This timely study offers a new interpretation of the life and thought of author, editor, and Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, whose long career as a public intellectual ran from the early 1850s to the first decade of the twentieth century. In much recent scholarship, Norton is portrayed as a cultural snob and political reactionary, a man embittered when his city and social class were bypassed by history.In this sharply revisionist narrative, Dowling counters the conventional view by revealing "the other Norton," a man whose early social radicalism and militant idealism continued to underlie the teaching and writing of his later years. Analyzing his career in its political, religious, artistic, historical, and philosophical contexts, she argues that Norton is best understood as an intellectual heir to the great New England reformers. She recreates the stirring era in American history that profoundly shaped Norton, when civic hopes were high and noble ideals seemed fully practicable.This major reassessment of Norton's career and politics will provoke re-readings not only of his own work but also that of the New England figures with whom he associated.
Dowling's Norton is no longer the reactionary defender of the genteel tradition, but a cultural hero of an unexpected and fascinating kind.