A neglected figure in Irish historiography, Henry Dixon was nonetheless an influential nationalist at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. He was a key member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Sinn Féin, and was extremely active in pivotal organisations like the Young Ireland League, the Celtic Literary Society and the Sinn Féin Printing & Publishing Company. A practising solicitor, he looked after the legal affairs of personalities like Seán T. O'Kelly and helped to structure Irish nationalism in the early 1900s. Liked many of his nationalist peers, he was interned at Frongoch after the 1916 Rising but unlike his younger comrades, slipped into obscurity afterwards.
Henry Dixon appears for the first time in open political activity in the spring of 1885 when he gave a lecture on the need to protect Irish industry to a meeting of the Dublin Young Ireland Society.
Between then and the end of the century he was extremely active in nationalist organisations, most with overlapping memberships, all controlled by the IRB. He ran the National Club Literary Society with Patrick Lavelle. He was the only non Dublin city councillor on the Charles Stuart Parnell Leadership committee established by the National Club to create an alliance between local government officials across the country to consolidate Parnell’s support base. He was also on the executive of the Parnell Leadership Fund with Fred Allan. The purpose of this fund was to raise money to maintain a Parnellite presence in the press.
Dixon was also on the Young Ireland League executive with John McBride and Patrick Lavelle, organised the local NMC and most republican commemorative events. During this period Dixon wrote political letters to the Northern Patriot. A provisional 1798 committee was set up in 1896 consisting of Dixon, Lavelle, and Fred Alan amongst others.
He was also active in the Celtic Literary Society, run by William Rooney. Arthur Griffith and Denis Devereux, were also members and he went on to work with them in the Sinn Féin Printing & Publishing Company.