Spiritualism, a religious movement that touted a belief in the ability of the living to communicate with the spirit world, enjoyed a period of popularity from the 1840-1920s. The bloodshed of the Civil War and WWI left a whole lot of people missing their loved ones, and wishing they could somehow breach the chasm between our world and whatever may come next. The movement embraced a generally paranormal worldview, touting everything from clairvoyance to spiritual healing.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was among the most passionate converts to the Spiritualist cause. The author wrote passionately about the power of séances, embarked on a world speaking tour to win converts to the cause, and even broke up his bromance with Harry Houdini when the magician spoke out against the faith. Doyle took his biggest pro-Spiritual stance in 1922, when he published The Coming of the Fairies. And no, it wasn’t a novel.
Who convinced the creator of the famously rational Holmes that magical creatures prance among us? Elementary, my dear reader: a couple little girls.
It was 1917, and Elsie Wright was 16. Her 10-year-old cousin, Frances, lived in South Africa, but had come to stay with Elsie and her family in Cottlingley, England. The girls liked to play in the family’s gardens, and claimed to the Wright parents that they frequently saw fairies playing down by a brook. When the adults teased them about their claims, Elsie told her father that, if he would lend them his camera, they could prove that the creatures were real. Mr. Wright (an amateur photographer with his own dark room) developed the film, and found that there were, indeed, photos of the girls and their magical companions. The next time Mr. Wright lent the girls his camera, he found a photo of the girls and a gnome.
He immediately dismissed the photographs as fakes, although Mrs. Wright wasn’t so sure. The couple stashed the photos for years, but the girls continued to speak of the fairies, with Frances even sending some fair photographs to a friend back in South Africa. “Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck Fairies,” she wrote on the back of the photo. “It is funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there.”
In 1920, Mrs. Wright attended her first Theosophical lecture. The Theosophical movement, related to the Spiritualists, believed that humans were constantly evolving toward a greater state of perfection. They had not, apparently, gotten the memo that some of us were just born that way. The speaker lectured on the possibility of fairy life, and Mrs. Wright was newly interested in the photographs her daughter and niece had taken a few years back.
She sent them to a prominent Theosophical leader named Edward Gardner, who was intrigued. If these girls could, indeed, see a magical dimension, then perhaps they represented the next step in human evolution (a stage of spiritual connectivity not seen again until 1995, when Christina Ricci communed with Casper). Gardner sent them to a photographer, who told him the photos seemed real (“‘This is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen!’- ‘Single exposure!’- “Figures have moved!’- ‘Why, it’s a genuine photograph!’” Gardner recounted him exclaiming). Encouraged, Gardner started show the photos around more widely.
Our favorite fiction-writing fairy-fan heard about the prints through the Spiritualist grapevine, while working on a piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. Doyle was initially skeptical. He showed the photos to other photography experts, some of whom said they were fakes. He even showed them to a fairy expert who shot down the photos’ credibility, pointing out the obvious fact that the fairies’ styling was too ‘Parisienne’ to be authentic (duh).
There were some red flags. But none of this mattered- the guy was simply a sucker for a supernatural photo. In fact, when the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures was founded in 1918, he had become their VP. In the photo with a gnome, the head of a pin is visible sticking out of his stomach. Doyle said some blurriness in the photos proved that the figures had been moving, and that the pin head was an umbilical cord that proved gnomes were born in a similar way to humans. “To the objections of photographers that the fairy figures show quite different shadows to those of the human,” Doyle wrote, “our answer is that the psychoplasm, as the etheric protoplasm has been named, has a faint luminosity of its own, which would largely modify shadows.”
In his continued quest not to take ‘fake’ for an answer, Doyle asked Gardner to visit the family and see if they seemed like honest people. Gardner did so, and left thoroughly convinced:
“Mrs. Wright certainly gave the impression that she had no desire to keep anything back, and answered by questions quite frankly. She told me that Elsie has always been a truthful girl, and there were neighbors who accepted the story of the fairies simply on the strength of their knowledge of her. I asked about Elsie’s career, and her mother said that after she left school she worked for a few months for a photographer in Manningham Lane, Bradford, but did not care for running errands most of the day. The only other work she did there was ‘spotting.’ Neither occupation was likely to teach a fourteen year old how to ‘fake’ a plate. From there she went to a jeweller’s shop, but her stay there was not prolonged…
I ascertained that Elsie was described by her late schoolmaster as being ‘dreamy,’ and her mother said that anything imaginative appealed to her. As to whether she could have drawn the fairies when she was sixteen I am doubtful. Lately she has taken up water-colour drawing, and her work, which I carefully examined, does not reveal that ability in a marked degree, though she possesses a remarkable knowledge of color for an untrained artist,” he wrote, blissfully ignorant.
