in the last year of his life his university conferred upon him an honorary doctor's degree in divinity, and his college made him an honorary fellow. In 1885 he stood for Oxford Professor of Poetry, but withdrew his candidacy before the election. The short preface to Eudocia and her Brothers upon the use of the heroic couplet shows that he possessed keen critical powers and a faculty of lucid exposition.

In 1892 Dixon issued a Latin poem, 'Carmen elegiacum in obitum Edwini Hatch, D.D.'

In December 1891 Dixon had a severe attack of influenza, which for some long time diminished his power of writing, but he ultimately recovered; a second attack in January 1900 carried him off after a few days' illness. He died at Warkworth.

Writing

Verse

The early poems of Dixon were distinguished by not a little of the color and imagination, and also by something of the eccentricity, that marked the early efforts of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The poems of Christ's Company, though largely upon religious subjects, are not strictly religious poetry; they are works of picturesque imagination rather than of devotional feeling. The Historical Odes show an advance in simplicity, and a power, that Dixon afterwards carried further, of ode construction. The odes upon Wellington and Marlborough contain much good writing, and deserve more attention than they have received.

Dixon's latest poems are his best. They grew to the end in simplicity and intellectual force. His later songs have some of the directness and music and imaginative quality of Blake's. His masterpieces may be reckoned the odes "On Conflicting Claims" and "On Advancing Age," and that entitled "The Spirit Wooed."

History

The work, however, by which he must take rank is The History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction, which happily he lived to complete, the 5th and final volume being ready for publication at the time of his death. This work is not a philosophical history of the Reformation, but a chronicle history. The attempt is made, and made with success, to narrate the events as they happened; in fact, to "beget the time again." Dixon's object was partly to correct Froude's view of the Reformation in England, and he held that "a reformation was needed in many things; but it was carried out on the whole by bad instruments, and attended by great calamities" (Hist. i. 7).

The style of the work is the prose-style of a poet; that is to say, words are used not merely as conventional counters, but with a full sense of their value. In some places the effect of the writing is somewhat, odd, but on the whole it is striking and satisfactory. The character sketches, generally critical in tone, of the chief actors in the historic drama show Dixon's imaginative insight and genius for reconstructing past events; and they are among the most interesting passages in the several volumes.

Miscellaneous

Dixon's published works besides the compositions referred to above are as follows: 'Christ's Company,' 1861. 'Historical Odes,' 1863. 'Life of James Dixon, D.D.,' 1874. 'An Essay on the Maintenance of the Church of England,' 1874. 'The Monastic Comperta, so far as they regard the Religious Houses of Cumberland and Westmorland,' Kendal, 1879. 'Seven Sermons preached in the Cathedral Church of Newcastle-on-Tyne,' edited with a preface, 1888. 'A Sermon preached on the Occasion of the Diamond Jubilee,' Alnwick, 1897. 'Mano,' a narrative poem in terza rima, 1883. 'Odes and Eclogues,' 1884. 'Lyrical Poems,' 1886. 'The Story of Eudocia and her Brothers,' 1888; the last 3 being pamphlets printed at the private press of the Rev. H. Daniel in Oxford; from them a selection was edited in 1896 (by his friend, Robert Bridges) and published in Elkin Mathews's 'Shilling Garland.'

Critical introduction

by Henry Charles Beeching

In most literary coteries which become famous there are members who, while respected for their talents within the circle, escape public recognition because they pursue the common ideal with a divided will. R.W. Dixon undoubtedly occupied a prominent place in that brotherhood of Oxford undergraduates in the '50s of last century, which included Burne-Jones and William Morris and, as an outside member, Gabriel Rossetti. But while still at Oxford he had discovered a taste for historical studies, winning the Arnold prize for an essay on The Close of the Tenth Century of the Christian Era, and on leaving the University and taking orders he began, in the leisured post of a Cathedral minor canonry, to write that picturesque chronicle history of the English Reformation by which he is best known. Later church preferments were all of the kind which added to his professional labours, and as his History retained for the rest of his life the first claim upon his leisure, poetry was well-nigh crowded out.

