The Doyle Family Obsession: A Fairy Tale
The Doyle Family Obsession: A Fairy Tale is an article written by Barbara Rusch published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 9, june 1999).
This article reflects on Arthur Conan Doyle's belief in the Cottingley fairies and contrasts it with Sherlock Holmes's method of evidence and deduction. It suggests that Conan Doyle's emotional and spiritual commitments led him to accept weak evidence and raises possible personal motives behind his fascination with the supernatural.
The Doyle Family Obsession: A Fairy Tale
Charles Doyle's self-portrait unleashed his demons.
Dicky Doyle's mischievous wood elves, reminiscent of Cox Brownies watch and beset a young lady strolling through the woods.
Dicky Doyle's Triumphal March of the Elf King reveals the fairies in all their splendour.
Once upon a time on a bright, sunny afternoon in July of 1917, seventeen-year-old Elsie Wright borrowed her father's camera and together with her cousin, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths, strolled down to the bottom of her garden. When the two girls emerged, their lives, the lives of their families, of the inhabitants of their little Yorkshire village of Cottingley, of thousands of people all over the world who had never even met the girls, as well as numerous so-called experts in the field of Spiritualism and psychic research, would be changed forever. As would the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, it was to be the first chapter of a mystery story that even the creator of Sherlock Holmes would never solve, and one that would puzzle the world for the next sixty-four years.
To understand these perplexing and beguiling events in Conan Doyle's life, it is important to place them in their proper cultural, historical and socio-economic context. The Victorians' obsession with the paranormal, and with fairies in particular, manifested itself in the literature, art and popular culture of the day, and the Doyle family — Arthur, his father Charles Altamont, and his uncle Dicky — all played a crucial rôle in this enchanting fixation.
The nineteenth century was one of great change and social upheaval. By the 1870s much of the formerly rural and agricultural population had migrated from the wholesome air of the English countryside to the fetid, cholera-infested atmosphere of the urban centres, notably London and Manchester, whose factories offered the promise of a better life. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution witnessed more than simply a shift in demographics; it was a paradigm shift on a grand scale.
To those searching for a more secure future, the new technology became a kind of religion, replacing the dogma of the purse-lipped arbiters of Victorian morality. Just as conventional religion promotes an ethical code, the religion of industry advanced a new social order, one dedicated to the changing values of the new middle class. Whereas the church steeple once dominated the landscape in the pre-industrialized image of the rural community, now smokestacks and factories, the newly erected cathedrals of commerce, became the focal points, icons in the pictorial representations of the urban scene.
In many cases, of course, the move to the cities did not result in increased prosperity Optimism quickly turned to despair as tens of thousands huddled into the grinding poverty afforded by the slums of London's East End, like its notorious Whitechapel district, home to the victims of the predatory Jack the Ripper. Technology had not proved to be the new religion sent to alleviate man's suffering, but rather a dangerous cult. a false god to be distrusted and feared. And yet, amidst all this grim despair. the Victorians still searched for a spiritual touchstone. a sign of hope that earthly cares could be eliminated in some mystical nether-world. It was a magical moment in time when cynicism intersected with a child-like wonder. The stage was set for the 'coming of the fairies'.
And suddenly they were everywhere, from revivals of Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream and J. M. Barrie's Tinkerbell in his classic Peter Pan, to the tales of the brothers Grimm, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book. They infiltrated every aspect of popular culture, from household products to advertising art, and an entire genre of painting was born which took as its theme the world of fairies. As much as they enchanted, fairies also offered hope to the disillusioned for a life enjoyed once again amongst the sparkling streams, green meadows and pristine forests of an earlier time.
In the dwindling days of this millennium we are in some ways reliving the Victorian experience in which the technological and the mythological have again collided. Once more we find ourselves in an age of cynicism, slaves to a new technology in which the computer has altered our lives as irrevocably as the Industrial Revolution transformed the physical and emotional landscape of our forebears. Traditional religion seems increasingly irrelevant as we point and click our way to self-imposed isolation and spiritual bankruptcy. Though we have become too sophisticated to believe in fairies, our craving for a belief system centred around a supernatural life force has given renewed credence to the concept of guardian angels hovering over us and protecting us from harm. If the Victorians were to have looked down, they might just have been able to discern tiny winged creatures, spritely elves and gnomes in the tall grass and beside the babbling brook, whereas we only have to raise our eyes heavenward to make out the space ships of grotesque-looking extra-terrestrials.
