[1] Dickenson was born on 30 May 1851,[2] the only daughter of Augusta Sophia Musgrave and Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Frederick Bonham.

In 1886, Dickenson left her husband, and England, and travelled to Australia (she arrived in arrived in Melbourne in February that year), to follow her lover, Augustus Maximillian Dickenson, a medical doctor based in Deloraine, Tasmania, whom she married.

[4] In the 1890s Dickenson travelled through Australia, India and South Africa; she wrote articles and took photographs for The Adelaide Advertiser newspaper.

[7] Emily Hobhouse, a British welfare campaigner, drew on Dickenson's writings as evidence for her work to improve conditions in South Africa.

[1] Dickenson died at the age of 52, on 17 February 1903, in Cape Town, South Africa.