Mr. F's Aunt appears in "Little Dorrit." Arthur Clennam, the eventual husband of the eponymous character, was infatuated with Miss Flora. In order to disentangle him, he was sent to China to look after the family's business. He returns, a middle aged man, to find Flora, married & widowed as Mrs Finching, but ready to romance him again. But she has become a silly, corpulent middle-aged woman, burdened with a senile aunt of her late husband. (Here it may be mentioned in passing that Flora Finching talks in the "Stream of Consciousness" style, later to be popularised by James Joyce & Virginia Woolf.) When they are dining, this Mr.F's Aunt, interjects, apropos of nothing, that "when we lived at Henley, Barnes gander was stole by tinkers." She takes a vindictive & inexplicable hatred to Mr. Clennam, & on his next visit, exclaims "Drat him, if he ain't come back again!"
If, Mr. F's Aunt is a genuine case, Mr.Chuffey in "Martin Chuzzlewit" is a presumed but not real case of dementia. He is a clerk of Anthony Chuzzlewit, who trains his son Jonas to be selfish & grasping like himself. (Much like Bhootayya training his son Ayyu in the Kannada novel & film.) Jonas & the egregious nurse, Sairey Gamp, think Chuffey is senile from his words. But he is not & just keeps observing the goings-on. In the climax, he absolves Jonas from the crime of parricide, but cannot save him from another murder. He also becomes a pillar of support to Mercy Pecksniff, the pathetic victim of a disastrous marriage to Jonas.
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