Our ancestors of a century ago possessed a great fear of the unknown, best represented by the new technology. They reacted by creating an entire universe inhabited by tiny creatures that frolicked and cavorted just out of sight of the humans who toiled and suffered just overhead. And yet. for all their charm, there persists an unsettling element of madness, a hallucinatory quality, and a faintly sinister eroticism in the Victorian fairy paintings, and nowhere is this better expressed than in the works of Charles Altamont Doyle. Sir Arthur's father.
Charles was born in 1832 into a strictly Catholic family whose members possessed remarkable artistic talents. His father, John, was a celebrated political caricaturist of the Regency period who signed his work 'HB'. His mother was Marianna Conan, the sister of Michael Conan, an artist, critic and journalist. His elder brother. Richard, known as 'Dicky', acquired a considerable reputation as an illustrator. Three other brothers were also serious artists, though one died at an early age. (1) In 1849, when he was 17. Charles was sent from London to Edinburgh to take up a post as assistant to the surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works, a somewhat tedious position which nonetheless required the skills of an architect, draftsman and builder. However, there is some evidence that his career was not entirely fulfilling, and his large family languished in genteel poverty.
It also seems that Charles Doyle suffered from headaches and was subject to bouts of depression. From 1879 until his death in 1893 he was confined to a series of mental institutions. The reason was unclear until research in the 1970s revealed that Charles had actually suffered from epilepsy and alcoholism. However, his circumstances did little to diminish his great artistic talents, though his paintings may well have been affected by his somewhat altered state of mind. He appears to have been preoccupied with death, undoubtedly brought on by his strict Catholic upbringing, his morbid thoughts, neuroses and depressions, together with the conditions in which he found himself. In one self-portrait, entitled Well Met, he greets the Grim Reaper with the words 'I do believe that to a Catholic there is Nothing so sweet in life as leaving it.'
It is hardly surprising, then, that Charles was not a particularly hands-on father, and from all accounts was an absent-minded sort of man who frequently fell into dream-like states. John Dickson Carr in his biography of Arthur Conan Doyle describes Charles as an indifferent sort of husband and father To his family he was becoming a dreamy, long-bearded stranger, with exquisite manners and an unbrushed top-hat', (2) who in this period was becoming increasingly alienated from his family and from reality in general. He is somewhat reminiscent of Henry Baker in the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Blue Carbuncle', whose character and circumstances Holmes deduces from the disreputable state of his hat, though he has never laid eyes on the fellow:
- 'That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him. He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect. He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged and has grizzled hair.'
Is this not a striking portrait of Charles Doyle, who died one year after this story was first published and whom Arthur had already forgiven for many of those very sins?
Whatever his true opinion of his father, Arthur treated him during his lifetime with something less than an outpouring of affection and compassion, abandoning him somewhat to his fate. This may have been a natural reaction from a son who in many ways had been abandoned himself, forced to shoulder more than his share of family responsibilities while working his way through medical school. But his attitude seemed to soften, and before Sidney Paget arrived on the scene, Charles contributed six pen-and-ink drawings to Arthur's first Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet. It has been pointed out that at that early stage in his career the great detective bore a remarkable resemblance to the father of his creator. Arthur may have paid further tribute to Charles in the Sherlock Holmes story 'His Last Bow', when the great detective assumes the persona of Altamont, an Irish-American agent who penetrates a dangerous German spy ring at the outset of the first World War. How telling that Conan Doyle's celebrated hero takes his father's name in a tale in which the fate of the entire western world may depend upon Holmes's success.
Be that as it may, Charles soon left the drawing of consulting detectives behind and concentrated his talents on the depiction of fairies, flora and fauna, for which he had a decided talent. Given his artistic obsession with fairies, it is not inconceivable that he truly believed in them. On one of his sketches of a 'cat-girl' he scribbled the words, I have known just such a creature'. It is also probable that he had a fear of birds, which, in addition to other small woodland creatures, assume a somewhat threatening attitude in many of Doyle's paintings. In the film FairyTale: A True Story, a fictionalized account of Conan Doyle's brush with the fairies, with Peter O'Toole in the rôle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there is a scene which recreates almost exactly Charles's sketch of a delicate fairy posing alongside a huge, menacing-looking black bird.
