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1917, 1920s: Sherlock Holmes creator and the mystery of the Cottingley Fairies
The Coming of the Fairies
What you need to know before your trail
In 1917, two young girls took pictures of what they claimed to be fairies dancing in the woods. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Doyle championed the photographs, and in the process destroyed his reputation; which is probably why this book, out of all of the Doyle corpus, has rarely been put into print until now. The Coming of the Fairies was possibly a bigger disappointment for Doyle fans than when he killed off Sherlock Holmes.
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The Cottingley Fairies
Elsie Wright (1901–88) and Frances Griffiths (1907–86), were two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England.
The first two photographs were taken in 1917 when Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9.
The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, as a spiritualist was very keen to find out more. He hoped that the photographs would proof that a person’s thoughts could be captured on film and that fairy folk could be summonsed by believing in them.
Public reaction was mixed at first; whilst some accepted the images as genuine, others believed they had been faked. Interest in them wained after 1921 but the girls were traced again in the 1960s and Elsie still said that she believed she had photographed her thoughts.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked, but Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was in fact genuine.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Coming of the Fairies
Destination: Cottingley Author/Guide: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Departure Time: 1912, 1920s
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