Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

During his college years, his tutor, Oscar Browning, was a strong influence on him, and Dickinson became a close friend of his fellow King's undergraduate 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 degree in the Classical Tripos.

That autumn, and continuing to the spring of 1886, Dickinson joined the University Extension Scheme to give public lectures that covered Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson.

With financial help from his father, Dickinson then began to study for a medical degree, beginning in October 1886 at Cambridge.

After an initially intense relationship (which according to Dickinson's biography did not include sex with Fry, a heterosexual), the two established a long friendship.

Dickinson then settled down at Cambridge, although he again lectured through the University Extension Scheme, travelling to Newcastle, Leicester, and Norwich.

When G. K. Chesterton chose contemporary thinkers with whom he disagreed for his book Heretics (1905), the focus of Chapter 12 was "Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson".

There Chesterton writes: Mr. Lowes Dickinson, the most pregnant and provocative of recent writers on this and similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have fallen into this old error of the mere anarchy of Paganism.

Edward Jenks was editor, and members of its editorial board included Dickinson, F. W. Hirst, C. F. G. Masterman, G. M. Trevelyan, and Nathaniel Wedd.

Within a fortnight of the start of the First World War, Dickinson had drafted schemes for a "League of Nations", and together with Lord Dickinson and Lord Bryce he planned the ideas behind of the League of Nations and played a leading role in the founding of the group of internationalist pacifists known as the Bryce Group.

[10] He also attended a pacifist conference in The Hague in 1915, and in 1916 he set off on a lecture tour of the United States promoting the idea of a League of Nations.

Forster has been criticised for refraining from publishing details of Dickinson's sexual proclivities, including his foot fetishism and unrequited love for young men.

[13] E. M. Forster stated (in "the Art of Fiction") that he used Dickinsons' sisters as his inspiration for Margaret and Helen Schlegel, the central characters in Howards End.