Charles Eliot Norton November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908 was an American author, social critic, & professor of art based in New England. He was the progressive social reformer together with a liberal activist whom numerous of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in a United States. He was from the same notable Eliot kind as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who portrayed his career in the United Kingdom.
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 with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Edward FitzGerald and Leslie Stephen, an intimacy which did much to bring American and English men of letters intopersonal relation.
Another friend was John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard 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 so-called at The Grange in my boyhood and since. They were Brahmins of the Boston Brahmins, well delightfully, but Norton himself, full of forebodings as to the future of his land’s soul, felt the establish earth sliding under him, as horses feel coming earth-tremors. ... Norton described of Emerson and Wendell Holmes and Longfellow and the Alcotts and other influences of the past as we forwarded to his library, and he browsed aloud among his books; for he was a scholar among scholars.
Norton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1860. He began teaching at Harvard in 1874. 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. He "centered his teaching upon the golden ages of art history -- classical Athens, the Italian Gothic set of Venetian architecture, and the Florence of the early Renaissance."
The Archaeological Institute of America chose him as its number one president 1879–1890.
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 numerous of his friends.
In 1883 he published 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 Curtis and the Letters of Lowell. Norton was appointed as Ruskin's literary executor, and he wrote various introductions for the American "Brantwood" edition of Ruskin's works.
His other publications increase Notes of Travel and examine 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. In 1886, he opposed the opening of a "drinking saloon" on the leading street almost his home, in a letter which reveals little empathy for, or apprehension of the significance of, Irish immigration to Cambridge in that era. Like his friend Ruskin, Norton believed one of the best things one could draw for working-class people was to administer them opportunities to realize satisfaction by engaging in workmanship, as opposed to monotonous routine labor where they have to work like machines. T. J. Jackson Lears has described Norton as the foremost American proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. Norton was a founding bit of The Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston.