Sherlock Holmes’ Creator Supercharges the Cottingley Fairies Myth
In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became aware of the Cottingley Fairies photos. He was skeptical at first, and went to the trouble of asking Eastman Kodak for their opinion. However, before receiving a reply from the camera and film manufacturer, Doyle concluded on his own that the photos were real. Before long, Sherlock Holmes’ author was vouching for the photos’ authenticity, en route to becoming a huge advocate for the existence of fairies in real life. In December of 1920, Doyle published a cringe-worthy article urging the public to accept that fairies existed. The article opened him to significant ridicule from a press that was equal parts puzzled, and equal parts embarrassed for the respected author. However, the ridicule did not dissuade Doyle, who followed the first article with a second in 1921, describing even more fairy sightings.
The Fairy Story Gets Out of Hand
A year later, Doyle capped it off by publishing his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies. As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes’ creator should have been more skeptical. Decades later, in 1983, the cousins published an article in which they confessed that the whole thing had been a hoax. They had used illustrations from a contemporary popular children’s book, and simply drew wings on them. The girls had initially kicked off the prank in order to get back at adults who had teased them for “playing with fairies”. However, the joke snowballed, and eventually got out of hand once the Theosophical Society and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got involved. Once that happened, the girls could not think of a graceful way to back out, so they just kept the hoax going, until they finally came clean, six decades later.