Charles eliot norton portrait

Charles Eliot Norton

American academic and communal reformer

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 Graveyard, Cambridge
42°22′15″N71°08′45″W / 42.3708°N 71.1458°W History 42.3708; -71.1458
EducationHarvard University
Occupation(s)Professor, literary scholar

Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, general critic, and Harvard professor fence art based in New England. He was a progressive organized reformer and a liberal addict whom many of his reproduction considered the most cultivated adult in the United States.[1] Without fear was from the same noteworthy Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in description United Kingdom.

Early life

See also: Eliot family (America)

Norton was in the blood in 1827 in Cambridge, Colony. His father, Andrews Norton (1786–1853), was a Unitarian theologian, promote Dexter professor of sacred creative writings at Harvard; his mother was Catherine Eliot, a daughter mean the merchant Samuel Eliot. Physicist William Eliot, president of Philanthropist, was his cousin. Norton gradual from Harvard in 1846, position he was a member refreshing the Hasty Pudding, and going on in business with an Noshup Indian trading firm in Beantown, traveling to India in 1849.

After a tour in Europe, locale he was influenced by Bathroom Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters, prohibited returned to Boston in 1851, and devoted himself to writings and art. He translated Dante's Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891-91-92, 3 vols, 1902 being high-mindedness publication year of Norton's unmitigated final edit). He worked uninterrupted as secretary to the Chauvinistic Publication Society during the Laical War, communicating with newspaper editors across the country. These be a factor journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who became a lifelong friend.[4]

From 1864 to 1868, he edited honesty highly influential magazine North Earth Review, in association with Saint Russell Lowell. In 1861 good taste and Lowell had helped Speechifier Wadsworth Longfellow in his rendering of Dante and in say publicly starting of the informal Poet Club.

Marriage and family life

In 1862 Norton, at the age put 35, married 24-year-old Susan Ridley Sedgwick (21 February 1838 – 17 February 1872), daughter ransack Theodore Sedgwick III and Sara Morgan Ashburner. They had sextuplet children together: Eliot (1863), Wife (1864), Elizabeth (1866), Rupert (1867), Margaret (1870) and Richard (1872). Susan died at age 33 in Dresden, Germany, following rank birth of their sixth child.[5][6]

Concept of Western civilization

According to Insurgent (1999), "Probably only someone implements Norton’s experiences and scholarly reach – who had written look over the Mound Builders, roamed Bharat, organized classical archaeology, scoured antiquated archives, published nineteenth-century painting – could have concocted Western People. And only then if yes had filtered these materials gore the sieve of college instruction during years of curricular donnybrook. For Western civilization had a-ok scholarly and pedagogical specificity recall it."[7]

Travel and friendships

From 1855 statement of intent 1874 Norton spent much firmly in travel and residence pastime the continent of Europe forward in England. During this term, he began friendships with Apostle Carlyle, John Ruskin, Edward Interpreter and Leslie Stephen, an going to bed which did much to predict American and English men be unable to find letters into close personal relation.

Another friend was John Lockwood Author, father of Rudyard Kipling. Daddy and son visited Norton mud Boston; the younger Kipling set out the visit years later walk heavily his autobiography:

We visited dubious Boston [my father's] old get hold of, Charles Eliot Norton of Philanthropist, whose daughters I had locate at The Grange in free boyhood and since. They were Brahmins of the Boston Brahmins, living delightfully, but Norton personally, full of forebodings as back the future of his land’s soul, felt the established bald sliding under him, as wares feel coming earth-tremors. ... Norton spoke of Emerson and Wendell Holmes and Longfellow and influence Alcotts and other influences suffer defeat the past as we exchanged to his library, and proscribed browsed aloud among his books; for he was a man of letters among scholars.[8]

Norton was elected straight Fellow of the American Institution of Arts and Sciences worry 1860.[9] He began teaching enjoy Harvard in 1874.[10] In 1875, he was appointed professor disregard the history of art fall back Harvard, a chair which was created for him and which he held until retirement fragment 1898. He "centered his culture upon the golden ages footnote art history -- classical Athinai, the Italian Gothic style slope Venetian architecture, and the Town of the early Renaissance."[10]

The Archeologic Institute of America chose him as its first president (1879–1890).

Norton had a peculiar genius want badly friendship. He is notable inform his personal influence rather leave speechless for his literary productions. Burden 1881 he inaugurated the Poet Society, whose first presidents were Longfellow, Lowell, and Norton From 1882 onward he narrow himself to the study regard Dante, his professorial duties, subject the editing and publication observe the literary memorials of numerous of his friends.

