Joseph Dickinson

Joseph Dickinson is in some ways the most interesting of my Dickinson ancestors, but at the same time the one I have found most difficult to trace from direct sources.

   The Whitfield parish records record his baptism on 7 January 1802. At some time he left Northumberland and became an artist and art publisher. The Westminster rate books show that from 1812 he had premises at 114 New Bond Street, London, rated on a rent of £40 a year. In August 1814 he married Anne Rowden Carter in Topsham, Devon. (Somewhere I have found a reference to a Dickinson in Bath in around 1810, a portraitist in silhouettes and miniatures, which may give a glimpse into how he met a West Country girl before he settled in London). He died at Wool House in Beltingham, Northumberland, staying with his brother George. In the church at Beltingham there is the following inscription: In memory of Mr Joseph Dickinson, of New Bond Street, London, who died 22nd of July 1849, aged 68 years.           His gentle, amiable and conciliatory manner, his integrity and just dealing, and his affectionate disposition, will long be remembered in the hearts of those who knew him. To the memory of their beloved Father, his children have erected this tablet.

  That is it, so far as primary sources go; the secondary sources seem to confirm what the memorial tablet says (in the eyes of his children) . Why Joseph left Northumberland we do not know, nor how he received the skills to take up the profession of an artist.  And the London Lead Company ran at least one school in the area, and needed skilled draughtsmen. So this is a possible source for his abilities to find what was then an unlikely profession for a son of a farmer (Joseph’s brother George was recorded as an “agricultural labourer” in the 1851 census before inheriting Wool House from his uncle John Lowes). 

  The business in New Bond Street was, according to EM Forster , a “print- and lithograph-shop and photographing business” (although the photography must of course have come later). Lithography was then a relatively new process, and most of the Dickinson lithographs before 1851 in the National Portrait Gallery appear somewhat primitive. But a willingness to use new technologies seems apparent in the whole business. Under various names it seems to have existed until 1925 (and once had the Royal Appointment to Queen Victoria, who thought it “a most respectable firm”) when it shared business premises with Sands, Hunter, and Co, who remained in business at 27 Bedford Street, The Strand, until 1969 – so it is possible that its business records remained in existence into my lifetime. More of this later. The first of many portraits by his son Lowes Cato Dickinson exhibited at the Royal Academy (in 1848) was one his father. This, after the death of Lowes Dickinson's son Sir Arthur, passed to his sister Hester Lowes, and is currently in the posession of the Lowes family. Joseph and Anne had eleven children, born in Kilburn. Lowes Dickinson was sent to school at Topsham, Devon, with his mother’s relatives and later to Dr Lord’s School in Tooting (where they must have moved) . This suggests that their material circumstances were not very good at the time; Dr Lord’s school was a charity school, founded in 1792, and the minute-books of 1832 record that: 	It was not kept warm enough. Dr Lord to order more coals and inform the ladies of that fact . But they appear to have moved to a house called Rosemount, Hampstead Road, St Pancras, at a later date; this is where Anne was living in 1851 and 1861.

  When my Aunt Poy was trying to trace the family tree in the 1950s, knowledge of the Carter side of the family had been lost, although EM Forster records  that

            [Her grandchildren] could just remember their grandmother and thought her formidable. She was certainly a woman of character, if I may judge from her entries in the family bible: “Hope this will be the last”, she writes opposite the birth of one of her babies, and opposite the next birth: “This must be the last”. As it was . and  Cousin Hettie was still in touch with some of her Carter cousins in 1943. All that was remembered in my part of the family was that the Carters were a naval family who claimed a descent from Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

  However, it is now possible to reconstruct some of her family history. She was the daughter (one of six children) of Lieutenant Robert Carter, RN, who had fought as a midshipman on HMS Ganges at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801; his will, proved in 1818, names her and a marginal note says that she was then Anne Dickinson. His father, Elias, appears to have married a Jane Goldsworthy, although the version of the marriage entry which I have seen names her only as Jane. However, one of Joseph and Anne’s sons, born in 1828, was called Goldsworthy Cicero; and EM Forster must be wrong in attributing the use of Goldsworthy as a first name in the Dickinson family  to the eminence of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, the noted inventor , since Gurney was only then embarking on his career. In fact Goldsworthy Gurney appears to have been the son of one of Anne’s sisters, Bell/Isabella , so he was Anne’s nephew. Goldsworthy Gurney was, according to his biographies, so named not after his grandmother but because the governess of Princess Charlotte, Martha Caroline Goldsworthy, was his godmother. It seems evident that there must have been some kind of family connection for her to agree to be his godmother; and it so happens that the Carter first names provide firm evidence of what the connection must have been. Lieutenant Robert Carter’s eldest brother was named Burrington; and Martha Caroline Goldsworthy’s father, who was British Consul in Leghorn (Livorno) and then Cadiz, was Burrington Goldsworthy. It would therefore seem probable that Jane Goldsworthy was one of his children, or at least a niece.  He married Philippia Vanbrugh, “la belle consulesse”, who was the niece of the Restoration dramatist and architect Sir John Vanbrugh. I have not been able to establish whether the Carter family connection with Sir Humphrey Gilbert is based on legend or fact, but the family certainly believed it. One of Anne’s brothers, a Commander in the Royal Navy, was called Thomas Gilbert Carter; his son, and her niece was Sir Gilbert Thomas Carter, successively Governor of the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Lagos, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados.