Fairy Tale

Frances with Fairies (1917) by Elsie Wright 

I. 

I suppose it's fair to say that the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of Britain's most famous fictional detective. Less well known is the fact that, despite his training in medical science, he was fascinated by paranormal activity and psychic phenomena. 

 

Indeed, Conan Doyle was a believer not only in the efficacy of spiritualism, but in the existence of fairies and published a book on the latter - The Coming of the Fairies (1922) - in which he set out his views and reproduced the Cottingley Fairies photographs, convinced as he was of their authenticity.  

II. 

In 1917, two young girls in West Yorkshire - Elsie Wright, aged 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, aged 9 - produced a couple of photographs purporting to show fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Public reaction to the pictures was mixed; some people believed them to be genuine and insisted that they provided firm evidence for the existence of supernatural beings; others, not quite so willing to accept the validity of the photographs, simply smiled at the idea that these magical figures from European folklore might actually be real and noted the très moderne hairstyles that the fairies modelled. 

Interestingly, whilst Elsie's mother, Polly, was in the first camp, her father, Arthur, a keen amateur photographer, immediately dismissed the images as a prank and was only concerned that the girls may have tampered with his camera.

The pictures became public in 1919 when Polly attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. At the end of the meeting, she showed the photographs taken by her daughter and niece to the speaker and, as a result, they were displayed at the Society's annual conference in Harrogate later that year.

 

Here, they came to the attention of a leading theosophist, Edward Gardner, who recognised the importance of the pictures; the fact that two young girls had not only been able to see the fairies, but also materialise their presence sufficiently for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, demonstrated that psychic photography was possible.

 

Gardner was soon selling prints at his lectures and, before long, Conan Doyle came to hear of them. Never one to miss an opportunity, the latter quickly gained permission from Arthur Wright to use the images (free of charge) to illustrate an article he had written for the 1920 Christmas edition of The Strand Magazine. He also arranged with Gardner for the girls to take more fairy photos.

The two men were ecstatic with the results and believed the new pictures confirmed the truth of their theories concerning fairies and other psychic phenomena. Critics, however, were increasingly scornful; G. K. Chesterton is said to have remarked that when it came to this sort of thing, Conan Doyle's mentality was unfortunately more Watson than Holmes. The public also were growing tired of this fairy tale ...

It wasn't until 1982, however, that Elsie and Frances finally admitted in an interview what surely everyone with eyes can see; namely, that the photographs were faked using cardboard cut-outs of dancing girls copied from a popular children's book of the time and given wings (although both maintained that there really had been fairies at the bottom of the garden).

III.

As the author of Genocide in Fairyland - an unpublished collection of contemporary tales - I have to admit that I have a certain fondness for fairies, elves, goblins, and little people of every variety. I even agree with Conan Doyle who wrote that recognition of their existence would jolt the material modern mind 'out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.' 

 

Primarily, however, my thinking on this subject has been shaped by the following (extraordinary) passage from an essay by D. H. Lawrence, in which he argues that fairies are not merely an imaginative reality:

"Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which cannot have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true ..."
 

 

See:

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1922). This work can be read online thanks to the good people at arthur-conan-doyle.com - click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press,1988), p. 127.