Editing Mary Anning (section)

=== Illness and death ===
[[File:MaryAnningGravestone.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=Photo of upright gravestone|Gravestone of Anning and her brother Joseph in St Michael's churchyard]]
Anning died from [[breast cancer]] at the age of 47 on 9 March 1847.<ref name=eb /> Her fossil work had tailed off during the last few years of her life because of her illness, and as some townspeople misinterpreted the effects of the increasing doses of [[laudanum]] she was taking for the pain, there had been gossip in Lyme that she had a drinking problem.<ref>{{Harvnb|Brice|2001}}</ref> The regard in which Anning was held by the geological community was shown in 1846 when, upon learning of her cancer diagnosis, the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created [[Dorset County Museum]] made Anning an honorary member.<ref name="Torrens1995" /> She was buried on 15 March in the churchyard of [[Lyme Regis#Religion|St Michael's]], the local parish church.<ref name="TorrensODNB">{{Harvnb|Torrens|2008}}</ref> Members of the Geological Society contributed to a stained-glass window in Anning's memory, unveiled in 1850. It depicts the six corporal ''[[works of Mercy|acts of mercy]]''—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and the sick, and the inscription reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life."<ref>{{Harvnb|McGowan|2001|pp=200–201}}</ref>

[[File:MaryAnningWindow.jpg|thumb|alt=Photo of colourful stained class window showing human figures|Mary Anning's Window, St Michael's Church]]
After Anning's death, Henry De la Beche, president of the Geological Society, wrote a eulogy that he read to a meeting of the society and published in its quarterly transactions, the first such eulogy given for a woman. These were honours normally only accorded to fellows of the society, which did not admit women until 1904. The eulogy began:

<blockquote>I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great [[Eurapsyda|Enalio-Saurians]], and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ...<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YR0RAAAAIAAJ&pg=PR24 |title=Anniversary Address of the President |journal=The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London |volume=4 |year=1848 |page=xxv |author=Anon}}</ref></blockquote>

An anonymous article about Anning's life was published in February 1865 in [[Charles Dickens]]'s literary magazine ''[[All the Year Round]]''. The profile, "Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder," was long attributed to Dickens himself but, in 2014, historians of palaeontology Michael A. Taylor and Hugh Torrens identified [[Henry Stuart Fagan]] as the author, noting that Fagan's work was "neither original nor reliable" and "introduced errors into the Anning literature which are still problematic." Specifically, they noted that Fagan had largely and inaccurately plagiarised his article from an earlier account of Anning's life and work by Dorset native [[Henry Rowland Brown]], from the second edition of Brown's 1859 guidebook, ''The Beauties of Lyme Regis.''<ref>Taylor, M. A. and Torrens, H. S. (2014). [https://web.archive.org/web/20200529051228/http://repository.nms.ac.uk/1258/1/1258_An_anonymous_account_of_Mary_Anning.pdf An Anonymous Account of Mary Anning (1799–1847), Fossil Collector of Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, Published in All The Year Round in 1865, and its Attribution to Henry Stuart Fagan (1827–1890), Schoolmaster, Parson, and Author]. Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History & Archaeological Society, 135, 71–85.</ref> The article emphasised the difficulties Anning had overcome, especially the scepticism of her fellow townspeople. Fagan ended the article with: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it."<ref name="Dickens">{{Harvnb|Dickens|1865|pp=60–63}}</ref>