Georgina Fernandez and the Pre-Raphaelites

This is a précis of an article published in 2005 in the British Art Journal (vol vi no 1, pp 3-20) by Julian Moore and Christopher Whittick entitled ‘Depictions of Georgina: Aspects of social identity in two portraits by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’. Some additional information concerning Fanny Cornforth has been added.


Georgina’s story begins at the start of the 19th century. In 1816 her mother, Helen Parsons, was baptised at Broadwater, near Worthing, where her grandfather had a carpentry shop. In the 1830s Helen, or Ellen as she was usually called, followed her brother, George, to live in Brighton. They were among the flood of rural work people who left the long-settled villages and swelled Brighton’s population by 40% in the early years of Victoria’s reign. Ellen went to share a house in one of four tiny, low-ceiling cottages in Gloucester Passage, a courtyard in the older part of Brighton which was dominated by an iron foundry and the Gloucester Brewery. This area was very poor and she was, in effect, just one step from destitution.

In August 1839 Ellen married Archibald Robertson and they went to live at 39 Blackman Street. He was a porter but already very ill with TB and he died a year later. Ellen began a relationship with a Henry Bignell, a violent, disruptive man and she was soon pregnant. A year later she found herself pregnant again and decided to go to the law to claim financial support from Henry but he promptly fled Brighton for London. Georgina was born on 15 October 1841. Her sibling died and, in 1844, Ellen herself died of TB aged 28. It is possible, but unlikely, that Georgina’s mother was a prostitute. The first generation of urban working class brought with them their own life assumptions forged in the Sussex countryside and simply tried to sustain this lifestyle within the urban environment.

From the wreckage of her mother’s life, Georgina was left an illegitimate baby without parents or siblings but she was saved by her uncle, George Parsons, who looked after her during her childhood with help from her grandfather who had followed the trend and left Broadwater for Brighton. George Parsons was a journeyman who lived in Whitecross Street. Their household was one of the lower artisan class; Georgina was one of the so-called ‘Common People’, a member of the fluid society of the Blackman and Whitecross Streets of Brighton.

In 1857, when Georgina was sixteen, her uncle and aunt both died so she was on her own again. However, somehow, within two years, she had left Brighton and found her way to Tenison Street in Lambeth where she lodged with a fellow Brightonian, Sarah Cox. Sarah, who was six years older than Georgina, had come from Steyning to Brighton with her father after her mother died, to live in Spring Gardens, close to Gardiner Street. It is possible that Georgina was a friend of Sarah’s younger sister. Around 1857 Sarah changed her name to Fanny Cornforth, possibly using the name of a great aunt, and moved to London. In 1858 Fanny married Timothy Hughes who turned out to be a drunkard. It was in 1858 that she first met the thirty year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This may have been when he was walking at Cremorne Gardens and he noticed her cracking peanuts with her teeth which she threw at him. Another version of their first meeting puts Fanny in the Royal Surrey Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth when Rossetti was attracted by her head of red hair whilst out walking with Edward Burne-Jones, Cornell Price and Ford Madox Brown. Fanny then became acquainted with various members of the Pre-Raphaelite group and it was Rossetti and George Price Boyce who helped her to escape from her husband and they set her up in a boarding house in Tenison Street. This triangular relationship has become famous through the painting Bocca Baciata by Rossetti. It was commissioned by Boyce who wanted a portrait of Fanny Cornforth. Lambeth at this time had a large and varied population and this street was quite a desirable site in an upper working class area. Fanny’s house had four-storeys which were over a basement. Fanny was a rather vulgar, extrovert character and it is possible, although there is no proof, that she was a prostitute at this time and the boarding house also served as a brothel.

In spite of the questionable status of her abode, association with Fanny Cornforth brought Georgina up in the world and she, too, became acquainted with the circle of friends centred around the Pre-Raphaelites. By 1861 Georgina is described as the wife of Charles Robinson, a draper’s warehouseman from Lincolnshire, but there is no record of any marriage. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1862, Fanny left Tenison Street and moved in with the newly-widowed Rossetti as his housekeeper, first living at lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn and then at 16 Cheyne Walk. She probably left his employment around 1865 when he started to use Alexa Wilding as his main model. However, they remained friends. Rossetti made a number of sketches in the early 1860s of Fanny and he also drew Georgina; a sketch entitled Portrait of Miss Robertson.

It is not known if Georgina stayed on in the Lambeth boarding house after Fanny left to live with Rossetti. She may have returned to Brighton for a time. However, by the mid- 1860s, she had become acquainted with James Fernandez. He was born in 1835 and was an aspiring actor playing at the Theatre Royal Brighton in 1868. He was professionally ambitious but big West End roles had so far eluded him. In the 1871 census he and Georgina were enumerated in Buckingham Palace Road, London, living as husband and wife.

It seems their relationship had reached a crisis point. Any exposure of their improper life style would have threatened James’s career but marriage was also fraught with difficulties: a mid-century Victorian marriage should not have begun with a premarital liaison; Georgina’s poverty-ridden background might become known; there was a Victorian horror of hereditary weakness and Georgina was, of course, a bastard daughter of a dissolute mother and a violent semi-criminal father; and there was also the difficulty of Georgina’s unrefined speech. This was a problem she shared with Fanny Cornforth who was noted for her Cockney accent. These difficulties must have been resolved as James and Georgina were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster in May 1871 when Georgina was thirty and her husband was thirty six.

In 1874 Rossetti drew Georgina again in coloured chalks on pale green paper. He drew Fanny at the same time and they are both wearing the same ear rings in their respective drawings. The two women now drifted apart and Rossetti wrote ‘Fanny lost sight of Georgey’. Georgina, as Mrs Fernandez, moved upwards into a new social world as her husband’s success increased. Fanny, meanwhile, moved downwards. She was rejected by Rossetti and later married John Bernard Schott and became the hostess of the Rose Tavern. She died in 1906.

Georgina and James had 44 years of marriage and for much of that time they lived in a flat at 1A Carlisle Place near to the site intended for Westminster Cathedral. James was a freemason and was amongst the first to join the Drury Lane Lodge when it was formed in 1886 and was the Master in 1891. He continued to climb the ladder of success and was a well-known supporting actor throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian years. The pinnacle of his success was in 1911 when he took part in a gala performance given by the king to honour his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. James died in 1915 and Georgina lived on as a widow at Carlisle Place for another fifteen years.

When James died Georgina put his collection of theatrical memorabilia up for sale at Sothebys and offered the two drawings to the National Gallery. Only the 1860s drawing was accepted and it is now at Tate Britain. On her death she bequeathed the chalk drawing to the Victoria and Albert Museum but it was declined and so it was sold through Christies. It has passed through various owners and was last sold to a private buyer in 2004 for £40,000.