In my fourth and final post on fairy mythology written to celebrate the publication of my novel The Good Neighbours, I want to take a look at one of the most famous fairy stories of the twentieth century. In the way it combines two of my greatest literary loves – the detective story and the mythological landscape of the British Isles – this tale has a feeling of strangeness about it that feels uncannily similar to that of The Good Neighbours itself, which makes it seem all the more fitting to have it round out this series of essays.  

In 1917, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths returned to England from South Africa, and went with her mother to stay with the family of her sixteen-year-old cousin, Elsie Wright, who lived in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford in Yorkshire. The two girls formed a close friendship, playing together for hours in the woodlands adjoining their home. When their mothers expressed displeasure at the grubby state of their clothing after such escapades, the girls insisted they had only been tracking the fairies that liked to frolic and dance on the banks of the quiet stream that flowed beneath the trees.

To offer proof of their story, Elsie and Frances borrowed a camera belonging to Elsie’s father Arthur – who was interested enough in photography to have constructed his own darkroom – and promised to return with evidence of what they had seen. They produced two photographs– one of Frances gazing enraptured at a group of dancing fairies, the other of Elsie seemingly in conversation with a diminutive winged figure in the grass in front of her. Arthur Wright dismissed the photographs as a childish prank, though Elsie’s mother Polly was less quick to jump to conclusions. In 1919, she took the photographs along to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in nearby Bradford. The speaker was so captivated by the images he asked and received Polly’s permission to display them at the Society’s annual conference in Harrogate, which is where the famous Cottingley Fairies first came to public attention.

In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a longstanding interest in spiritualism and occult phenomena, heard about the photographs from the editor of the spiritualist journal Light, and decided to make them the subject of an article he was writing on the fairy world for Strand Magazine. Doyle contacted Edward Gardner, one of the leading voices in the theosophist movement, to find out more about the background to the images and to gain an introduction to the Wright family. He arranged a meeting with Elsie and Frances, at which he questioned them in detail about their experiences. He also gave each of them a camera, in the hope that they would capture further images. They soon came back with three more photographs. Doyle saw the appearance of this new evidence as groundbreaking, proof of another world, existing just a hair’s breadth from our own. 

 As the photographs gained wider attention, the girls began to feel uncomfortable with their fame. Anyone who has ever been in the unfortunate position of having started a rumour that blows up into something vastly grander and more far-reaching than ever intended can well imagine their feelings of helplessness and embarrassment as eminent men of science and philosophy did battle over the authenticity – or otherwise – of the plates and what they depicted. It was many decades before Frances and Elsie felt able to give an honest account of how the photographs had been created. Much as Elsie’s father Arthur had suspected all along, the figures had been traced from images of dancing girls in a popular children’s book. Elsie, a gifted artist, had added the wings. The way in which the two girls captured the images – using pins as props to hold the fairies in place – was a skilful and ingenious contrivance in its own right. The more time went on, the more impossible it seemed for them to come clean. ‘Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle,’ Elsie says in a TV interview towards the end of her life. ‘Well, we could only keep quiet.’

Conan Doyle’s obsession with the Cottingley Fairies would seem to be the ultimate contradiction, the ultimate face-off between fact and fiction: a man of science, not to mention the creator of the world’s most famous detective, bewitched by a couple of children and some cardboard cut-outs? In fact, Doyle was more sceptic than proselytiser, and for me his interest in the photographs is indicative of his intellectual curiosity in general, the product of a lively mind that never stopped asking questions about the world, nor presumed to have all the answers.

 In his investigation of paranormal phenomena, Doyle takes nothing on trust. His approach might even be called scientific, a weighing up of evidence; he does not believe something to be true so much as conclude that it must be. In The Coming of the Fairies, the book he wrote about the story of his involvement with the Cottingley case, Doyle posits the possibility – not so different from the ideas expressed in many subsequent science fiction or ghost stories – that there might be different ‘wavelengths’ of reality, with our own human existence occurring on a relatively limited plane. Seeing ghosts, fairies or even making contact with the spirits of the dead would not be a matter of faith, but of ‘switching up’, training one’s mind and body to apprehend sound, motion and corporeal manifestation occurring on hitherto invisible planes adjacent to our own.    

