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Charles Eliot Norton

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Charles Eliot Norton
Charles Eliot Norton, 1903
Born(1827-11-16)November 16, 1827
Cambridge, Massachusetts,U.S.
DiedOctober 21, 1908(1908-10-21)(aged 80)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Resting placeMount Auburn Cemetery,Cambridge
42°22′15″N71°08′45″W/ 42.3708°N 71.1458°W/42.3708; -71.1458
EducationHarvard University
Occupation(s)Professor, literary scholar
Signature

Charles Eliot Norton(November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, social critic, andHarvardprofessor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.[1]He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poetT. S. Eliot,who made his career in the United Kingdom.

Early life[edit]

See also:Eliot family (America)

Norton was born in 1827 inCambridge, Massachusetts.His father,Andrews Norton(1786–1853), was aUnitariantheologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature atHarvard;his mother was Catherine Eliot, a daughter of the merchantSamuel Eliot.Charles William Eliot,president of Harvard, was his cousin. Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, where he was a member of theHasty Pudding,and started in business with an East Indian trading firm inBoston,traveling toIndiain 1849.[2]

After a tour inEurope,where he was influenced by John Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters, he returned to Boston in 1851, and devoted himself to literature and art.[3]He translatedDante'sVita Nuova(1860 and 1867) and theDivina Commedia(1891-91-92, 3 vols, 1902 being the publication year of Norton's thorough final edit). He worked tirelessly as secretary to theLoyal Publication Societyduring theCivil War,communicating with newspaper editors across the country. These included journalistJonathan Baxter Harrison,who became a lifelong friend.[4]

From 1864 to 1868, he edited the highly influential magazineNorth American Review,in association withJames Russell Lowell.In 1861 he and Lowell had helpedHenry Wadsworth Longfellowin his translation of Dante and in the starting of the informal Dante Club.[3]

Marriage and family life[edit]

In 1862 Norton, at the age of 35, married 24-year-old Susan Ridley Sedgwick (21 February 1838 – 17 February 1872), daughter ofTheodore Sedgwick IIIand Sara Morgan Ashburner. They had six children together: Eliot (1863), Sarah (1864), Elizabeth (1866), Rupert (1867), Margaret (1870) andRichard(1872). Susan died at age thirty-three inDresden, Germany,following the birth of their sixth child.[5][6]

Concept of Western civilization[edit]

According toTurner (1999),"Probably only someone with Norton’s experiences and scholarly range – who had written about theMound Builders,roamedIndia,organized classical archaeology, scoured medieval archives, published nineteenth-century painting – could have concocted Western Civilization. And only then if he had filtered these materials through the sieve of college teaching during years of curricular anarchy. For Western civilization had a scholarly and pedagogical specificity about it. "[7]

Travel and friendships[edit]

From 1855 to 1874 Norton spent much time in travel and residence on the continent of Europe and in England. During this period, he began friendships withThomas Carlyle,John Ruskin,Edward FitzGeraldandLeslie Stephen,an intimacy which did much to bring American and English men of letters into close personal relation.[3]

Another friend wasJohn Lockwood Kipling,father ofRudyard Kipling.Father and son visited Norton in Boston; the younger Kipling recalled the visit years later in his autobiography:

We visited at Boston [my father's] old friend, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, whose daughters I had known at The Grange in my boyhood and since. They were Brahmins of the Boston Brahmins, living delightfully, but Norton himself, full of forebodings as to the future of his land’s soul, felt the established earth sliding under him, as horses feel coming earth-tremors.... Norton spoke of Emerson and Wendell Holmes and Longfellow and the Alcotts and other influences of the past as we returned to his library, and he browsed aloud among his books; for he was a scholar among scholars.[8]

Norton was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1860.[9]He began teaching at Harvard in 1874.[10]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.[3]He "centered his teaching upon the golden ages of art history -- classical Athens, the Italian Gothic style of Venetian architecture, and theFlorenceof the early Renaissance. "[10]

TheArchaeological Institute of Americachose him as its first president (1879–1890).[3]

Norton had a peculiar genius for friendship. He is notable for his personal influence rather than for his literary productions. 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.[3]

In 1883 he published theLetters of Carlyle and Emerson;in 1886, 1887 and 1888,Carlyle's Letters andReminiscences;in 1894, theOrations and Addresses ofGeorge William Curtisand theLetters of Lowell.Norton was appointed as Ruskin'sliterary executor,and he wrote various introductions for the American "Brantwood" edition of Ruskin's works.[3]

His other publications includeNotes of Travel and Study in Italy(1859), and anHistorical Study of Church-building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence(1880). He organized exhibitions of the drawings ofJ. M. W. Turner(1874) and of Ruskin (1879), for which he compiled the catalogues.[3]In 1886, he opposed the opening of a "drinking saloon" on the main street near his home, in a letter which reveals little empathy for, or understanding of the significance of, Irish immigration to Cambridge in that era.[11]Like his friend Ruskin, Norton believed one of the best things one could do for working-class people was to give them opportunities to gain satisfaction by engaging inworkmanship,as opposed to monotonous routine labor where they have to work like machines.T. J. Jackson Learshas described Norton as the foremost American proponent of theArts and Crafts movement.Norton was a founding member ofThe Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston.[12]

Later years[edit]

In 1881 he helped found theAmerican School of Classical Studies in Athens.During the first years of the twentieth century, Norton spoke out in favor of legalizedeuthanasia.He lent his name to a movement led by Ohio socialite Anna S. Hall to passphysician-assisted suicidelegislation inOhioandIowa.[13] Norton died at "Shady Hill," the house where he had been born, on October 21, 1908, and was buried atMount Auburn Cemetery.

Grave of Charles Eliot Norton

Legacy[edit]

Norton was widely admired for the breadth of his intellectual interests, remarkable scholarship and interest in the common good. He was awarded the honorary degrees of Litt.D. (Cambridge) and D.C.L. (Oxford), as well as the L.H.D. from Columbia and the LL.D. from both Harvard and Yale. One of his many students at Harvard wasJames Loeb,who in 1907 created the "Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship" in archaeology.[14]TheCharles Eliot Norton Lecturesare given annually by distinguished professors at Harvard. Norton bequeathed the more valuable portion of his library to Harvard.

References[edit]

  1. ^Dowling (2007)
  2. ^Chisholm 1911,pp. 797–798.
  3. ^abcdefghChisholm 1911,p. 798.
  4. ^Turner (1999)
  5. ^A Sedgwick Genealogy
  6. ^Turner, James(1999).The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton
  7. ^Turner, James(1999). "invention of concept of western civilization".The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton.Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 385.ISBN978-0801871085.
  8. ^Rudyard Kipling,Something of Myself: For My Friends, Known and Unknown — The Complete Unfinished Autobiography,London: MacMillan and Co., 1951 (first published 1937). pp. 127–28
  9. ^"Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter N"(PDF).American Academy of Arts and Sciences.RetrievedSeptember 11,2016.
  10. ^abArthur Efland (1990).History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts.New York:Teachers College Press.ISBN978-0-8077-7003-0.
  11. ^For a copy of his letter, seeCambridge Civic Journal Forum
  12. ^T. J. Jackson Lears(1994). "Origin of the American Craft Revival: Persons and Perceptions".No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920.University of Chicago Press.p. 66.ISBN0226469700.
  13. ^Appel, Jacob M.(2004). "A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906" inBulletin of the History of Medicine,Vol. 78, No. 3
  14. ^The Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship, Archaeological Institute of America

Sources[edit]

External links[edit]

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