Ed Willcox was a talented, but singularly odd man. A product of high Victorian manly culture, Willcox worked with the shipping department of the Gilbert Manufacturing Co., a producer of cotton goods in New York City, however he became more widely known for his particular artistic talent, using human skin in place of canvas. Willcox peeled large pieces of carefully prepared skin from the bodies of people who had suffered severe sun burns, laid the skins out with weights at the corners, and painted delicately on them with his brush. There is no indication that Willcox made a living with his art.

After leaving his hometown of Malone, N.Y., for New York City in 1886, Ed Willcox began seriously to court a woman he had known since childhood, [Clara] Stewart. Only 22, he hoped to make his fortune in the city and bring Stewart to live with him, and with this end in mind, he signed on at once with the Gilbert Manufacturing Co. At first, Willcox was miserably treated, belittled as a mere country boy, and he endured both hard work and low wages. Yet his ambition drove him to assume additional tasks at Gilbert at no additional pay, cutting out cloth linings for sale to homemakers. To save money for his impending marriage, he left his boarding house and strung a hammock in a corner of the warehouse, sleeping over a steam grate in winter to stay warm, and with the little free time allowed outside of work, he began to study bookkeeping at the Young Men's Institute in the Bowery with the hope of improving himself. After he became more comfortable with his financial situation, Willcox began to indulge his passions for camping, fishing, and hunting, visiting the Adirondacks on several occasions.

In the summer of 1889, after more than two years of grinding work in the city, Willcox finally felt secure enough to return to Malone and marry. He and his wife settled in the city, rooming with an Aunt named Dorman until September, 1889, when they took a place of their own at 1082 Park Ave. Four years later, the Willcoxes made an arrangement with their Aunt and Uncle to alternate houses between a country house at Riverdale and their house in the city.

Scope and contents:

Ed Willcox's journal consists of a series of autobiographical manuscripts and a few loose sheets of diary entries, illustrated with seventeen photographs, eight pencil sketches, and nine watercolor illustrations. Written in an eccentric, but engaging fashion, and enlivened with a peculiar sense of humor, these essays and illustrations document Ed Willcox's life as a new arrival in New York City during the Gilded Age, working in Horatio Alger-like fashion to raise money to marry, and his passion for the manly activities of camping and fishing. Work on the book was apparently begun in June, 1893, but coherence of theme is not its hallmark. It seems rather that the essays were separately, addressing a range of themes relating to Willcox's personal experiences. When these were rebound, probably in the 1980s, the original order was disturbed, and some materials may have been removed or lost.

Approximately half of Willcox's autobiographical essays deal with hunting and fishing expeditions during the summers of 1893 and 1894, and these reveal a great deal about the culture of natural living in which Victorian men engaged too such a strong interest. The longest and most polished essay, however, concerns Willcox's move from small-town Malone, N.Y., to big city Manhattan, and his efforts to balance his ambitious career plans with his courtship and marriage. It is impossible to gauge whether, or to what degree, the story may have been fictionalized, but his claims of hardship and reward bear the distinct stamp of the popular success stories of the day.

Willcox's drawings and watercolors all relate to his passions, fishing and camping. Exuding a naive appeal and a sense of humor, they form an excellent complement to the narrative accounts of his manly exploits.

The photographs are a mixture of images taken by professional photographers (none identified), with possibly some amateur productions mixed in. In addition to portraits of Willcox (including one dressed as a contortionist) and his wife, four images appear to have been acquired by Willcox during a trip to Southern California in 1885, and several others show Willcox and his colleagues at work in the offices of the Gilbert Manufacturing Company, or at play, camping and fishing in the Adirondacks. Among these are a particularly fine view of an Adirondack (?) hunting camp (p.103), views of the street outside the Gilbert Manufacturing Company and inside the shipping department (p. 140, 142), and the most dramatic image -- and technically the most sophisticated -- a view depicting two ships in dry dock, possibly at Lake George (p. 81).

Provenance:

Acquired, 1995.

F-245; M-3145.1
cat. 6/98 rsc

Link to subject index to the E. E. Willcox Journal

inventory of the E. E. Willcox Journal

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