He was born in Hull, England, the fifth child and third son of William Hey Dikes or Dykes, a ship builder,[1] and Elizabeth, daughter of Bacchus Huntington, a surgeon of Sculcoates, Yorkshire, and granddaughter of the Rev.

[17] His diaries and correspondence, the work of Joseph Thomas Fowler and press reports show that a number of his part-songs were performed by the CUMS.

[19][20] In 1862 he relinquished the precentorship (to the dismay of Sir Frederick Ouseley)[21] on his appointment to the living of St Oswald's, Durham, situated almost in the shadow of the Cathedral, where he remained until his death in 1876.

John Purchas (1823–72) who, as a consequence of a Privy Council judgment which bore his name, was compelled to desist from such practices as facing east during the celebration of Holy Communion, using wafer bread, and wearing vestments other than cassock and surplice.

[25] Dykes's treatment at the hands of the evangelical party, which included Bishop Charles Baring, was largely played out locally.

[28] The Dean of Durham, from 1869 William Charles Lake, was on the other hand a High Churchman, and not an opponent of ritualism, who put his views on the issue on record in a letter to The Times in 1880.

Peake was an Oxford graduate, ordained priest in 1872, who had been a curate in Hull and then had moved to Houghton le Spring.

[32] Grey, Rector of Morpeth, Northumberland, signed the 1873 "Declaration on Confession and Absolution", put together by Edward Bouverie Pusey.

Rest and the bracing Swiss air proving unavailing, Dykes went to recover on the south coast of England.

Dykes was admitted to a lunatic asylum, Ticehurst House in East Sussex, and died on 22 January 1876, aged 52.

[43] He is buried in the ‘overflow’ churchyard of St Oswald's, a piece of land for whose acquisition and consecration he had been responsible a few years earlier.

[50] More significant was his speculative submission in 1860 of tunes to the music editor William Henry Monk of a new venture, Hymns Ancient and Modern.

[67] The Hymnal published by authority of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America (1895) contained 43 tunes by Dykes.

Dykes also published sermons, book reviews and articles on theology and church music, many of them in the Ecclesiastic and Theologian.

[73] These cover the topics of the Apocalypse, the Psalms, Biblical numerology and the function of music and ritual in church services.

[75] In editing The English Hymnal (1906), Ralph Vaughan Williams "was ruthless in his treatment of Dykes", whose tunes included in the work amounted to six, with some that were popular consigned to an appendix.

Erik Routley was disparaging, and Kenneth Long in The Music of the English Church (1971) classed as providers of a "glow of spurious religiosity" Dykes with Joseph Barnby, Henry Gauntlett, John Stainer and Arthur Sullivan.

Hutchings felt that "Victorian sentimentality" as applied to Dykes's tunes would be better described by adjectives such as "stodgy", "dramatic" and "vulgar".

Dykes was thoroughly aware of the rich reservoir of continental harmonic innovation in the music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Weber, Spohr, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and early Wagner and he had absolutely no compunction in using this developed harmonic vocabulary in his tunes both as a colourful expressive tool and as a further means of musical integration.