Two English Girls Photographed Fairies in 1918
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: History, Creative Non Fiction, Feminism, Magic, Women

There are scholarly papers and books on the Cottingley fairies

It’s an unexpectedly magical world of narrative options, cultural tensions, and striking possibilities. The popular media, interestingly, had been useless in getting to facts.

The first investigator to open up the case was an occult researcher with an unusual knowledge of children’s books. In a 1978 book, Fred Gettings noted that a children’s coloring book from 1914 had ‘fairies’ like those in Alice and the Fairies.

Elsie’s son read the Gettings book, and confronted her with her apparent lies. After a half-century, she confessed she had drawn the fairies. She thought she had done well. She’d been to art school, after all.

Elsie added:

“If people wish to believe in fairies, there is no harm done. And if people wish to think of us as a couple of practical jokers, or two solemn faced Yorkshire comedians that’s alright too. But the word liar is a rough word for a true or untrue fairy story.”

She’d recall the fairies were said to have ‘moved’. That was true, but it was ordinary magic. A windy day.

The focus was kept on Elsie and Frances as hoaxers

But for scholars, the behavior of the Theosophists invited more scrutiny.

Geoffrey Hodson, the ‘clairvoyant’, had seemed to the girls a complete buffoon. Elsie and Frances had only to make some claim about fairies, and Hodson would add in details about the fairies he was psychically viewing—oddly emphasizing they were ‘nude’.

Had he really seen magical beings? An alternate reading began to emerge.

When Edward Gardner died in 1969, he’d left his papers with his son — with instructions that they not be shown to anyone. Years later, the son relented, as scholars studied the rotting documents of the Cottingley episode.

Gardner had consulted two photography experts. Harold Snelling told him the photos were real. The other expert said they were staged.

Gardner went with the ‘expert’ he liked better

Then the original, overexposed print which became Alice and the Fairies was located. Snelling, it was discovered, had done extensive retouching.

The scholar Nicola Bown, in a 2001 study, details the changes:

“Snelling reduced the size of Frances’s head by 10 per cent and touched up the fairies; he then re-photographed the whole thing, producing an entirely new negative which has since been used instead of the original. These processes disguise the original composition by making the fairies the focal point.”

Gardner had purchased the copyright from Elsie’s father — who wished to have little to do with the matter. Postcards of the retouched image were mass-produced.

They were expensive

As Gardner and Doyle were out on their lecture tours, talking up the fairy photos, writing books about them, they were selling prints all along the way.

The earnings were split between Snelling, Gardner, and Doyle — with Doyle revealed to be making the “lion’s share.”

The famous Arthur Conan Doyle had been out talking up the “epoch-making” photographs — while selling a product from which he was profiting? As the historian Alex Owen tracks in a 1994 paper:

“This was the secret and stark reality of Cottingley as a business transaction, the details of which were not published.”

Owen adds: “The price of enchantment…is invariably disenchantment.”

Other photos of girls among ‘fairies’ surfaced

In a 2017 study, The Secret of the Cottingley Fairies, F.R. Maher found two photos of girls from 1918 who seemed to have the same idea: a photoshoot with fairies. One appeared in a London magazine.

A new possibility? Elsie and Frances had been participating in a fad.