A three-quarter length portrait of Dickinson wearing the dress uniform of a captain. He joined the service as a second class boy in 1796 and in 1805 was a midshipman in the ‘Royal Sovereign’ at Trafalgar, where he was wounded. He was promoted to the rank of acting lieutenant the following day by Collingwood. In 1813 as a lieutenant in ‘Andromeda’ he was again wounded while his ship was capturing the frigate ‘La Trave’. In 1814 he was promoted commander but saw no further service until he took command of the ‘Lightning’ in 1829. She was on the South American station where for six months he was the senior officer at La Plata. While still out in the station in 1831 Dickinson recovered a vast sum in dollars from the wreck of HMS ‘Thetis’ a difficult operation mainly achieved by using diving bells of his own invention. Shortly after paying off the ‘Lightning’ in 1832 he was made post but saw no further service.