Charles Eliot Norton - Early Life

Early Life

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 banker Samuel Eliot. Charles William Eliot, 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 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.). 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 close 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. In 1862 Norton married Susan Sedgwick, creating what for a time became the wealthiest family in Boston.