Cottingley Fairies, The, two ‘epoch‐making’ photographs—‘Frances and the Dancing Fairies’ and ‘Elsie and the Gnome’—taken in July 1917 by girls aged 9 and 16. In 1920 copies reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the deductive detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle published them, along with three new ones the girls had taken, in his book The Coming of the Fairies (1922), which endorsed them as proof of the existence of psychic phenomena. Many people doubted the photographs' authenticity, but no trickery could be proved. After more than 50 years, the first screen version of the story reached television. ‘Fairies’, a 1978 dramatization by Geoffrey Case for the BBC, treats the girls' claims sympathetically. However, in the 1980s both photographers admitted deceit: they had used hat‐pins and paper cut‐outs to fake the pictures. Fairytale: A True Story (USA, 1997) condenses the controversy into a wartime argument between Doyle the believer and pre‐eminent illusionist Harry Houdini, who remains sceptical. The film hints that the girls could have been hoaxers, but leaves the question open, preferring to end with an affirmation that, whether or not they can be photographed, fairies do exist for people who believe in them. In Photographing Fairies (UK, 1997), based on a novel, the Cottingley pictures are ridiculed by a professional photographer, Charles Castle, when Doyle presents them in a public lecture as hard evidence. Different fairy photos do, however, convince Castle. Investigating, he discovers that what is needed in order to see fairies is not faith but a special magic flower. When eaten, it induces a trance in which he sees fairies as sexual beings and then has a vision of making love to his late wife. Fully confident that he will be reunited with her not in death but in a different world, he happily submits to being hanged for a murder he did not commit.
Bibliography
- Cooper, Joe, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1990).
- Szilagyi, Steve, Photographing Fairies (1995).
— Terry Staples