Gardner left happy, giving the girls a camera so they could take more photos in the future. His report was all the proof Doyle needed, diminishing any doubts he had to “a faint shadow of a doubt” only. He wrote to the family to ask permission to publish the photos. The granted him permission to do so without accepting any compensation.
Doyle published two of the shots with his piece in the Strand. “Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought,” Doyle humbly wrote.
In the meantime, the girls used the cameras Gardener provided to take some more photos. All told, there was a set of five.
Doyle was thrilled with the shots. He wrote to Gardner that his heart was “gladdened,” and that “when our fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance … We have had continued messages at seances for some time that a visible sign was coming through.” Doyle was so pumped that he wrote a follow-up piece the next year, and then published his compilation of fairy stories, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.
The photos sparked strong public reactions, both positive and negative. Debates were heated up by the national climate of conflict between science and faith, brought on by debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution. A 1922 piece in a Pittsburgh newspaper (with the amazing title “Confucious and Bryan. Also the Bible and Conan Doyle and Ghosts. Fit Sunday Subjects” ) compared Doyle to the politican and vocal Darwin-denier WIlliam Jennings Bryan. “The photographs of fairies were not doctored in any way, and did not need doctoring. They were pictures of lifelife toys, photographed among the pretty wildflowers. What a wonderful lecturing team would be “Bryan and Doyle.” Mr. Bryan lecturing on old-fashioned belief, Conan Doyle following up with a convincing talk, with spook photography on up-to-the-minute ghosts, both winding up with ‘Down with Darwin and science.’”
The faithful stood beside the girls and beside the photos. Using the pseudonyms Doyle used for the girls, novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole wrote: “Look at Alice’s face. Look at Iris’s face. There is an extraordinary thing called TRUTH which has ten million faces and forms. It is God’s currency and the cleverest coiner or forger can’t imitate it.” Only with time did the debate die down, with the story eventually fading from the public eye altogether.
In 1981 and 1982, the magazine The Unexplained interviewed the two, now-elderly cousins. Elsie Wright admitted that all of the photos were frauds, explaining that she and her cousin had copied images of fairies from illustrations to Afred Noye’s poem “A Spell for a Fairy,” and then lend them up with hat pins. The poem and illustrations had appeared in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, which also contained a story by Doyle (guess he didn’t look at it too closely). The girls, she later said, had attached the drawing to hat pins and propped them up. If they appeared to move, it was only because they shook in the wind. There were no double-exposures to discover, because the deception was not even that complex. Once a “brilliant man like Conan Doyle” publicly endorsed the veracity of the photos, she said, “we could only just keep quiet.”
Frances also admitted that four of the five photos taken were fakes. In an interview with the BBC, she said that she “never even thought of it as a fraud. I just thought of it as Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can’t understand it to this day why people were taken in- they wanted to be taken in. People often say to me, don’t you feel ashamed that you made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you. But I don’t, because they wanted to believe…we didn’t have to tell a lie about it at all, because always somebody came out to justify it.” However, she insisted that the last of the set was genuine. “It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph.” Like Doyle and Fox Mulder, it seems she wanted to believe.
Works Referenced
“Confucious and Bryan. Also the Bible and Conan Doyle and Ghosts. Fit Sunday Subjects.” The Pittsburgh Press. May 7, 1922. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=NskaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zUkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1157,1852044&dq=fairies+doyle&hl=en.
Cooper, Joe. “Cottingley: At Last the Truth.” The Unexplained, No. 117, pp. 2338-40, 1982.
The Case for Spirit Photography, also published in 1922
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015056050001
Coppens, Philip. “Fairy Dust: The Cottingley Fairies.” http://www.philipcoppens.com/cottingley.html
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Coming of the Fairies. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZVtNAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=arthur+conan+doyle+fairies&hl=en&ei=dLaITuf8LYf50gH15a3RDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Strand Magazine: an Illustrated Monthly. Vol. LX. June to December 1920. London: George Newnes, Ltd.
“Asserts Many Can See Fairies, But Ashamed to Have their Word Doubted.”
Ottawa Citizen. Sept. 10, 1928. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=rlIuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ptkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1667,956796&dq=arthur+conan+doyle+fairies&hl=en
Grimes, Hilary. The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011.
Silver, Carole G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
LFarge, Antoinette. “Cottingly Fairies.” Fictive Art. 2007. http://fictive.arts.uci.edu/cottingley_fairies
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LABELS: 1920’S, ART, CHEATERS, FOLK BELIEFS, JOURNALISM, KIDS, LET DOWNS, VICTORIAN
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