Dickson, Frederick Stoever, 1850-1925

Frederick Stoever Dickson, Sr. (Yale 1871) collected and wrote in the area of 18th century English literature, especially regarding Henry Fielding. He also had an interest in Abenaki languages.

Frederick Stoever Dickson (1850-1925), lawyer and author.

Frederick Stoever Dickson was born June 24, 1850, in Utica, New York to Rev. Hugh Sheridan Dickson, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and a Presbyterian minister, and Sarah Margaret (Stoever) Dickson. Dickson attended Yale University with the Class of 1871, studied law in Philadelphia from 1871-74, was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1874, and practiced law in Philadelphia until 1898. He then pursued various management, banking and investment interests in Ohio and Pennsylvania from 1900-1913, during which time he was president of telephone companies in Cleveland, manager of the Cleveland office of the New York banking and brokerage firm of A. O. Brown & Company, and president of The Abrasive Company of Bricksburg, Philadelphia. He lived in New York City from 1913-24 and died December 1, 1925, in Philadelphia.

Dickson produced published and unpublished work on Henry Fielding, William Makepeace Thackeray and other subjects. He is the author of An Analysis of Blackstone's Commentaries (1874) and An Analysis of Kent's Commentaries (1876), on American law, And the Wilderness Blossomed (1901), a description of his summer home in Maine, Thackeray in the United States (1904), and contributions to Fielding literature in The Library, Yale Review, Notes and Queries and other journals. He also compiled indexes to Fielding's novels. Dickson collected work by and about both Fielding and Thackeray, and he donated his Fielding collection of approximately 2,000 volumes to the Yale University Library in 1913.

For additional biographical information on Frederick Stoever Dickson see the Yale University Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale College (1926). For a summary description of Dickson's Fielding collection see the Wilbur Lucius Cross essay in The Yale University Library Gazette (1927).