‘If the objects are indeed there, and the inventive power of the human brain is turned upon the problem, it is likely that some kind of psychic spectacles, inconceivable to us at the moment, will be invented, and that we will all be able to adapt ourselves to the new conditions,’ Doyle writes, imagining a world in which anyone armed with the right technical equipment would be able to apprehend psychic phenomena with the ease of a biologist looking down a microscope at a single-celled amoeba.

It is so easy for us now to look at the Cottingley photographs and wonder how anyone could have entertained the idea that they were real. To a modern eye, the contrast between the three-dimensional reality of the girls and the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts appears laughably obvious. There is also the fact that the ‘fairies’ as pictured conform so exactly to picturebook stereotypes: lithe, winsome figures in scanty clothing with transparent wings, they are precisely the kind of delicately beautiful fairy folk any imaginative child might long to see. But fast-forward a hundred years, and are we not precisely as open to being deceived?

When any simple online search will reveal dozens of constructed images or fake video clips that purport to be the truth but are anything but, we have a duty to ask questions about our continuing appetite for the unbelievable. We live in a media landscape where image fakery has become so sophisticated it is possibly only a matter of time before someone perpetrates an updated version of the Cottingley hoax, an act of digital subterfuge that would doubtless garner more attention and followers than Frances’s and Elsie’s five sweet photographs ever did. It is important to remember that the Cottingley Fairies were not a fraud or a hoax in the accepted sense of the word; Elsie and Frances never intended to hurt or make fools of anyone, indeed they never expected their images to be seen outside their own family. They were simply creating art, a harmless piece of trompe l’oeil. The same could not be said of the multitudinous acts of online larceny taking place in our digital underground, even as we speak.

As a postscript to the Cottingley story, in a 2009 episode of the long-running BBC series Antiques Roadshow filmed in Bridlington, Paul Atterbury can be seen interviewing Frances’s daughter, Christine Lynch, who has brought along her original prints of the Cottingley photographs, together with the box camera given to Frances by Conan Doyle. Atterbury talks about the intellectual climate of the 1920s, when spiritualism was experiencing a revival, largely due to the massive loss of life in World War One. As the case of Conan Doyle himself demonstrates, there were many, up to and including the most highly educated and erudite individuals, who remained stalwart believers in spiritual and other occult phenomena. Atterbury reminds us that the camera then was seen as a scientific instrument, incapable of lying. Photographs were still viewed as objects of wonderment and contemplation, and to imagine them being anything other than a factual representation of whatever was before the lens as the shutter descended was beyond imagining.   

What I find especially magical about the Cottingley affair even today is the fact that right up to the end of her life, Frances insisted the fifth and final photograph was genuine, that it showed real fairies. When Atterbury asks Christine Lynch if she stands by her mother’s pronouncement, Christine hesitates for just a second before replying: ‘I do, yes’. It is a beautiful moment, an expression of faith and hope that lives on down the ages, revealing, as do the photographs themselves, the enduring power of stories and the myths that give life and richness to our time in the world.   

FURTHER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:

The Coming of the Fairies by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A full account from Conan Doyle of his investigation into the Cottingley photographs and his own conclusions. The wealth of contemporary detail makes this book indispensible. A detective story in its own right, it’s as compelling as any episode in the life of Doyle’s most famous creation and all the more so for being real.

Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies by Frances Mary Griffiths. Frances’s own memoir about her lifelong association with the story. This book is ridiculously scarce at present, and thus ridiculously expensive. I for one am hoping that a new edition will appear at some point to bring it within the reach of ordinary mortals.

Fairy Tale: a true story. 1997 film by Charles Sturridge that loosely retells the story of the Cottingley Fairies starring Bill Nighy, Harvey Keitel and Peter O’Toole. This is a delightful family film that hints at the truth behind the photographs without ever entirely spoiling the story for a younger audience. The facts are bent a little, especially with respect to the girls’ family circumstances, but so long as you go in prepared to enjoy yourself you almost certainly will.

Photographing Fairies. Also out in 1997 (make of that what you will) is this excellent movie starring Toby Stephens, Edward Hardwicke and Frances Barber. The film’s director Nick Willing is the son of artists Paula Rego and Victor Willing, and those expecting something special from this, his first full-length feature, will find all those hopes fulfilled. Adapted from a 1992 novel of the same name by Steve Szilagyi the film strays further from the true events of the story but offers much more in the way of ambiguity, darkness and adult sexuality. I first saw the movie not long after it came out and it instantly became a favourite. Criminally, it is currently unavailable on DVD, but there are second-hand copies floating about. If you are at all interested in out-of-the-way movies of the British weird this is well worth hunting down.

