The Gender of Letters: Charles Eliot Norton and the Decline of the Amateur Intellectual Tradition

Abstract

H IS aspirations best captured in ubiquitous nineteenthcentury term man of letters, Charles Eliot Norton was successful by any standard. Indeed, William James predicted that Norton's name will dominate all literary history of his epoch.I Within a few decades, however, amateur intellectual tradition he had devoted his life to defending was under assault. Speaking for a rising generation of American intellectuals, George Santayana lamented that American life was insidiously divided into practical affairs and matters of mind. one is sphere of American man, he observed in 1911, the other, at least predominantly, of American woman. ... The one is all aggressive enterprise; other is all genteel tradition.2 Born in 1827, Norton moved in and out of worlds of business, politics, religious instruction, social reform, and literature with a freedom that testifies to inclusive spirit of amateur tradition. Norton chose not to follow in footsteps of his famous father, Unitarian minister Andrews Norton. Instead, day after his graduation from Harvard in 1846, he took his