[citation needed] Christopher Henry Dawson was born of an Anglo-Catholic family in the Bevan ancestral home of Hay Castle, during the waning years of the Victorian era, and spent most of his childhood among the ruins of the Yorkshire countryside.

[3] Captain Dawson, although an army officer, was more of an explorer than a soldier, and the closest he ever came to actual combat was behind the front-lines in the Franco-Prussian War.

Dawson's childhood was exuberance and wonderment, spending most of his time in the place which would set the course for his interest in history: The Yorkshire countryside.

Dawson recognised a moral and spiritual beauty within the Catholic Church, leading to an intellectual awakening which culminated in his conversion on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1914.

His daughter recalled an incident when he neared the gates of a school she was about to attend, Dawson murmured "I can't face it"; he left the car and sat in the wood reading a book.

The great church with its tombs of the Saxon kings and the medieval statesmen-bishops, gave one a greater sense of the magnitude of the religious element in our culture and the depths of its roots in our national life than anything one could learn from books[9]However, he later stated that Winchester College "was the best of English schools".

His starting point was close to that of Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, others who were also interested in grand narratives conducted at the level of a civilisation.

Dawson's first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was apparently intended as the first of a set of five to trace European civilisation to the twentieth century.

He argued that the medieval Catholic Church was an essential factor in the rise of European civilisation, and wrote extensively in support of that thesis.

His work was influential in the founding of Campion College and the formation in 2012 of The Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture Inc. in Perth, Western Australia.