Charles Eliot Norton, (November 16, 1827 - October 21, 1908) was a leading
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.
Norton was born at
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
. His father,
Andrews NortonAndrews Norton was an American preacher and theologian. Along with William Ellery Channing, he was the leader of mainstream Unitarianism of the early and middle 19th century....
(1786-1853) was a
UnitarianUnitarianism as a theology is the belief in the single personality of God, in contrast to the doctrine of the Trinity ....
theologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature at
HarvardHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
; his mother was Catherine Eliot, and
Charles William EliotCharles William Eliot was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.- Background :The scion of a wealthy Boston...
, president of Harvard, was his cousin.
Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, and started in business with an East Indian trading firm in Boston, travelling to
IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal...
in 1849.
Charles Eliot Norton, (November 16, 1827 - October 21, 1908) was a leading
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.
Biography
Norton was born at
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
. His father,
Andrews NortonAndrews Norton was an American preacher and theologian. Along with William Ellery Channing, he was the leader of mainstream Unitarianism of the early and middle 19th century....
(1786-1853) was a
UnitarianUnitarianism as a theology is the belief in the single personality of God, in contrast to the doctrine of the Trinity ....
theologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature at
HarvardHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
; his mother was Catherine Eliot, and
Charles William EliotCharles William Eliot was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.- Background :The scion of a wealthy Boston...
, president of Harvard, was his cousin.
Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, and started in business with an East Indian trading firm in Boston, travelling to
IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal...
in 1849. After a tour in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
, where he was influenced by John Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters, he returned to Boston in 1851, and devoted himself to literature and art. He translated
DanteDurante degli Alighieri , commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His central work, the Divina Commedia , is often considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.In...
's
Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the
Divina Commedia (1891-91-92), 3 vols.). He worked tirelessly as secretary to the
Loyal Publication SocietyThe Loyal Publication Society was founded in 1863, during a time when the Union Army had suffered many reverses in the Civil War. The purpose of the society was to bolster public support for the Union effort, by disseminating pro-Union news articles and editorials to newspapers around the...
during the
Civil WarThe American Civil War , also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America...
, communicating with newspaper editors across the country, including the journalist
Jonathan Baxter HarrisonJonathan Baxter Harrison , Unitarian minister and journalist who was involved in many of the social causes of his day: abolitionism, Indian rights, forest preservation, and the cultural improvement of the working class...
who became a lifelong close friend.. From 1864 to 1868, he edited the highly influential magazine
North American ReviewThe North American Review was the first literary magazine in the United States. Founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others, it was published continuously until 1940, when publication was suspended due to World War II. Publication subsequently resumed in 1964 at Cornell College...
, in association with
James Russell LowellJames Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets who rivaled the popularity of British poets...
. In 1861 he and Lowell helped
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American educator and poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline"...
in his translation of Dante and in the starting of the informal Dante Club. In 1862 Norton married Susan Sedgwick.
In 1875 he was appointed professor of the history of art at Harvard, a chair which was created for him and which he held until retirement in 1898. The
Archaeological Institute of AmericaThe Archaeological Institute of America is a North American nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion of public interest in archaeology, and the preservation of archaeological sites. It is based at Boston University....
chose him as its first president (1879-1890). From 1856 to 1874 Norton spent much time in travel and residence on the continent of Europe and in England, and it was during this period that his friendships began with
Thomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.
Coming from a strict Calvinist family,...
,
John RuskinJohn Ruskin was an English art critic and social thinker, also remembered as an author, poet and artist. His essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras....
,
Edward FitzGeraldEdward FitzGerald was an English writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The spelling of his name as both FitzGerald and Fitzgerald is seen...
and
Leslie StephenSir Leslie Stephen, KCB was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.-Life:...
, an intimacy which did much to bring American and English men of letters into close personal relation. Norton had a peculiar genius for friendship, and it is on his personal influence rather than on his literary productions that his claim to fame rests. In 1881 he inaugurated the Dante Society, whose first presidents were Longfellow, Lowell and Norton himself. From 1882 onward he confined himself to the study of Dante, his professorial duties, and the editing and publication of the literary memorials of many of his friends. One of his many students at Harvard was
James LoebJames Loeb was a Jewish-German-American banker and philanthropist. He was the son of Solomon Loeb and Betty Loeb of Cincinnati, Ohio....
.
In 1883 came the
Letters of Carlyle and Emerson; in 1886, 1887 and 1888,
Carlyle's Letters and Reminiscences; in 1894, the
Orations and Addresses of George William CurtisGeorge William Curtis was an American writer and public speaker, born in Providence, Rhode Island, of old New England stock.-Biography:...
and the
Letters of Lowell. Norton was also made Ruskin's
literary executorA literary executor is a person with decision-making power in respect of a literary estate.The literary estate of an author who has died will often consist mainly of the copyright and other intellectual property rights of published works, including for example film and translation rights...
, and he wrote various introductions for the American "Brantwood" edition of Ruskin's works. His other publications include
Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (1859), and an
Historical Study of Church-building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (1880). He organized exhibitions of the drawings of Turner (1874) and of Ruskin (1879), for which he compiled the catalogues.
During the first years of the twentieth century, Norton spoke out in favor of legalized
euthanasiaEuthanasia refers to the practice of ending a life in a painless manner. Many different forms of euthanasia can be distinguished, including animal euthanasia and human euthanasia, and within the latter, voluntary and involuntary euthanasia...
. He lent his name to a movement led by Ohio socialite Anna S. Hall to pass
physician-assisted suicide legislation in
OhioOhio is a Midwestern state of the United States. The thirty-fourth largest state by area in the U.S., it is the seventh-most populous with nearly 11.5 million residents...
and
IowaIowa is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland." It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of...
.
Norton died at "Shady-hill", the house where he had been born, on October 21, 1908, and was buried at
Mount Auburn CemeteryMount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831 as "America's first garden cemetery", or the first "rural cemetery", with classical monuments set in a rolling landscaped terrain...
. He bequeathed the more valuable portion of his library to Harvard. He had the degrees of Litt.D. (Cambridge) and D.C.L. (Oxford), as well as the L.H.D. of Columbia and the LL.D. of Harvard and of Yale. Today, his name is borne by a series of lectures (
Charles Eliot Norton LecturesThe Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard University was established in 1925 as an annual lectureship in "poetry in the broadest sense" and named for the university's former professor of fine arts. Distinguished creative figures and scholars in the arts, including painting,...
) held annually by distinguished professors at Harvard.
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