Charles Altamont Doyle's paintings of elves and fairies amply reflect the dual nature of his personality. On the one hand they possess a dreaminess, a charm and a playful wit that characterize the gentleman who was once described by his son with the words. 'He had a charm of manner and a courtesy of bearing which I have seldom seen equalled'. (3) But on occasion his fairy paintings reveal a hallucinatory element and a dark eroticism that betray an unbalanced mind. Here we witness the demons that plagued him, his own private. Saucy Jack ripping at the delicate fabric of his psyche. the self-destructive urges brought on by financial difficulties and professional mediocrity, by what he perceived as a failure to live up to the creative genius for which his family was so renowned, and the guilt and shame over his alcoholism and epilepsy. Whatever the reasons, his fairies possess a child-like quality and often appear vulnerable and fragile, caught up by forces beyond their control, as was Doyle himself. A cogent argument for asserting that the fairies are indeed us, tiny sprites menaced on all sides, full of strange forebodings, yet yearning for a kind of emotional liberation and a oneness with nature. If Doyle's sketchbooks created at 'Sunnyside' (his euphemism for the mental asylum in which he was detained) are his fantasy world, they are also his worst nightmares in watercolours and pen-and-ink. A prime example is his intensely revealing and introspective self-portrait. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile noting that his best and most compelling work, like that of Richard Dadd, was produced during his asylum days.
The art of Charles Altamont Doyle would have gone largely unnoticed and unappreciated had not his son Arthur, who always considered his father the greatest artist in the family (George Bernard Shaw tended to agree), in 1924 organized a London exhibition of some fifty of his works. In his autobiography. Memories and Adventures, Sir Arthur observed: 'His work had a peculiar style of its own, mitigated by great natural humour ... His originality is best shown by the fact that one hardly knows with whom to compare him.'
If the life of Charles Doyle's brother, Richard, commonly known as 'Dicky', was less complex, less fraught with drama and emotion. his paintings are no less so. Much of his work depicts the same feverish visions and dreamlike world of the supernatural which inhabits Charles's art, though he has been described as one of the more prolific and consistently attractive of all the fairy painters. Born in 1824, he showed remarkable early skill as a draughtsman and by the 1840s had already acquired a considerable reputation as an illustrator, notably for Punch, whose best-known title page, in use well into the twentieth century, was evidence of Dicky's skill. In 1846 he made some of his first fairyland illustrations for The Fairy Ring, a new translation from the brothers Grimm, and in 1851 illustrated John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River. His genius for fantasy art culminated in his masterpiece, In Fairyland, published in 1870, whose success marked the end of the Golden Age of fairy painting.
Some of Dicky Doyle's works are very large and teem with hundreds of fairies. The branches of his Fairy Tree support more than 200 of the charming, if slightly weird-looking creatures. He appears to have had a fascination for exaggeratedly long moustaschios, as in his painting of the Elf King, and one might well wonder if Arthur Conan Doyle's own luxuriant growth was yet another instance of some atavistic family obsession. His playful caricatures and cartoon-like elfin figures, reminiscent of Cox Brownies, give Dicky Doyle's paintings, like those of his brother Charles, a child-like, whimsical quality and are spared the intensely macabre and mythological overtones of such fairy painters as Daniel Maclise. His sprites are consistently engaging and are usually up to some mischief or other. whether on parade, lining the branches of a tree, or spying on innocent maidens. (4)
Dicky Doyle was described in the catalogue of his 1983 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum as an artist-wizard who could sweep his pen across the page and fill it with fantasies'. (5) Following his death from apoplexy in 1883. he was eloquently eulogized in The Dictionary of National Biography: 'He left behind him the memory of a singularly sweet and noble type of English gentleman, and of an artist of "most excellent fancy" — the kindliest of pictorial satirists. the most sportive and frolicsome of designers, the most graceful and sympathetic of limners of fairyland. In Oberon's Court he would at once have been appointed sergeant-painter. (6)
And now we return to our fairy tale. When we left Elsie and Frances, they had just returned, camera in hand, from Cottingley Beck, the little stream that ran through the bottom of their garden. What happened next would amaze the world and leave it guessing for the next sixty years. When Elsie's father developed the photographs. two startling images emerged. One was of Frances surrounded by winged fairies, the other of Elsie cavorting with a small gnome. Though Arthur Wright, Elsie's father, was sceptical, especially of the second picture in which Elsie's hand appears curiously elongated, the girls insisted that the photographs were genuine, and that they had often seen fairies at the bottom of their garden.
