1819–1878 · United Kingdom · Romantic
Ellen Dickson (1819-1878) was an English composer of drawing-room ballads. She was born in Woolwich and died in Lyndhurst, where she spent most of her life; she also published as Dolores. About 65 of her songs survive, setting Longfellow, Tennyson and other poets; the site has three of her songs for voice and piano.
Ellen Dickson was born in 1819 in Woolwich, south-east of London, the third of General Sir Alexander Dickson's daughters. Her father passed on to her a talent for mathematics and a keen analytical mind.
From an early age she lived with a physical disability. She chose the Latin pseudonym Dolores herself; the word means sorrow and bodily pain.
Ellen Dickson spent most of her life in Lyndhurst. She died there on 4 July 1878.
Dickson began to make a name for herself in the late 1850s, writing drawing-room ballads in a manner close to that of Maria Lindsay. Her first songs, in 1854, were settings of poems by Longfellow.
Afterwards she brought out a large number of songs with leading London music publishers, in part as Dolores. Roughly 65 have come down to us. Among the poets are Longfellow, Adelaide A. Procter, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson and others.
Dickson became widely known through her song The Bridge, to words by Longfellow. It was first published by Charles Jefferys in 1857.
In 1867 a songbook called Dream, released by Dolores, was published in Philadelphia. It contains her arrangements of works by Anne Proctors.
Dickson wrote mainly parlour music. This was the main kind of music thought socially acceptable for women composers of her time. Her songs often rest on unusual variants of broken-chord accompaniment and on a delicate use of grace notes.
In The Brook, to words by Tennyson and published in 1857, grace notes suggest the rippling of water. Dickson's accompaniments are often unpredictable in shape and rhythm; The Land of Long Ago is a good example. Clear and Cool joins a beautiful melody to an ornamented accompaniment. Its words come from Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies and are addressed to a mother and child.
The site has three of her songs for voice and piano: The Land of Long Ago (level Intermediate+), and Drifting and The Brook (both Advanced).