This paper originally appeared in The PRS Review, Pre-Raphaelite Women Special Issue (Volume XXX, Number 3, Autumn 2022), guest-edited by Dr Serena Trowbridge. It has been reformatted for this website by Taylor Tomko. Footnotes have been incorporated into the text, and illustrations added from our own site. [Click on these for more information about them, and to see larger versions of them.] Note that all cartoons mentioned in this essay are from the Samuel and Mary R Bancroft Collection in the Delaware Art Museum.
he attributes applied to artists' model, companion and carer Fanny Cornforth (1835-1909) are almost exclusively negative. Unlike her fellow models, Fanny had no artistic ambition, nor did she improve her accent or remain quiet and demure. When biographers refer to her, Fanny is a combination of pejorative terms, being described as a thief, as illiterate, a liar, and greedy.
Rossetti's drawing of Fanny, c. 1859.
While some are easily dismissed as defamation by her antagonists, the attributes applied by Fanny's lover, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, are given a patina of authority. The image of the Elephant burying a vase or jar that accompanied a letter from the 1870s brings together heft, theft and loneliness, but it could be argued that rather than speaking of Fanny's habits, they reveal a joke that deepened in significance.
After her meeting with Rossetti in 1856, Sussex-born Sarah Cox assumed the name 'Fanny', then 'Elephant', a nickname affectionately applied by Rossetti, and subsequently repeated in his letters of the late 1860s onwards. (The surname 'Cornforth' was applied after her marriage to Timothy Hughes/Cornforth in 1860 and is interchangeable with Fanny or Sarah Hughes. As a name, 'Fanny Cornforth' gained popularity in later biographies and fiction rather than among her contemporaries.) At the same time, Rossetti became 'Rhino', sometimes 'Old Rhinoceros' to her 'Good Elephant'. Both nicknames are often assumed to apply to their spreading girth, although more is made of this in descriptions of Fanny. Arguably, the nicknames remained as Rossetti's health deteriorated and he felt cut off from his former friends. While Fanny's Elephant is active and acquisitive, Rhino is often sad, lonely and unpredictable. In one of his notes, he wrote 'Old Rhinoceros was nasty last night & his horn is wet with tears' (Baum 105). It is possible that the characteristics of Rhino's melancholy could stem from Rossetti's own deterioration in mental health, signified in 1867 by his eyesight failure due to overstrain and nervous upset (Dyke 41). 'Rhinoceros' becomes almost Rossetti's alter ego for when he feels 'othered' by his mental illness. In a letter to Fanny, Rossetti teasingly accuses her of becoming a 'Rogue Elephant', a creature that has separated from the herd to roam alone (Fredeman 126). Creating a creature alter ego for Fanny shows a connection, that he was not alone in his depression.
From the 1860s through to his death, Rossetti wrote letters to Fanny. Ranging from demands to excuses, they show a relationship weathering the landscape of Rossetti's mental health. Occasionally, he would include a sketch of an elephant engaged in some activity that was pertinent to the subject of the letter. When Fanny had been away to the seaside, the elephant was shown swimming, trunk raised. When Rossetti sent Fanny a cheques, the elephant was seen secreting the money away in a safe in the cartoon Economies Éléphantines. In 1873, Rossetti wrote a particularly stern letter to Fanny:
'Hullo Elephant! Just you find that pot! Do you think I don't [sic] know that you've wrapped your trunk round it & dug a hole for it in the garden? Just you find it, for I cant [sic] do without it.
R
PS I promise you faithfully to return it when I have painted it. But you know in fact you have no business with it, as I never gave it you, and now I want it badly for my picture. You shall have it back quite safe when done with which will be before long.' [Baum 48-49]
The accompanying cartoon was Elephant and Pot, showing a very determined elephant, with its trunk firmly wrapping the vase, furiously shovelling. This has been interpreted as Rossetti pleading with his elephantine mistress to stop stealing, her materialistic ways causing distress. It is seen as Fanny's way at either lashing out at her unfaithful lover or acquiring a safety net against the inevitable drop.
