[KALKI]

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (6 August 1862 – 3 August 1932), was a British political scientist and philosopher. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.

Dickinson was deeply distressed by Britain's involvement in World War I. He drew up the idea of the League of Nations within a fortnight of the war's outbreak, and his subsequent writings helped to shape public opinion towards the League.



Early years

Dickinson was born in London to Margaret Ellen Williams Dickinson, daughter of William Smith Williams who was literary advisor to Smith, Elder & Company and had discovered Charlotte Brontë. His father was Lowes Cato Dickinson (1819–1908), a portrait painter. 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 schooling included attendance at a day school in Somerset Street, Portman Square, when he was 10 or 11. At about age 12 he was sent to Beomonds boarding school in Chertsey. His teenage years from 14 to 19 were spent at Charterhouse School in Godalming, where his brother, Arthur, preceded him. He was unhappy at the school, although he enjoyed seeing plays put on by visiting actors, and he played violin in the school orchestra. While he was at Charterhouse, his family moved from Hanwell to a house behind All Souls Church in Langham Place.

In 1881 he went 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, and Dickinson became a close friend of fellow King's College student 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 Classical Tripos.

After travelling in the Netherlands and Germany, he 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.