The matter might have gone unnoticed, had not the mothers of the girls, who were totally convinced of their daughters sincerity, become involved in Theosophy, the study of the mystical and the paranormal. Their confirmation of Elsie and Frances's claims of authentic photographs of fairies (a not unheard — of concept even in 1917) attracted the attention of Edward Gardner of the Theosophical Society and well-known lecturer on the occult. He in turn wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle, who by then was devoting much of his time to the study and promotion of Spiritualism, and was in fact at that very moment planning to write an article on the subject of fairies in the 1920 Christmas issue of The Strand magazine, in which so many of his hugely popular Sherlock Holmes stories had appeared. Conan Doyle's critical faculties, which had made him so celebrated as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, were initially awakened to the possibility of fraud. In one postcard to Gardner he wrote, 'The more I think of it the less I like it'. (7) Nevertheless, he was decidedly intrigued and wrote to Arthur Wright, Elsie's father. Unfortunately, he was just about to embark on a tour of Australia, where he was to speak on the subject of Spiritualism, and consequently had little time to personally investigate the girls' claims. Instead, he instructed Gardner to travel to Cottingley to check out the story.
Edward Gardner was no Sherlock Holmes and his anxiety to have the photographs authenticated made him something less than an unbiased observer. A photograph he had taken of himself on the spot where the girls claimed to have taken the other two was pretty much all the evidence he needed to establish their veracity. However, his was not the only uncritical voice. Three additional photographs taken by the girls had been pronounced genuine by other so-called experts in spirit photography. Their corroboration was all the impetus Conan Doyle needed to endorse the girls' claims full throttle. Two articles were subsequently published in The Strand in which he cites the evidence of others to corroborate the authenticity of the photographs, even claiming that his own children had themselves experienced fairies. 'My younger family consists of two little boys and one small girl, very truthful children, each of whom tells with detail the exact circumstances and appearance of the creature. To each it happened only once, and in each case it was a single little figure, twice in the garden, and once in the nursery.' (8)
In the articles Conan Doyle explains the reasons for involving himself in the case of the Cottingley fairies, and indeed, for his single-minded dedication to the Spiritualist cause. 'The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life. Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been so convincingly put before it.' (9) Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that the untimely death of Conan Doyle's son during World War I might have provided added incentive in his desperate quest for verification of life beyond the grave.
In the articles Conan Doyle poses as a sleuth while sounding suspiciously like a romantic idealist. 'I will now make a few comments upon the two pictures, which I have studied long and earnestly with a high-power lens ... there is an ornamental rim to the pipe of the elves which shows that the graces of art are not unknown among them. And what joy in their complete abandon of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance! They may have their shadows and trials as we have, but at least there is great gladness manifest in the demonstration of their life.' (10)
The articles opened a floodgate of criticism and disbelief. How could the creator of Sherlock Holmes, described by Dr. Watson as an automaton a calculating machine' devoid of sentiment and arbitrary emotion, endorse a concept so unsubstantiated, so airy-fairy, as fairies? Indeed, he appeared to have thoroughly abandoned his critical faculties to embrace a world of make-believe. The implications were astounding. This was, after all, the author whose most famous character, when offered compelling evidence of the supernatural in 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire', emphatically proclaims: 'Watson, this agency stands flat-footed upon the ground. No ghosts need apply. How does such empirical thinking reconcile itself to the unanswered questions of the fairy photographs-Elsie's elongated hand, for instance, and the fact of her obsession with fairies from an early age, manifested in her own winsome fairy paintings?
Even as he was endorsing the photographs, Conan Doyle had doubts and questions that were that were never satisfactorily answered. Troubled by a suspicious dot in the centre of the gnome picture, he explained it away as evidence of a fairy navel, proof that fairies. reproduce in the same manner as humans. Thus the creator of the world's greatest consulting detective, who warned, 'It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts', was guilty of intentionally discarding those very methods of detection which he had himself devised. If Holmes had a credo, it was, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Surely Conan Doyle was far from eliminating any number of possibilities before settling on the existence of fairies as his ultimate truth. We almost want to shake him and admonish him in the same deprecating tone that Holmes frequently reserved for his inferiors. You see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You know my methods, Watson. Apply them.' Clearly, Conan Doyle saw but did not observe.