There could be another meaning behind the images. The first of Rossetti's images of Fanny as an elephant references the earliest days of their relationship. In Economies Éléphantines, an elephant with a castle on its back, opens a safe on a wall that also has a picture of an elephant and castle on it. The instance of a picture within a picture, especially when applied to Fanny, has a precedent in Fanny Cornforth and G P Boyce in Rossetti's Studio (1858) also by Rossetti (now in Tullie House City Museum and Art Gallery). In the sketch of Fanny with Boyce, it is Ruth Herbert who is pictured in the framed sketch, possibly alluding to the connection between one model and another, who look similar in Rossetti's paintings: the similarity between the women led to F G Stephens, who knew both women, mistaking Fanny for Ruth Herbert in Lady Lilith (Stephens 68). The elephant in the framed sketch in the later drawing is recognisably the icon from the Elephant and Castle district of London (the iconography of an elephant with a castle on its back is derived from a pub sign of the eighteenth century, which became a statue at the end of the nineteenth). The elephant who is reaching for the safe looks similar but the address, written on its castle, was Fanny's Chelsea home in Royal Avenue, close to Tudor House in Cheyne Walk. It's around four miles and a few social layers from Elephant and Castle, across the river to Cheyne Walk, so why is the Elephant and Castle opening a safe in Chelsea?
Lady Lilith (1868-73).
At the start of their relationship, Rossetti lived in Chatham Place and Fanny had lodgings in Lambeth. As they walked between their homes, the Elephant and Castle district was on their path. Repeated sightings of the iconic Elephant and Castle statue and its echo of Fanny's assumed name could have easily led to Fanny becoming Ele-Fan. Rossetti's fondness for the animal was expressed not only through the sketches for Fanny, but in designs for a dinner service, brooches and Fanny's own collection of miniature bronze elephants.* The elephant applied to Fanny, however, is specifically linked to the Elephant and Castle iconography. The nature of this Elephant avatar is often shady – she steals, hides, opens safes and plays cards. From the early 1800s, there existed a criminal organisation from the district, called the Elephant and Castle Gang. The wives and sisters of the men of this groups formed their own branch, becoming known as the 'Forty Thieves' or 'Forty Elephants'.
The most famous leader or 'Queen' of this gang was Mary Carr, an artist's model who had posed for Frederic Leighton's The Maid with the Yellow Hair (1895) as well as being the possible model for Dorothy Tennant's flower seller in her book, London Street Arabs (1890; now in a private collection). While the men of the gang specialised in violence, the women deployed cunning and costume to achieve their thefts. Special dresses with deep pockets and specially tailored undergarments aided shoplifting, while others of the gang posed as maids and emptied the safes of their employers. In the 1860s, there were 700 cases of 'larceny from the person by prostitute', which included the work of the women of the Elephant gang, working in conjunction with the men. The girls would stop a likely looking victim, then the men would set about him, threatening to tell the police he was consorting and assaulting prostitutes. The victim paid handsomely to avoid scandal and disgrace (Davies 79).
The women of the Elephant and Castle Gang had a reputation of villainy linked with theft, seduction and prostitution, three attributes that have been applied to Fanny. Two of those, theft and seduction, came via Rossetti, in his portrayals of Fanny in art and cartoon. The sketch Rossetti drew of Fanny the day after he met her in 1856 was that of the shamed prostitute in Found (1854-1882), and her willingness to accept unorthodox living arrangements funded by men has allowed the title of 'prostitute' to be applied to her beyond the character she portrayed in art. One of Fanny's final appearances on canvas in 1865 was as Lady Lilith, who carried her seduction as power (now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). She feels no shame and is surrounded by her luxury. Lilith, with her voluptuous turpitude, is an extreme version of Fanny the Elephant.
Found, begun in the 1850s.
The crimes of the Fanny the Elephant are petty; the theft of a vase and gambling, but the image of her attending to her cheque is also an interesting one. While often interpreted as an elephant placing a cheque in a safe, it could equally be removing the cheque in the way that the criminal gang used the guise of maids to remove items from their employers's homes. Fanny the Elephant used her trunk to remove a vase. All these little items taken from Rossetti found their way to 'the Elephant's Hole', a bottomless pit of things to which Fanny was not entitled yet had helped herself anyway. While Rossetti often refers to Fanny as 'Good Elephant', the elephant in his sketches is anything but virtuous. She is truly 'rogue' in all senses as she never appears with others. What is often arguably infantilised teasing between friends turns to accusation over possessions. In the above letter about the vase, the ownership seems unclear. While Rossetti demands it back with charges that Fanny has 'wrapped your trunk round it', the postscript is distinctly conciliatory with promises 'faithfully to return it' even though, as he repeats 'I never gave it you'. If the vase belonged to Rossetti and he was as angry with the theft as he appeared in the first half of the letter, the promises and contradictions of the postscript confuse the tone and the ownership.
