347-The Cottingley Fairies

In 1917, two young cousins carried a camera into an English dell and returned with a photo of fairies. When Arthur Conan Doyle took up the story it became a worldwide sensation. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Cottingley Fairies, a curiosity that would remain unexplained for most of the 20th century.

We'll also remember a ferocious fire and puzzle over a troublesome gnome.

Intro:

Poet Harry Graham found "a simple plan / Which makes the lamest lyric scan."

In the 1920s, Otto Funk fiddled across the United States.

Sources for our feature on the Cottingley fairies:

Jason Loxton et al., "The Cottingley Fairies," Skeptic 15:3 (2010), 72B,73-81.

Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography, 2008.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 1922.

Timothy R. Levine, Encyclopedia of Deception, 2014.

Jerome Clark, Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Physical Phenomena, 1993.

Joe Cooper, "Cottingley: At Last the Truth," The Unexplained 117 (1982), 2338-2340.

A. Conan Doyle, "The Cottingley Fairies: An Epilogue," Strand 65:2 (February 1923), 105.

Kaori Inuma, "Fairies to Be Photographed!: Press Reactions in 'Scrapbooks' to the Cottingley Fairies," Correspondence: Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Literature 4 (2019), 53-84.

Douglas A. Anderson, "Fairy Elements in British Literary Writings in the Decade Following the Cottingley Fairy Photographs Episode," Mythlore 32:1 (Fall/Winter 2013), 5-18.

Bruce Heydt, "The Adventure of the Cottingley Fairies," British Heritage 25:2 (May 2004), 20-25.

Helen Nicholson, "Postmodern Fairies," History Workshop Journal 46 (Autumn 1998), 205-212.

Michael W. Homer and Massimo Introvigne, "The Recoming of the Fairies," Theosophical History 6 (1996), 59-76.

Alex Owen, "'Borderland Forms': Arthur Conan Doyle, Albion's Daughters, and the Politics of the Cottingl