Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. 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 the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom.

Sir Leslie Stephen was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, mountaineer, and an early humanist activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.