up. We are married and are happy. We have been happy ever since our wedding three years ago. We are not worrying about the future, or the loss of Mr. Palmer’s millions.”
The embarrassing publicity did not inspire Nancy and Waring to cut off contact with their relative; not only would family gatherings have been impossible to negotiate, but Nancy particularly enjoyed the chance to consider herself part of society by association. Although he barely referred to his wild uncle in his autobiography, Norman spent plenty of time with him until about the age of thirteen. Sam’s new stepson, eleven-year-old Frank Crampton, remembers proudly the pleasure that Norman took in the set of carpenter tools his stepcousin bestowed on him one Christmas. This same new relative inadvertently reveals, in his own memoir, that his mother and stepfather spun a different story for him than the one printed by
The New York Times—
a version that was probably passed down to the Rockwell boys as well: he believed that his Uncle Frank invidiously disinherited Susan Crampton to obtain control of stocks and securities she had endorsed over to him after her first husband’s death. The disinheritance “followed a request of my mother that the securities be returned to her.” Only a few years after Uncle Frank’s death did Susan recover her fortune, according to her son, and even then it was but “a small fraction of what had been hers.”
If Waring and Nancy indulged in the sin of envy around this time, no one could blame them. Nancy’s side of the family had decided that it was the Rockwells’ turn to care for Eva Milner, Nancy’s mentally retarded niece; Amy, who had been staying with Nancy and Waring, would exchange places with the sweet but emotionally demanding girl. Eva Milner Orpen, two mothers dead by the time she was eight years old, would, over time, disappear from the map of the Rockwells’ lives, unnoted in family stories and memoirs, a quiet footnote in a few distant cousins’ memories. Certainly Nancy and Waring, basically compassionate people, tried to do their Christian duty by her, and at least one cousin claims that the girl lived for five or six years with the Rockwells. Norman Rockwell’s sons recall his vague mention of Eva as an additional drain on his mother’s meager psychological resources. But the dominant impression in family recollections is of the Rockwells’ shame at having such a clearly defective relative. Oddly similar in instinct to Erik Erikson’s denial of his own Down’s syndrome baby, none of Rockwell’s colorful anecdotes even suggests that Eva existed, in spite of the fact that her care further exhausted his mother. Surely by this point, when the young boy was about seven years old, he must have sorely needed a lens with which to focus his often chaotic, drama-ridden city life, especially since his parents believed in providing few explanations to children. How to make sense of the family logic that seemed so irrational to him, even then? His deliverance would come at the hand of a British and, more significant, thoroughly Victorian novelist—Charles Dickens.
4
A Dickensian Sensibility
Given the broad strokes with which Norman Rockwell’s melodramatic early life could be painted, his parents’ choice of Charles Dickens as their literary hero seems a natural fit. What we know of the Hill and Rockwell familial sensibilities from at least the 1860s suggests that the determinedly middlebrow novelist would have appealed to Norman’s great-grandparents on both sides. With their frequent access to Manhattan, it is likely that either John William Rock-well or Thomas Howard Hill caught one of Dickens’s lectures on the novelist’s second speaking tour of the States, when he exhausted himself reading in sixteen eastern cities between November 9, 1867, and April 22, 1868.
Around 1902, Waring began to augment the after-dinner routine of copying magazine illustrations with what quickly became an even
The embarrassing publicity did not inspire Nancy and Waring to cut off contact with their relative; not only would family gatherings have been impossible to negotiate, but Nancy particularly enjoyed the chance to consider herself part of society by association. Although he barely referred to his wild uncle in his autobiography, Norman spent plenty of time with him until about the age of thirteen. Sam’s new stepson, eleven-year-old Frank Crampton, remembers proudly the pleasure that Norman took in the set of carpenter tools his stepcousin bestowed on him one Christmas. This same new relative inadvertently reveals, in his own memoir, that his mother and stepfather spun a different story for him than the one printed by
The New York Times—
a version that was probably passed down to the Rockwell boys as well: he believed that his Uncle Frank invidiously disinherited Susan Crampton to obtain control of stocks and securities she had endorsed over to him after her first husband’s death. The disinheritance “followed a request of my mother that the securities be returned to her.” Only a few years after Uncle Frank’s death did Susan recover her fortune, according to her son, and even then it was but “a small fraction of what had been hers.”
If Waring and Nancy indulged in the sin of envy around this time, no one could blame them. Nancy’s side of the family had decided that it was the Rockwells’ turn to care for Eva Milner, Nancy’s mentally retarded niece; Amy, who had been staying with Nancy and Waring, would exchange places with the sweet but emotionally demanding girl. Eva Milner Orpen, two mothers dead by the time she was eight years old, would, over time, disappear from the map of the Rockwells’ lives, unnoted in family stories and memoirs, a quiet footnote in a few distant cousins’ memories. Certainly Nancy and Waring, basically compassionate people, tried to do their Christian duty by her, and at least one cousin claims that the girl lived for five or six years with the Rockwells. Norman Rockwell’s sons recall his vague mention of Eva as an additional drain on his mother’s meager psychological resources. But the dominant impression in family recollections is of the Rockwells’ shame at having such a clearly defective relative. Oddly similar in instinct to Erik Erikson’s denial of his own Down’s syndrome baby, none of Rockwell’s colorful anecdotes even suggests that Eva existed, in spite of the fact that her care further exhausted his mother. Surely by this point, when the young boy was about seven years old, he must have sorely needed a lens with which to focus his often chaotic, drama-ridden city life, especially since his parents believed in providing few explanations to children. How to make sense of the family logic that seemed so irrational to him, even then? His deliverance would come at the hand of a British and, more significant, thoroughly Victorian novelist—Charles Dickens.
4
A Dickensian Sensibility
Given the broad strokes with which Norman Rockwell’s melodramatic early life could be painted, his parents’ choice of Charles Dickens as their literary hero seems a natural fit. What we know of the Hill and Rockwell familial sensibilities from at least the 1860s suggests that the determinedly middlebrow novelist would have appealed to Norman’s great-grandparents on both sides. With their frequent access to Manhattan, it is likely that either John William Rock-well or Thomas Howard Hill caught one of Dickens’s lectures on the novelist’s second speaking tour of the States, when he exhausted himself reading in sixteen eastern cities between November 9, 1867, and April 22, 1868.
Around 1902, Waring began to augment the after-dinner routine of copying magazine illustrations with what quickly became an even
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