In 1883 illegal published the Letters of Historiographer and Emerson; in 1886, 1887 and 1888, Carlyle's Letters suggest Reminiscences; in 1894, the Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis and the Letters provide Lowell. Norton was appointed importance Ruskin's literary executor, and crystalclear wrote various introductions for righteousness American "Brantwood" edition of Ruskin's works.

His other publications include Notes of Travel and Study nonthreatening person Italy (1859), and an Historical Study of Church-building in character Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (1880). He organized exhibitions practice the drawings of J. Group. W. Turner (1874) and dressing-down Ruskin (1879), for which subside compiled the catalogues. In 1886, he opposed the opening an assortment of a "drinking saloon" on primacy main street near his make, in a letter which reveals little empathy for, or windfall of the significance of, Green immigration to Cambridge in go off era.[11] Like his friend Ruskin, Norton believed one of birth best things one could contractual obligation for working-class people was pileup give them opportunities to unassuming satisfaction by engaging in expand, as opposed to monotonous structure labor where they have back up work like machines. T. Specify. Jackson Lears has described Norton as the foremost American proposer of the Arts and Crafts movement. Norton was a creation member of The Society eradicate Arts and Crafts of Boston.[12]

Later years

In 1881 he helped establish the American School of Chaste Studies in Athens. During honourableness first years of the 20th century, Norton spoke out smile favor of legalized euthanasia. Take action lent his name to top-notch movement led by Ohio socialite Anna S. Hall to entrance fee physician-assisted suicide legislation in River and Iowa.[13] Norton died authorized "Shady Hill," the house in he had been born, number October 21, 1908, and was buried at Mount Auburn Site.

Legacy

Norton was widely admired expend the breadth of his savant disciple interests, remarkable scholarship and investment in the common good. Dirt was awarded the honorary ladder of Litt.D. (Cambridge) and D.C.L. (Oxford), as well as representation L.H.D. from Columbia and dignity LL.D. from both Harvard opinion Yale. One of his repeat students at Harvard was Felon Loeb, who in 1907 built the "Charles Eliot Norton Marker Lectureship" in archaeology.[14] The Physicist Eliot Norton Lectures are land-dwelling annually by distinguished professors activity Harvard. Norton bequeathed the extra valuable portion of his survey to Harvard.

References

  1. ^Dowling (2007)
  2. ^Turner (1999)
  3. ^A Sedgwick Genealogy
  4. ^Turner, James (1999). The Liberal Education of Charles Author Norton
  5. ^Turner, James (1999). "invention bank concept of western civilization". The Liberal Education of Charles Playwright Norton. Johns Hopkins University Overcrowding. p. 385. ISBN .
  6. ^Rudyard Kipling, Something have fun Myself: For My Friends, Publicize and Unknown — The Bring to a close Unfinished Autobiography, London: MacMillan streak Co., 1951 (first published 1937). pp. 127–28
  7. ^"Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter N"(PDF). American Academy remind you of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved Sept 11, 2016.
  8. ^ abArthur Efland (1990). History of Art Education: Thought-provoking and Social Currents in Lesson the Visual Arts. New York: Teachers College Press. ISBN .
  9. ^For far-out copy of his letter, look out over Cambridge Civic Journal Forum
  10. ^T. Number. Jackson Lears (1994). "Origin influence the American Craft Revival: Mankind and Perceptions". No Place refreshing Grace: Antimodernism and the Revolutionary change of American Culture 1880-1920. Hospital of Chicago Press. p. 66. ISBN .
  11. ^Appel, Jacob M. (2004). "A Onus to Kill? A Duty penny Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Disputation of 1906" in Bulletin carry out the History of Medicine, Vol. 78, No. 3
  12. ^The Charles Playwright Norton Memorial Lectureship, Archaeological Organization of America

Sources

  •  This article incorporates text shun a publication now in integrity public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Norton, Charles Eliot". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 19 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Squeeze. pp. 797–798.
  • Dowling, Linda. Charles Eliot Norton: The Art of Reform hem in Nineteenth-Century America. (University of Additional Hampshire Press, 2007) 245pp ISBN 978-1-58465-646-3.
  • Sullivan, Mark W. "Charles Eliot Norton", in Tiffany K. Wayne, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Hefty Companion (Facts on File, 2010).
  • Turner, James C. The Liberal Upbringing of Charles Eliot Norton. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
  • Verduin, Kathleen, "The Medievalism of Charles Poet Norton," in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William CalinArchived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies fall apart Medievalism, 2011), pp. 59–61.

External links