This is not a thing of which any one can reasonably complain. The History is at least an accomplished fact, and its merits as literature are acknowledged; while there is no evidence that Dixon saw his way at all clearly in poetry. He was experimenting to the last, and none of his experiments held out much prospect of a great success. But it is worth pointing out how little time Dixon could give to poetry, because poetry was not with him, as it was with his friend Morris, very much a matter of improvisation; it was an art calling for long study and assiduous practice; and his first book shows that he had many of the qualities which might in other circumstances have led to a greater measure of success.

His debut collection, Christ’s Company, published in 1861, 3 years after Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, had even less chance of attracting popular attention. The Defence of Guenevere, though it might surprise by occasional quaintness and offend by the absence of Tennysonian polish, contained stories of human passion which are at any rate intelligible, and, as we know, it made on many sympathetic minds an ineffaceable impression. Dixon’s poems were at the opposite pole to these straightforward tales in easy verse. The first impression they gave was of queerness. The vocabulary was queer, there were words like agraffes, stroom, graith, which are not known to the dictionary, and lines like “the flax was bolled upon my crine;” the rhymes were queer and assertive, “only, conely;” “writhing, high thing;” often the syntax was queer. “Who,” asks St. Peter, “shall ban my sorrow?” and this is the answer he gives:

  “Not earth that drinks my tears; not heavenly sky;
    Not they who took with me the bread and wine;
    Perhaps not God who looks on me,
    The Father thinking of the tree
    Of cursing in me rooted, see
    The flinders; not the victim, He,
                My sorrow!”

But no less evident to an attentive reader is the fact that in each poem the writer has something to say which he is earnest about saying, and that he is saying it as well as he can, with his eye upon some ideal beauty which he is endeavouring to reproduce. What is unfortunate is that through want of skill the artist’s hand does not always answer to his imagination, and thus the reader is sorely puzzled to make out the meaning. St. Mary Magdalene is perhaps the most successful of these early poems. It has the accent of Rossetti, and could never have been written without his influence. But it has a beauty of its own; and if it had been furnished with an argument, so that the ordinary reader could have mastered the general meaning, it might have become as popular in the Butterfield period of Churchmanship as many of Miss Rossetti’s picturesque poems. The St. John contains a fine series of pictures of “the seven archangels with his army each,” done in the same Pre-Raphaelite manner. And many of the descriptions of natural scenery with which the book abounds are in the same style of careful detail.

  “Here I lie along the trunk
That swings the heavy sluice-door sunk
In the water, which outstreams
In little runlets from its seams.”

But occasionally we have passages of description of quite a different character, addressed not to the memory but to the imagination. This is how the Bride of Christ is seen in St. John’s vision:—

  “Her form was beautiful and wondrous tall,
Her eyes were like half-moons in cloudy smoke,
  Her height was as a pillar in a wall,
Her hair was as a flowery banner free,
Her glory like a fountain in the rocks,
Her graciousness like vines to tender flocks,
  
  Her eyes like lilies shaken by the bees,
Her hair a net of moonbeams in a cloud,
  Her thinness like a row of youngling trees
And golden bees hummed round her in a crowd.”

Dixon’s 2nd volume followed the first after a 3 years’ interval, and while containing a few poems in the early manner, was chiefly interesting for its new experiments. It bore the name Historical Odes from the poems upon Wellington and Marlborough with which it opened: poems which it is to be feared there have been few to praise, and very few to love. The historical interest is rightly subordinated to that of character, but the sentiments, though excellent, do not succeed in finding for themselves a memorable expression. But there were experiments also in other directions. There are tales of classical mythology and there are romantic tales, both of which modes of writing retained their attraction for the poet to the last. There are also various odes upon such subjects as Sympathy, Rapture, and Departing Youth. Finally, there was one song, "The Feathers of the Willow", of which it was said by a fine critic that it would be difficult to find anywhere “two stanzas so crowded with the pathos of nature and landscape.”

