Unforgotten Lives - Fanny Eaton

Fanny Eaton was born Fanny Antwistle in 1835. She travelled to Britain from Jamaica with her mother in the 1840s and by the time of the 1851 census she was living in St Pancras, working as a domestic cook. She married James Eaton who worked as a cab man, and the couple had ten children between 1858 and 1879. This large family lived at several cramped dwellings at addresses in St Pancras and later Notting Hill. Five of their children were baptised at St Clements Notting Hill: Sicily, Ernest, Walter, Miriam and Julia. At this time, the family were living at 191 Lancaster Road. James Eaton died in 1881, leaving Fanny a single mother who worked variously as a seamstress, a charwoman and a cook.

According to her biography Eaton has a similar life to many other working-class women in London in the Victorian period. However, she leaves an unusual legacy, as from the early years of her marriage she worked as an artist’s model. She modelled at the Royal Academy and became closely associated with artists that were part of the Pre Raphaelite movement. She features in artworks by Everett Millais, Frederick Sandys and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among others, often as a character in Biblical settings where she provides a contrast to the ethereally pale women that routinely featured as sitters for these artists. Art scholars continue to debate how much these artists portray Eaton’s dignity and beauty, and how far she is being othered as an exotic figure.

It appears that most of Eaton’s modelling took place in the 1860s and we do not know why she stopped, however, it is believed that modelling only ever topped up her earnings from other sources. In later life she moved to the Isle of Wight for a time to be a cook in a family home. She returned to London to live with her daughter Julia in Hammersmith, where she died aged 88 in 1924.