James Main Dixon

James Main Dixon FRSE (20 April, 1856, Paisley – 27 September 1933) was a Scottish teacher and author, and an important scholar of the Scots language.

Life He was born in Paisley in Scotland the son of Rev J. M. Dixon.

He graduated MA from the University of St Andrews in 1879, and was appointed scholar and tutor of philosophy there in the same year.

Dixon spent almost 12 years in Japan from 1880 to 1892. He was professor of English and secretary of the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo, Japan, from 1879 to 1886, when he was called to the Imperial University of Japan in the same capacity. There he taught Hidesaburo Saito and Natsume Sōseki. While Natsume Sōseki was in the 2nd year of his undergraduate program at Tokyo University Dixon requested him to translate Hōjōki. Later on based on Sōseki's translation Dixon produced a new English translation of this work and also authored an article comparing Kamo no Chomei, the author of Hōjōki and William Wordsworth. Among his other contributions in Japan, he is credited with the rediscovery (together with his friend, Alexander Croft Shaw), of former Nakasendō post town of Karuizawa, and its popularization as a summer resort.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1885. His proposers were Robert Flint, John Duns, William Swan, and his brother-in-law Cargill Gilston Knott.

In 1903–1904 he was president of Columbia College, in Milton, Oregon. He was professor of English literature at the University of Southern California from 1905 to 1911, when he was transferred to the chair of Oriental studies and comparative literature. In 1906 he became editor of the West Coast Magazine.

In 1908, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Dickinson College.

He died on 27 September 1933.

Writings

He compiled a Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases (1891) and wrote: Twentieth Century Life of John Wesley (1902); "Matthew Arnold," in Modern Poets and Christian Teaching (1906); and A Survey of Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1907). In 1920, he wrote, The Spiritual Meaning of Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and Manual of Modern Scots.

Family

His sister, Mary Dixon, married Cargill Gilston Knott in 1885.