And yet, perhaps we should not be quite so astonished at his inattention to detail. Does Sherlock Holmes not also say, 'Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent? And it's true that Conan Doyle attempted to give the appearance of scientific credibility in his investigations of the fairies in his use of the 'powerful lens' in examining the photographs, in this case an affectation which would undoubtedly not have impressed Holmes in the least. He also had a map of the Cottingley area drawn up, similar to those which figured in two of the Holmes stories, 'The Priory School' and 'The Golden Pince-Nez', lending an air of objectivity to his research.
In the end it would be unfair to judge Conan Doyle too harshly for his almost total absence of deductive reasoning. For despite the fact that he invented Sherlock Holmes, in character and personality he more closely resembled Watson, the sensitive, emotional medical man, who was at times perhaps a little dim.
Nevertheless, when Conan Doyle's book on the subject of fairy sightings, The Coming of the Fairies, which was more or less a compilation of the two Strand articles, was published in 1922, there were few who accepted it as serious scientific data. Could it be that Arthur Conan Doyle's obsession with fairies, and indeed with the whole subject of Spiritualism, was in some way a guilty attempt to reconcile with the spirit of his deceased father, whom he had so harshly judged and abandoned in the days of his incarceration in the insane asylum? Or was it perhaps an attempt to prove that his father's life, so taken up with the supernatural, had not been in vain?
Whatever his motivations, Conan Doyle did not live to learn the truth about the fairy photographs, and perhaps it's just as well. For sixty years the cousins, who went on to live productive lives (Elsie in the volunteer corps in India and Japan, and Frances as a medical secretary), before having families of their own, steadfastly maintained the authenticity of the photographs. It's difficult to imagine what Arthur Conan Doyle's reaction might have been had he lived to write the last chapter in the Case of the Cottingley Fairies. He might have chided himself with Holmes's words, 'How could I have been so blind?' Or then again, he might have shrugged off the whole affair, as Holmes once observed, as 'one of those whimsical little incidents that take place which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal.'
It was not until 1981, over fifty years after Sir Arthur's death and sixty-four since the first photographs had been taken, when Elsie was eighty and Frances seventy-four, that all the possibilities had been eliminated and what remained was finally the truth. It was in that year that the younger of the two cousins finally admitted that the entire episode had been something of a practical joke that got out of hand. Indeed, the whole thing had been nothing more than smoke and mirrors, achieved with hatpins and cut-out cardboard figures from Queen Mary's Gift Book. 'From where I was', confessed Frances. 'I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I've always marvelled that anyone ever took it seriously.' (11) So much for fairy navels.
In many ways the Doyles — Charles, Dicky and Arthur — were very much products of their time, subject to the same fads, failings and fears as their contemporaries. And yet their genius lifted them above their limitations to capture in images and words an act of faith of an entire generation searching for something greater than itself in which to believe. Out of a sense of disenchantment and cynicism came an enchanting, ethereal, mystical landscape populated by creatures who had the power to raise us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. That is the legacy of the Doyles. And if the world they left us has not had a fairy tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, it is a far better place for having known them.
Notes
1. It is worth noting that of the few clues we are given as to Sherlock Holmes's antecedents, we do know that his grandmother's brother was the celebrated artist Vernet. Like Holmes, ACD could boast a bit of artistic genius in his family tree. 'Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms'. Holmes once said, and in this case he very likely. represents Conan Doyle's alter ego.
2. John Dickson Carr. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p. 14.
3. Michael Baker. The Doyle Diary. The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery. New York & London: Paddington Press Ltd., 1978, p. XVI.
4. Images of gnomes and elves stalking beautiful young women were not uncommon in nineteenth-century popular culture and similar themes may be found in advertising and popular prints.
5. Victoria and Albert Museum. Richard Doyle and His Family, Catalogue of the Richard Doyle Exhibition. 1983, p. 14.
6. Victoria and Albert Museum. p. 14.
7. Joe Cooper. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. London: Pocket Books, 1997, p. 48.
8. Cooper. p. 69.
9. Cooper. p. 66.
10. Cooper. p. 62.
11. Cooper. p. 169.
Bibliography
Baker, Michael. The Doyle Diary, The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery. New York & London: Paddington Press Ltd., 1978.
Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. New York: Random House, 1975.
Cooper, Joe. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. London: Pocket Books, 1997.
Royal Academy of Arts, London. Victorian Fairy Painting, Exhibition Catalogue. London: Merrell Holberton, 1997.
Victorian and Albert Museum. Richard Doyle and His Family, Catalogue of the Richard Doyle Exhibition, 1983.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