While in no way claiming that Fanny was a member of the Forty Elephants, the linking of Fanny the Elephants with the iconography of the Elephant and Castle district and the theft of valuables appears to show Rossetti was consciously or otherwise linking the two, albeit humorously. What obviously began as a joke, a play on her name and area, becomes interwoven with Rossetti's alternative reality as he demands that the 'Good Elephant' returns the items she has stolen while simultaneously promising to return those same items she is not entitled to have. Rather than being part of a gang, she was a 'rogue elephant', a separate creature to whom only 'Old Rhino' had access. Whether or not Rossetti had consciously made the joke about Fanny being a member of the criminal gang, his paranoia and bouts of deep depression in the 1870s caused him to make accusations towards Fanny, usually followed swiftly with confusion and recanting. Problems subsequently arose when friends and relatives believed the accusation but not the withdrawal. These escalated after Rossetti's sudden death with rumours that Fanny intended to blackmail poet Algernon Swinburne and Jane Morris, the former for his sexual activities, and the latter for her relationship with Rossetti. On investigation by William Michael Rossetti, the rumours proved groundless (Peattie 441-2).
The letters dating from the 1870s reflects the decay in Rossetti's clarity, but have never been connected to his decline in mental health by biographers in terms of their truthfulness. Fanny kept all the letters, even the incoherent, chloral driven one which Fanny called 'the bad 'un' as if she was grading her lovers decline. Unwittingly, by selling the collection of Rossetti's letters to Samuel Bancroft Jnr, she allowed the world to ultimately see a man who was respected accuse her of theft, first published in Paull Frankin Baum's 1940 edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Letters to Fanny Cornforth and recently digitised for world-wide access. Only one of Fanny's letters to Rossetti exists, so there is no way of gauging her concern and response to the letters she received other than Rossetti's own response to her correspondence in his letters. While he kept the letters he received from Jane Morris, presumably he, or a family member, disposed of Fanny's letters. This is likely because of the embarrassment felt over the close connection between Fanny and Rossetti but could equally be because of the content and her own observations over his health. The only letter that exists between Fanny and Rossetti ends with the words 'trusting that you are getting right agin [sic]', after Rossetti had told her to forget about him after his health declined in 1877 (Baum 89-95).
Rossetti's sketches of Fanny the Elephant show how a distressed man allowed his paranoia to colour the biography of a woman who loved him. The linking of the Elephant with theft marked Fanny as untrustworthy and greedy, which led to a hostile response from William Michael Rossetti after Rossetti's death. By creating a 'zoo for two' of just Good Elephant and Old Rhino, Rossetti removed Fanny from his circle and alienated her from his circle. In her Elephant persona, Fanny is at her most devoted to Rossetti, allowing him to brand her a thief and a liar, as recorded by biographer and novelist Thomas Hall Caine in the phrase 'But who believes anything said by the "Helephant"?' (Dobbs 220). Seen in this light, the idea that the Elephant refers to her weight would be a blessing when the implications are far more damaging. Because of the closeness of Fanny to Rossetti's life, especially during the periods of mental illness that drove so many of his friends and family to distance themselves, it is impossible to create biography of Fanny Cornforth without acknowledgement of the impact of her care for him and his unpredictable response to her. So many faults that are attributed to Fanny are drawn from the period 1870-1882, the most devastating crisis in Rossetti's health. Just as his friends and family were unwilling to acknowledge the context in which allegations are made, research now must evaluate the mental landscape in which the Elephant and Rhino lived.
*The dinner service is mentioned in undated letter from Rossetti to Fanny, from the Harry Ransome Collection (MSS_RossettiD_3_5_046), the brooches were given to May Morris and the bronze elephants were subsequently sold to Samuel Bancroft Jnr and are part of the Delaware Art Museum collection.
Links to Related Material
- Rossetti's Real Fair Ladies: Lizzie, Fanny, and Jane
- John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (Fanny Cornforth as Stanhope's model)
Bibliography
Baum, Paull Franklin. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Letters to Fanny Cornforth. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1940.
Davies, Caitlin. Queens of the Underworld . Cheltenham: The History Press, 2021.
Dobbs, Brian and Judy.Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Alien Victorian. London: Macdonald and Janes, 1977.
Dyke, S.C. "Some Medical Aspects of the Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. Volume 56 (1963).
Fredeman, William E. (ed) The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 7 The Last Decade, 1873-1882: Kelmscott to Birchington II. 1875-1877. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008.
Peattie, Roger.Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1990.
Stephens, F. G. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Seeley, 1894.
Created 12 February 2023