Fairy painting has existed for as long as fairy mythology, though as a genre it has come to be associated with its first great flowering in Victorian England. Various theories have been put forward as to why Victorian artists – and the Victorian public – showed such a fervent interest in the depiction of alien realms. Some suggest the fashion was tied up in the resurgence of enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and the consequent popularity of such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which fairies and the fairy world feature as salient characters. Others have seen the phenomenon as a form of escapism born out of the seismic social and environmental changes of the Victorian age. With rapidly increasing industrialisation and the growth of the suburbs, both artists and art lovers experienced a yearning for scenes and subjects that featured the natural world. The spiritual, mystical aspect of fairy paintings in some sense symbolised the innocence people felt they were losing, for some even seeming to act as a conduit between the living and the dead. There is also the possibility that fairy painting was seen by more forward-thinking Victorians as a way of beating the censor. Many of the bucolic scenes that form the bedrock of the genre reveal more than a tantalising glimpse of naked flesh, and are characterised by an openness about sexuality and physical attraction that would have been scandalous if the characters featured had not been fairies.  

For this reason alone, it is no surprise that the artists of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, with their progressive approach to relationships and unconventional modes of living, showed a notable enthusiasm for fairy subjects. There were other artists who made a career specialism of fairy art, including Richard Doyle and his brother Charles, John Anster Fitzgerald, Joseph Noel Paton and most famously Arthur Rackham. Their paintings were characterised above all by jewel colours, translucent tonal effects and an intense focus on tiny details.

This delicacy of approach and emphasis on fairy-tale-like beauty has recently been taken up by the ‘new wave’ of immensely skilled and deeply imaginative fairy painters including Brian Froud, Terri Windling and Anne Sudworth. But perhaps the best known – and least understood – of all fairy painters is Richard Dadd, a nineteenth century artist who started his career as a prodigiously talented painter in the Victorian tradition and ended it in the asylum, painting scenes and subjects that owed more to the disturbed and ultimately unknowable landscape of his inner world than the pastoral idylls that form a defining feature of the genre as a whole.  

Dadd is usually described as an outsider artist, a term that is often applied to those with no formal training and who have sometimes also suffered damage to their mental health. I’m not a big fan of the label, which is often used more as a form of gatekeeping – a way of subtly indicating who is and who is not worthy of being described as an artist, who is important enough to be classed alongside ‘real’ artists who studied at art school and know their way around the industry – than as a genuine attempt to engage with the characteristics and unique insights of art like Dadd’s. In the case of Dadd, it also erases the fact that he started out very much as an insider, admitted to the Royal Academy of Art at just twenty years of age. His talent was outstanding, and led directly to him being offered the commission that would alter his life forever.

In 1842, the gentleman traveller and former mayor of Newport Sir Thomas Phillips engaged Dadd as the official artist on an expedition he was planning to make through the nations of the southern Mediterranean and the Middle East, culminating in a voyage up the Nile amidst the wonders of Ancient Egypt. Dadd was in a fever of enthusiasm for the enterprise – his early paintings focus very much on re-imaginings of the ancient world, and in spite of his delicate constitution, the promise of seeing these scenes and places for himself was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he could not forgo. Friends and witnesses say he worked in a kind of delirium, often remaining outside for hours in the boiling sun, in spite of being warned of the dangers, especially for a Westerner unaccustomed to the climate. He was encouraged to rest, to eat properly, But Dadd worked on.

And not even those closest to him fully realised how deeply he was being affected by the sights he saw. The multitudes of people, the unfamiliar customs, the poverty, the glaring new colours, the overabundance of detail and sensation were working a profound and cataclysmic change in the artist. At first, Sir Thomas and other friends of Dadd attributed the painter’s increasingly strange and violent behaviour to an attack of sunstroke. He was shipped home to England, where his father Robert accompanied him to Cobham, a quiet Kentish village that, his father believed, would be the perfect environment for his son’s recuperation.

