The Coming of the Fairies (Extraordinary World)
by Arthur Conan Doyle Sir
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Book Summary Information
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle SirIntroduction: John M. Lynch
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-01
ISBN: 0803266553
Number of pages: 189
Publisher: Bison Books
Book Reviews of The Coming of the Fairies (Extraordinary World)
Book Review: A Fairy-Fellow's Master Stroke
Summary: 4 Stars
Back in print after over half a century due to the efforts of the University of Nebraska Press, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's curious The Coming of the Fairies (2006, originally 1922) examines the key events surrounding the Cottingley fairy photograph phenomenon that swept England in the early 1920s. Despite the unfortunate inclusion of one frivolous chapter, 'Observations Of A Clairvoyant,' which was written by "an anonymous seer," the book is an interesting, if not always credible, exploration of its highly unusual subject.
Today, the photographs--which were recently exhibited in New York City--typically elicit one of two polarized responses: bemused academics, scientists, and the rational 'average man' dismiss them out of hand as clear and obvious fakes, while some New Age adherents, who are perhaps also sentimentalists, tend to find at least some of the photographs convincingly authentic.
The text on this edition's back cover--and its perfunctory introduction by Arizona State University Professor John M. Lynch--make it abundantly clear where the University of Nebraska Press stands on the issue: fairies, are, of course, an impossibility, scientific or otherwise.
But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of master rationalist detective Sherlock Homes, was hardly so certain of their lack of reality himself. Though he qualifies his initial opinions at every turn, and stresses the objective evaluation the photographs received by a number of expert sources, including Kodak, even his early paragraphs fairly burst with unbridled enthusiasm and barely suppressed belief.
At the time that the photographs initially came to light, Conan Doyle was mourning the loss of a son who died in the Great War, which in turn led the author to an active investigation of Spiritualism. Proof of the existence of fairies was ultimately of secondary interest to him; what he desperately sought was proof of an afterlife, and hence, the continued existence of his son on another plane ("...and once fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance."). If Spiritualism offered largely intangible 'evidence' of the transmigration of the soul if it offered any at all, tangible evidence of fairies generally bolstered Conan Doyle's rapidly evolving belief in an unseen world.
To complicate matters, like the confusion surrounding the infamous debunking of the 'Surgeon's Photo' that purported to reveal the Loch Ness Monster (and the subsequent revelation that the 'truth' might have itself have been a hoax), at the end of their lives, the two photographers in question, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, openly admitted to an eager media that the photographs had been faked. But then Frances, who died first, waffled--by 'revealing' that only some of the photographs were faked, and nevertheless insisted, right up until her death in 1986, that she and her cousin had encountered, interacted with, and photographed fairies "at the beck" and near "the bottom of the garden" in 1917.
While most of the fairies in the photographs do unmistakably resemble two-dimensional paper cut-outs like those the girls would have found in their copy of 'Princess Mary's Gift Book' (1914), the photograph usually known as 'Elsie and the Gnome' is remarkable due to the fairly complex position in which the 'gnome' is standing (no such figure was featured in Princess Mary's Gift Book, and thus not obtainable from that source), as well as due to Elsie's weirdly elongated, almost deformed, right hand and fingers, which one party in the text explains by stating that the young lady merely had physically unusual hands (another oft-repeated theory is that Elsie was holding her left hand partially behind the right, which, thus positioned, appear as one long appendage).
The hazy 'fairy bower' photograph, which features multiple figures, including a very tiny 'elf' resembling Prince Valiant emerging from the bracken (and whose head is reflected in its own wing, proving that the figures could not be made of simple paper) also seems beyond the artistic and technical skills of two young girls almost completely unfamiliar with the rudimentary camera equipment of the era.
Certainly the photographs are open to interpretation: in observing the gnome figure, one party discusses its 'beard,' another its partially hidden 'pipes,' and yet another the hat pin which the party believes was utilized to support the cut-out. Readers may see all of these things or none of them; no mention is made of the gnome's pronounced Pinocchio-like nose, or its brimmed and conical cap, which resembles a traditional witch's hat.
The basis for two excellent films, 'Fairy Tale: A True Story' and the darker 'Photographing Fairies' (both 1997), The Coming of the Fairies ultimately raises more questions than it answers about skill, chance, credulity, psychology, fading cultural romanticism, the sociology of logic, and the nature and motivation of belief.
Those seeking books of greater substance on the same topic may also want to read Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth: Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (New York Review Books Classics) (reprinted 2007), William Butler Yeats' classic The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore (1893), Lady Gregory's outstanding Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), and Carole G. Silver's Strange & Secret Peoples: Fairies & Victorian Consciousness (2000).
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