What James Saw: The Bethnal Green Museum and Charles Eliot Norton

Abstract

This paper draws upon unpublished letters from Charles Eliot Norton to Henry James regarding James’s visit to the Bethnal Green Museum in London; and considers the similarities and divergences between James’s review, “The Bethnal Green Museum,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1873, and a comparable review of Norton’s “The Manchester Art Exhibition,” published in the same magazine some two decades earlier.

Keywords

• charles eliot norton
• henry james
• manchester art exhibition
• bethnal green