Fanny Cornforth's last days

Christopher Whittick and Kirsty Walker have separately published on the final years of Fanny Cornforth, Pre-Raphaelite model and Rossetti's devoted companion, which make for relatively sad reading, although with today's greater familiarity with alzheimer's and other dementias her experience was by no means unusual.

And the detailed record kept by the Graylingwell asylum or hospital  now in West Sussex Record Office makes this clear.  Admitted from Chichester workhouse on 30 March 1907 as a widow with no known relatives, she was 'well nourished', indeed stout, but 'very deaf', confused, 'excitable'  and upset, with no sense of orientation and no memory for recent or remote events.  In September she fractured her wrist in a fall, and kept attempting to remove the plaster cast.  By January 1909 she was bed-ridden and effectively blind, and on 24 February she died, the causes listed as pneumonia and senile dementia.



The melancholy chronicle is aggravated by the absence of all friends and relations, and by the fact that the hospital record is for 'Sarah Hughes',  which was Fanny's name during her first marriage.  So there is no trace of her second husband John Schott - who predeceased Fanny.  The record cites two informants who appear to have transferred Fanny to this version of community care:  Mrs Mant from the Homestead at Felpham, described as her landlady, who committed Fanny to the Chichester Union workhouse, and Ann Humphrey of Outram House Felpham, who stated that Fanny had been  'strange in her manner' for some time and occasionally violent. Both addresses sound like private care homes,  which  presumably moved their most decayed residents to poor law public hospitals on a regular basis.

The whole register makes for absorbing reading,  with the accounts of Fanny's companions [all female in this ledger and the hospital section] suffering not only from senility but also psychosis  - frequently hearing distressing voices urging them to suicide and some suffering mental breakdown after having stillborn infants.  Several younger patients were discharged, registered as 'recovered',  which implies  families to return to.  It's a rare glimpse into historical mental health services via record-keeping.