Tragically, it was not to be. In August 1843, Dadd fatally stabbed his beloved father in a public park, having become convinced that Robert was the devil. After a brief time on the run, Dadd was apprehended, declared to be of unsound mind, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Bethlem (later Broadmoor) hospital for the criminally insane. His doctors encouraged him to keep on with his art, and his greatest work, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, was painted in the asylum. He was judged in many ways to be the model patient, retaining much of the friendliness and enthusiasm for life of his younger years. He never did lose his paranoid convictions, however, believing to the end of this days that he was the servant of the Egyptian god Osiris, sent to do his bidding here on Earth. Contemporary psychiatrists and neuroscientists who have studied Dadd’s case have mostly concluded that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, a genetic inheritance that also affected other members of his family.       

My own fascination with the life and work of Richard Dadd began with a postcard reproduction of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke my mother had purchased on a visit to the Tate Gallery in London, where the original painting is kept. The postcard is not the ideal format for a painting as intricately detailed as the Fairy Feller, but still I was captivated. I already had a bit of a thing for fairy art, but Dadd’s approach was different from any I had previously encountered. His colours are understated, the dour greys and greens of a winter in the country. His fairies are unfriendly-looking and almost threatening. More even than that, they seem completely immersed in their own world, their own private business; looking in on them feels like a dangerous act of trespass.

A number of years later, and I was finally able to see the real painting, on display at the Tate. I was struck once again by its resistance to human scrutiny, the profusion of detail. Seeing the painting in the flesh also helped to make plain the hours and years of work Dadd had lavished upon his masterpiece. In contrast with the minute brush strokes and refined surfaces that characterise much of Victorian fairy painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is densely clogged and heavily textured, paint upon paint upon paint, as if to reflect the agony Dadd suffered in attempting to convey a vision so personal and so traumatic he could never escape its hold on him.

Dadd laboured for ten years, and still chose to leave the painting unfinished. Amidst the jostling figures, the tangled undergrowth there are scattered patches of canvas that remain bare of markings. That one of these lacunae is the fairy feller’s axe? We can read into that what we will. What must be plain to any viewer is the sense of enchantment, of time forever stilled that rises up from this painting. Dadd could not bear to let his vision go. In this sense at least, he is still with us.

Almost from the moment I published my first story, I knew in my gut that at some point I would attempt to say something about Richard Dadd, to try and tell his story in a way that felt appropriate to his legacy. Dadd has left us with much to think about: the nature of genius, the traumatic fallout of mental illness, the sometimes fatal difficulty of trying to exist in a world that cannot tolerate difference. When I first began writing The Good Neighbours, I did not know that Richard Dadd would finally be making his appearance in the pages of my fiction. Which is not to say I was surprised when he chose to show up. Even today, information on Richard Dadd is scarce, and leaves many gaps, not least in relation to other members of his family. I feel certain there is more of his story to be uncovered. In the meantime, we have his paintings, and I can only hope that catching glimpses of them in The Good Neighbours will encourage more people to seek them out.    

FURTHER READING:

Victorian Fairy Painting edited by Jane Martineau. A catalogue that was produced to accompany a 1997 exhibition at the Royal Academy, this lavishly illustrated book includes essays and a wealth of supplementary information from experts in the field. If you are into fairy art, this is a must-have!

Richard Dadd: the artist and the asylum by Nicholas Tromans. This is the most comprehensive biographical work on Dadd to date. Here you will find images of many of his most important paintings, including a series of enlarged plates that reveal The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke in full and extravagant detail.

Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie. An experimental novel that attempts to convey Dadd’s genius and breakdown through a series of poetic vignettes. Higgie is an art critic and editor and her approach to Dadd is powerfully felt. This is an essential work in the Dadd bibliography and deserves to be better known.   

Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Angela Carter. Written in 1985 as a play for radio, Come Unto These Yellow Sands attempts to conjure the world of Richard Dadd by bringing his own fantastical creations verbally to life. I was lucky enough to catch a rare broadcast of this small masterpiece on Radio 3 in 2018, while I was still deeply engaged in the writing of The Good Neighbours. To my mind it comes closer than anything previously attempted in conveying both Dadd’s heightened state of consciousness and his tragic collapse. I wish the BBC would make this work of Carter’s permanently available. Luckily the full script is included in the anthology of Carter’s plays The Curious Room.