Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. The Coming of the Fairies was possibly a bigger disappointment for Doyle fans than when he killed off Sherlock Holmes. Doyle championed the photographs, and in the process destroyed his reputation which is probably why this book, out of all of the Doyle corpus, has rarely been put into print until now. Public reaction was mixed some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |