Card signed by Charles Eliot Norton - Autographs

Card to Miss Mildred Stimson signed by Charles Eliot Norton. Card measures 3 1/2" x 2 1/4".

Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as poet T.S. Eliot. Norton was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Andrews Norton (1786–1853), was a Unitarian theologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature at Harvard; his mother was Catherine Eliot, a daughter of the merchant Samuel Eliot. Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, was his cousin. Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding, and started in business with an East Indian trading firm in Boston, travelling to India in 1849. After a tour in Europe, 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 Dante's Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891-91-92, 3 vols, 1902 being the publication year of Norton's thorough final edit). He worked tirelessly as secretary to the Loyal Publication Society during the Civil War, communicating with newspaper editors across the country, including the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison who became a lifelong friend. From 1864 to 1868, he edited the highly influential magazine North American Review, in association with James Russell Lowell. In 1861 he and Lowell helped Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his translation of Dante and in the starting of the informal Dante Club. 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 was James Loeb, who in 1907 created the "Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship" in archaeology. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures are given annually by distinguished professors at Harvard. Norton bequeathed the more valuable portion of his library to Harvard.

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