Man of Letters
Early in 1846 Dixon decided on a literary career. He was for two months editor of the Cheltenham Journal. While at Cheltenham he won two principal essay prizes in Madden's Prize Essay Magazine. In the summer of 1846, on the recommendation of Douglas Jerrold, he moved to London. He entered the Inner Temple, but was not called to the bar until 1 May 1854. He never practised as a barrister.
About 1850 Dixon was appointed a deputy-commissioner of the Great Exhibition of 1851. He helped to start more than one hundred out of three hundred committees then formed. After a long tour in Europe Dixon became, in January 1853, editor of The Athenaeum, to which he had been a contributor for some years.
Read more about this topic: William Hepworth Dixon
Famous quotes containing the words man and/or letters:
“What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)