William Hepworth Dixon

The historian and traveller William Hepworth Dixon (1821-1879) was the editor of the Athenaeum from January 1853 to August 1869. His histories included a Life of William Penn (1851, a Life of Blake (1852) and a masterful Personal History of Lord Bacon (1861), supplemented the following year by The Story of Lord Bacon’s Life.

In 1863 he visited the East, and on his return helped to found the Palestine Exploration Fund, and published The Holy Land (1865). In 1866 he travelled through the United States, publishing, in 1867, New America, and, the following year, Spiritual Wives, two supplementary volumes. In the autumn of 1867 he journeyed through the Baltic Provinces, publishing an account of his trip in Free Russia (1870). In 1871 he was in Switzerland, and in 1872 in Spain, where he wrote the greater part of his History of Two Queens. In 1874 he revisited the United States, giving the impressions of his tour in The White Conquest (1875).

Photographed by John Mayall of London and Brighton.