His father, James Waite Dickson, was an artist, astronomer and linguist, claiming direct lineage from the painter William Hogarth, and from Judge John Waite, the man who sentenced King Charles I to death.
His mother, Elizabeth Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, was a gifted musician, related to the Lauries of Maxwellton (immortalised in the ballad Annie Laurie) and connected with the Duke of Atholl and the Royal Stuarts.
Dickson’s invention, the Kinetoscope, was simple: a strip of several images was passed in front of an illuminated lens and behind a spinning wheel.
Basically, for all of Dickson's boasting about the innovative way in which art and story are here commingled, it all looks to me like what it is: a book with pictures, and one that would not necessarily have been any less enjoyable had the illustrations — many of which are mediocre — been omitted.
Dickson's scenario is absorbing, and despite the story's brevity (or maybe because of it), Johnny and his many friends and family are richly realized characters with whom the reader immediately sympathizes.
Dickson grippingly and often chillingly depicts the tension between the sea-people and the "landers"; this racial tension makes the book palpably contemporary even decades after it was originally written.
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