Flower Fairies, Photographic Hoaxes, and the Post-War Imagination

In 1920, photographs of the Cottingley fairies took the world by storm as "evidence" of an eternal, elfin realm. But the image of the flower fairy was a more modern creation.

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The first of five fairy photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths (above). This image was captured in 1917. Via the BBC.

In December 1920, readers across the United Kingdom and around the world were shocked by an article published in The Strand Magazine. The front cover screamed a sensational headline: “FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED / AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE.”

Arthur Conan Doyle… as in, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series?

If this comes as a surprise to you, dear reader, then I will direct you to an essay I published in November of last year about the many lives of the beloved mystery writer. Doyle was not just a writer. He was a doctor, a botanist, political activist, world-traveler—and, crucial to our purposes, a leading member of the Spiritualist movement.

Spiritualists believed in life after death, including the soul’s continual evolution after one’s passing, and that skilled mediums could contact the dead through séances. Though it may seem contradictory, the Spiritualists endeavored to document evidence of spiritual phenomena, as a new wave of biologists collected evidence in support of the theory of evolution. (Leading evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace was himself a Spiritualist.)¹

To Doyle’s enormous delight, he now possessed the evidence that would surely persuade his peers—photographs of actual fairies, documented by two young girls in the town of Cottingley.

The second photograph taken in 1917, which shows Elsie Wright with a male fairy. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It all started in the summer of 1917. As the Great War tore apart millions of lives, as a generation of British men were wiped out to the tune of 880,000 soldiers lost, two English girls made a “discovery” that would prove incredibly enticing for a battle-hardened public.

Frances Griffiths was only nine years old, and she and her mother had moved to England from South Africa that year. They were living with Frances’s aunt Polly Wright, her husband, and their sixteen-year-old daughter Elsie. At the bottom of the Wright family’s garden was a little stream, in which Elsie and Frances loved to pass the long summer days. Incensed by her daughter’s perpetually-damp shoes, Frances’s mother demanded to know why she insisted on playing in the stream. “I go to see the fairies,” was Frances’s reply.²