Dixon published no more poetry for 20 years. In 1878 the late Father Hopkins, S.J., who admired the early volumes, introduced himself to him and then made him known to Robert Bridges, and the stimulus of this poetic sympathy provoked an aftermath in a series of fine odes, dealing chiefly with the thoughts and experiences of age, which remain Dixon’s most original and effective contribution to poetry.

Recognition

Dixon won the Oxford prize for a sacred poem in 1863, on the subject of "St. John in Patmos."

Dixon was briefly considered for Poet Laureate when Alfred Tennyson died in 1892.

Dixon received an honorary degree of D.D. from Oxford University in 1899.

Dixon's selected Poems were published in 1909, edited and with a memoir of the author by Robert Bridges.

Publications

Poetry

• Christ's Company, and other poems. London: Smith, Elder, 1861; New York: Garland Publishing, 1978.
• St. John in Patmos. Oxford, UK: T. & G. Shrimpton / London: Smith, Elder, [1863?]
• Historical Odes, and other poems. London: Smith Elder, 1864.
• Mano: A poetical history. London: Routledge, 1883.
• Odes and Eclogues. Oxford, UK: H. Daniel, 1884.
• Lyrical Poems. Oxford, UK: H. Daniel, 1887.
• The Story of Eudocia and Her Brothers: A narrative poem. Oxford UK: H. Daniel, 1888.
• In Obitum Edwini Hatch, D.D.: Carmen elegaicum. London: Routledge, 1892.
• Songs and Odes. London: Elkin Mathews, 1896.
• Last Poems (edited by Robert Bridges; with preface by Mary E. Coleridge). London: H. Frowde, 1905.
• Poems by the Late Rev. Richard Watson Dixon (edited by Robert Bridges). London: John Murray / Smith, Elder / Oxford University Press, 1909.
• Collected Poems of Canon Richard Watson Dixon, 1833-1900. New York: P. Lang, 1989.

Fiction

• "The Rivals", "The Barrier Kingdoms", and "Prospects of Peace", in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856)..

Non-fiction

• The Close of the Tenth Century of the Christian Era. Oxford, UK: T. & G. Shrimpton, 1858.
• [https//www.archive.org/details/thelifeofjamesdi00dixouoft The Life of James Dixon, D.D., Wesleyan Minister]. London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1874;
• Three Essays on the Maintenance of the Church of England as an Established Church. London: John Murray, 1874.
• [httsp://www.archive.org/details/historychurchen00dixogoog History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction]. (6 volumes), London, George Routledge; (6 volumes), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV, 1891 Volume V, Volume VI, 1902.

Letters

• The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (edited by Claude Colleer Abbott). London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

See also

The Wizard's Funeral by Richard Watson Dixon

• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Beeching, Henry Charles (1901). "Dixon, Richard Watson". In Sidney Lee. Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement​. 2. London: Smith, Elder. pp. 139-140.  Wikisource, Web, Jan. 5, 2017.

External links

Poems

• "If thou wast still, O stream"
• "Rapture: An Ode"
• 3 poems by Dixon: "Song: The feathers of the willow," "The Fall of the Leaf," "The Judgment of the May"
• "The Silent Heavens" - Poem of the Week at The Guardian
• Richard Watson Dixon at PoemHunter (2 poems)
• Dixon in The English Poets: An anthology: Song: The feathers of the willow, "The Fall of the Leaf," "Ode on Conflicting Claims," "Ode: The Spirit Wooed," "Ode on Advancing Age"
• Dixon in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "Ode on Conflicting Claims," "Humanity," "The Skylark," "Of a Vision of Hell, Which a Monk Had," "Of Temperance in Fortune"
• Richard Watson Dison at Poetry Nook (165 poems)

Stories

• "The Rivals" at The Rossetti Archive

Books

• Richard Watson Dixon at Internet Archive
• Richard Watson Dixon at Amazon.com

About

• Dixon, Richard Watson at British and Irish Poets
• "Christian Pre-Raphaelitism: G.M. Hopkins' debt to Richard Dixon" (.PDF)
• Dixon, Richard Watson" in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement (edited by Sidney Lee)​. London: Smith, Elder, 1901. Original article is at: Dixon, Richard Watson